My name is Marmoset

...A dispatch from bewilderness

Marmosets are some of the smallest monkeys on Earth but Very Smart. They like to eat fruit, crickets, grasshoppers and moths. I know. I am a marmoset.

My favorite thing is climbing trees. In fact, climbing to the Very Top of any tree. But especially my tree where I was born and where mama and I live. I love our tree. I also like Upper-Case Letters.

My best friend is a mantis. I call him Mantis and he calls me Marmoset. He’s way smaller than me but I have promised to never eat him or any other mantis. My not eating mantises could help save mantis-kind.

Mantis and I study humans and we are a bit concerned by the braying of “leaders” and the fraying of social fabric and former protections for people and planet that don’t exist anymore.

I mean, just look at the news. A war here, a war there, cutbacks here, cutbacks there, outbreaks here, outbreaks there, lack of food, lack of housing, lack of health care, droughts, floods, flames, tornados.

That’s the richest man in the world starving the poorest kids in the world and withdrawing life-saving drugs so that the kids and their moms and their dads and their brothers and sisters are dying. His thirteen kids are doing well. So is he. His fourteenth kid is on the way. They have homes and healthcare and food.

One of my friends is a human. Her name is J. She writes this Stack. Mantis and I are writers, too. We share adventures, dreams, goals, plus science and math. Especially math as it relates to food.

For example, two ants plus two ants equal four ants, which is a snack, and twenty ants plus twenty ants equals forty ants which is a meal for two. We also plan to ponder existential questions like if you build a cricket stadium on Long Island will they come? I like crickets. I eat them.

Like Dispatch from Bewilderness, our writing will tackle serious things while it will also twinkle like dew on grass at dawn. With a symphony of birds. As long as the planet lasts.

Note from human: Every week for 15 months, I’ve posted two pieces. This week, there are three. One is from Marmoset and one is from Mantis. Thank you for your readership.

This is how my human feels sometimes. Lots of living things who aren’t human feel the same way.