[For NPR's 4th 3-minute fiction round]
Venus at dawn
He woke up in the swamp, frogs croaking ominously all around, an occasional bird song moving across his hearing with the familiar Doppler shift in pitch. The sky was illuminated in one corner by an approaching dawn, while nearby the morning star sparkled between branches. The moon had long disappeared, and the pin-cushion lights had all gone out except for this one. He got moving.
What drove him most was the hunger. It had been forever since he had found something sustaining. He could lick the dew on broad leaves and peck at bits of edible plant life, but there wasn't anything that could fill him. He went wherever the ground was green, but hadn't gotten close to anything that moved on its own.
From a farm and a stable he had somehow ended up out here, driven away by sticks and yelps. So what if he had bitten one of them. It tasted sweet. Now he was in a delirium from want and confusion and spite. The sense that had never yet failed him was smell, and he went from one hint of a promise to another, though each time it dissolved into empty odors from the muck or brackish water.
Then a smell repeated between others, grew stronger and eventually stayed with him. He was on course, had only to dodge a few trees and stop. The source was close, beneath him somewhere. A single plant beckoned but that couldn't be. It was a feast down there, the smell of flesh and excess, a place to find others and mingle and procreate. His whole life was there.
The fly landed on a button of color. Before long there was a rattling snap and he was blocked by green. He bounded in every way but couldn't escape, tricked, he dimly recognized, by a brainless stalk. Eventually he was still. Light still entered from above between the trap's interwoven cilia, and atop his head an eye took in the last flickering reflection from Venus.
