Blood Lust, by Caitie Remen

Dear Aunty Oodergoo, Emus are largely solidary animals, as I’m sure you know. However, when we are young we stay with our fathers and siblings as a family unit to receive training. When we are grown enough care for ourselves we spread out more. We also tend to gather when we are migrating or for egg season. So we build and dissolve our military units as we need them. Over the course of my military career I have met many a creature. I fought the goannas on Lake Ballard, in the Kalbarri gouges I fought against wallabies. There have been countless skirmishes along the way. Most ending in my victory naturally. Over the course of the years I have laid a few eggs, however I never shared your enthusiasm for motherhood, I met a few strange animals and solved most of the mysteries of life. Nearly all of them in fact. Including the answer to the question, “Why can’t emus fly?”. I had a recent epiphany and discovered the answer. We can! All other birds can fly and emus are birds so obviously we must be able to as well. Now I just had to straighten out the mechanics of it, which I had been working on every spare minute. But I digress. I thought I had seen and done it all, but I was proved wrong by the latest drama out here in the bush. Recently a new sub-species of humans seem to have flooded the continent. I have fought, and won obviously, against humans previously but these ones seemed different. They brought with them diseases and weapons we had never seen before and had no defences against. And they didn’t seem to understand the natural order of things around here. One of their most troublesome habits happen to be building “fences”. I know that you often felt ignored or oppressed by the modern world Aunty, but I what was your opinion on fences? I have yet to read anything about them in your works. The amusing thing about fences, is that for any other bird they wouldn’t be a problem. As the second tallest bird in the world,

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allegedly; I have yet to see the taller one, you would think that there is nothing we emus could not pass over with ease. However, it has recently been proven to us that we may be slightly hindered by fences. Which is ridiculous seeing as even Honeyeaters find fences no challenge, and they are hopelessly uncoordinated. As my comrades and I had converged with each other, and started our annual campaign north for the summer, we found our habitual routs blocked by these troublesome fences. It would appear that the new humans had started attempting to domesticate the very earth beneath our claws. Personally, I am offended by the audacity of this odd sub-spices. These weak limbed creatures, who cannot even find the strength in their legs to walk to the nearest bush for a meal, but instead interfere with our connate migration, to lodge their own ghastly dry grass into the ground. And yes Aunty, before you accuse me of being overdramatic, I have sampled their disgusting grass, and it’s absolutely nothing to brag about. I cannot comprehend why those unsightly beings (their appearance is as unappealing as their food unfortunately) insist on constructing these wire death-traps all over the place. Your old people never resorted to such cumbersome measures to cultivate their food.

As we continued along our migratory route we passed through, and possibly damaged, many fields and fences. It seemed to infuriate the new humans which was when they started to seek conflict with us. As emus we could not ignore this battle cry you understand, and so we began our war with the new humas. I suggested to my comrades that perhaps those vexing wire contraptions may present the motivation we needed for evolution to grant us the ability to fly. Regrettably, they persisted on turning their beaks up at me and refuse to accompany me on my journey to harvest the power of flight despite the many militaria advantages it would present. It dumfounds me that they refused to hear anything

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about the next stage of our evolution. I wonder if they would prefer to conform to shiny guns and fences. By now my comrades and I had met these pests in battel a number of times. They brought one of their strange new weapons, called guns, that produce a lot of smoke and noise. Guns seemed to be a favourite of the new people. Occasionally they manage to damage one of the mob, and even more occasionally we suffered a death. However I imagine they were quite disheartened to find that we are not so easily killed by these sub-par sticks. They on the other hand were incredibly vulnerable to the strong legs and claws of the emus and suffered numerous deaths and the further destruction of their grass fields. The demise of their comrades seemed to only infuriate them further which confused me. Even wombats new when they were beaten but these new humans seemed to have none of their original species’ intelligence. Which, I’m sorry to break it to you Aunty, was already pitiful enough. Though I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by this due to the way they were attempting to grow their grass. As we continued on our journey, pushing through fences and the occasional barrage of gunfire, I told every bird I could hold the attention of about my recent epiphany regarding flying. That we had the potential to, we simply needed a little practice. More often than not they seemed uninterested in my theory. I did not let is discourage me however, I took every break in our march as an opportunity to practice flying. Leaping from boulders, ant nests, trees if I could. It exhausted my wings but I found it was fulfilling in a way fighting never had been for me. Perhaps akin to the satisfaction writing brought you?

As the sun woke us to begin our travels for this particular day, I fluffed my tired wings and conversed with my comrades. We have

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decided to avoid direct confrontation with the humans today. They seem to have noted the ease with which we scale their fences and thought up countermeasures for it. One of which was propping long sticks through their fences to make it too difficult for us climb over. Their creativity really speaks of their previous military experience however, the futility of their actions really speaks of their lack of experience with a mob of determined emus. So as not to crush their spirits completely, a rousing act of mercy I’m sure you would agree, and make our inevitable victory all the more satisfying, we had decided to take a detour to a nearby billabong that afternoon for some relaxation and rejuvenation. The troops deserve a quick break and I wanted to get a flying session in. As we were closing in on our camp for the night we came across a sudden blockade. We had not been expecting to see the enemy on this route, we even went so far as to avoid them on purpose. Nevertheless there they were in front of us, and we had to take action. We split into our attack units with speed that gave credit to our training. While the male birds with chicks went around us to head directly to the billabong, the combat units charged ahead running straight at the enemy and their shiny weapons. This seemed to startle them however it also solidified their resolve. They raised their sticks, and the battle began. The wind rustling through the feathers of the birds around me seemed to cheer me on, the boom of our steps and hearts against the bang and crack of the guns. I employed every evasive manoeuvre I had ever picked up, leaping over rocks and bushes, dodging around trees perfectly in sync with the other birds in my unit. I saw the emu in front of take a leap, I could have sworn she was flying, straight over the enemy and their fence. Then she hit the ground and kept running, swerving around bullets and enemy dogs as if she were dancing. As I ran, with the wind behind me, one clawed foot after the other, boom boom boom, my steps matched my heartbeat. I inhaled, felt the wind that was pushing me, fill my lungs, travel through my veins, fuel my blood, every second was in stark focus for me. I leaped over the fence. And

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I soared. Unlike my comrade who seemed born to be a dancer, as you were born to be a writer and a mother, I knew in this moment that I was born to be a flyer. And that is exacting what I did. The sound of the guns faded out behind me and I was weightless, I floated in the air, stretched out every muscle in my body, and I soared. The sound of the guns fading out behind me.

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BLOOD LUST

Soul of Mosquito

Died 1940, England By Catie Remen

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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell

‘Animal Farm’

Day-1

As a larva, I have always wondered what it would be like to feel understood. Perhaps this is a consequence of my father abandoning me. After fertilising my mother during a ‘Boys Trip’ to the Lake District, he proceeded to work abroad, adventuring to every swarm in London city. My mother thought that was stupid. She believed in a lifetime of playing her role in the ecosystem – feeding, laying, and sucking was enough to fulfill her short life before a frog swallowed her whole as a light afternoon snack. The devasting death of my mother was a turning point in my adolescence. I no longer aspired to be a source of biomass in the food chain, but instead felt compelled to deny such hierarchal norms entirely by squashing totalitarianism – how is it fair that a frog can choose who lives or dies, leaving us mosquitoes inherently subservient solely due to the smaller composition of our bodies? After months of observing various human interactions and learning about the political turmoils of our world, I finally threw my allegiance behind the ideals of democratic socialism. This was also when I first read about George Orwell, and subsequently came to the realisation that Great Britain was under attack.

My infatuation with Orwell expanded like mosquito sucking from a blood bag as I learned more about his lucid prose and biting social criticism. Despite my two sisters disparaging my life-long dreams of

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swatting hierarchy – dismissing my aspirations as rushes of adolescent hormones – I decided that the only way I could be the first mosquito to deviate from the orthodox social stratum of the food chain, was if I found George Orwell himself and helped him with his literary masterpieces that were stuffed with the thick, oozing blood of the nationalists that he so overtly censured.

Day-2

I arrived at Orwell’s London address that I had acquired through the pollen-vine just under 6 mosquito years later. It was during this long pilgrimage – 267 miles, to be precise – that I was bequeathed with my pseudonym ‘Yook’ (often pronounced as ‘Yuck’, as this is what most of the humans I encountered greeted me with). I was initially against the name – not wanting to participate in the peculiar human tendency to label and divide. I held pride in rejecting this societyforged epithet, aspiring towards the ideals of an egalitarian society, my wings fuelled by Orwell’s 1938 ‘Homage to Catalonia’. However, I quickly realised that without a human name, Orwell would have no other way of differentiating me from the common mosquito, so ‘Yook’ quickly stuck. It was during the following years of my journey that I dreamt of Orwell and I’s budding connection that would hatch upon my arrival. Although the prospect of starvation forced me to indulge in the occasional union of human-that-is-not-George-Orwell and mosquito, I would squeeze my eyes shut during the process, imagining it was Orwell’s succulent forearm that I was attached to –buzzing around the area until I found the sensitive spot on the other side of his elbow, thrusting my little prick into his cephalic vein and sucking… Although this fantasy kept my mind busy while I reluctantly engaged with other humans, I do not think the detachment of mind from body

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