The Fruits of Multitasking Reconsidered in the Age of Everything Britney Spears
Janey Smith
A BABY KANGAROO is called a Joey. They hop wildly, sometimes uncontrollably, all across the Australian Great Outback. They hurt themselves sometimes, too, bouncing into trees, then they take a break, nibble on tall dry grass that's yellow. Sit there, smarting, wondering about their big feet.
When the sun makes a concentrated beam of light that you can't see somewhere between their eyes, they squint heavily, feel important kind of, chew the dry grass of the great desert—dramatically illuminated. This makes them slump, too, do bad posture, chew the same piece of grass for a long time, look at you like "what are you looking at" then turn away because they are sometimes sick of having their pictures taken.
The entire desert before them, a hundred miles in every direction of nothing but dirt, dry hot dirt, baby kangaroos will snort, shake the ticks from their neck, and study their surroundings with the slow, careful curiosity of about 118 different chemistry professors.
This is the life of a baby kangaroo: they know that beneath them there is all the food to drink, and above them, only sky.
They kick the dirt a little with one of their big flat feet, look around, measure the distance between them and a tree, see a tree, a couple of trees, here and there, spring onto their thick haunches to set themselves, ignore the cameras, then hop wildly, almost uncontrollably, into a tree.
JANEY SMITH lives in San Francisco, California. Her collection of stories VERY APE, will be published by Ink Publishing & Design in March, 2011. This story also appears in Sententia 2.
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