prompt: duck, title: it beats the alternative in misc. flash fiction

The dinosaurs didn’t die out, not really, they just became the duck. Evolution doesn’t have a plan, it’s just whatever happens next and whoever has the genetic luck to accidentally survive. Our culture ascribes meaning to the evolutionary process, has fantasies that evolution’s trying to go somewhere, that it has end-goals, knows forward momentum but that simply isn’t true.

Evolution’s an accumulation of inadvertently beneficial mistakes that happened to survive on down to another generation, billions of unintentionally useful glitches that turn an ape into a man, a wolf into a dog, a marauding Tyrannosaurus Rex into a mallard duck begging for scraps at the Fly Creek cider mill.

A meteor strike, some novel virus, climate change, whatever, came along and killed off most of the thunder lizards but the tinier ones whose scales were a little bit more feather-like managed to survive to make kids, then their kids made kids, distilling and amplifying the traits that allowed for reproduction until such time as they became something entirely else. No meaning, no plans, random mutations stumbling blindly into the future, the luck of the draw retroactively assigned purpose because we as humans can’t stand admitting this whole gig is a wholesale crapshoot. We want to believe divinities mold the chosen into predestined perfection. We want to believe that dinosaurs pulled themselves up by their bootstraps into a world where ducks were needed but we’re wrong. Things happen and whatever manages to make it through by being aberrations against what came before, they’re the new normal until the universe randomizes it all over and again.

There are many insecure fools who parade through this mayfly human life proclaiming that our universe operates on a system of “Survive or Die” and how awesome they are because they have managed to be alive for a little while. It couldn’t be further from the truth, of course, existence isn’t “Survive or Die”, rather “Get Lucky and Pretend You Meant to Do That”. That’s the engine that turns dinosaurs into ducks, makes diseases jump species and wipe out populations. COVID-19 just got lucky, you know, and then some human beings got unlucky and that’s the ballgame.

This dog at my feet, he was once a mighty wolf, now just an anxious little ball of marshmallow fluff and teeth that barks at leaves. I was once a local shaman giving form and substance to the short and brutish lives in European mountains, now just a middle-aged ball of anxiety and used-up rhetorical parlor tricks signifying nothing. The plagues meanwhile grow deadlier by the day.

All we can do is hope that when the next wave of diseases comes, our random genetic mutations will have granted us immunologic resistance by nothing more than the dumbest luck. All that we can we do is hope that when the next meteor beats the odds and finally hits our tiny azure target, we’ll have the outrageous fortune to, in that most splittingest of seconds, accidentally duck.

Last updated April 16, 2020