The Dance of the Grass

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Inspired by https://deepdreamgenerator.com/ddream/jgm5zi8r2fz


The grass had decided to improve itself.

This was already suspicious.

For years it had relied on sunlight, rain, and the occasional dog as its entire educational system. Then one Tuesday evening it enrolled in contemporary jazz night classes at the community center, where the instructor was a retired saxophonist named Mel who wore suspenders and believed every problem could be solved by counting to seven.

The grass was terrible at first.

It had no feet, for one thing.

Still, it learned. It learned the sideways hesitation of jazz, the little pause before the note, the elegant mistake that becomes the whole song. By the third week it could sway in twelve different directions and had developed a complicated relationship with syncopation.

The tall grass began meeting after dark.

They practiced under the moon, bending and rising together, making shapes that looked vaguely like choreography and vaguely like an electrical storm trying to remember a dance. The reeds whispered through their leaves. The seed heads clicked together like tiny percussion instruments.

And then came Friday night.

The dancers arrived wearing their strange painted costumes, horns curling above their heads, arms reaching into the warm air. The grass was ready.

A saxophone appeared somewhere beyond the field.

Nobody knew who was playing.

The first note entered the night like a moth through an open window.

The grass moved.

One blade leaned left.

Another waited.

Then the entire field began to swing.

It had learned something important in jazz class: you don’t always move when the beat tells you to. Sometimes you wait for the space around the beat. Sometimes you let the silence do the heavy lifting.

This made the grass extremely attractive.

At least, the grass thought so.

It had begun hoping to maybe get lucky.

Nothing vulgar. Just a little botanical romance. A breeze through the seed heads. A mysterious flower opening somewhere after midnight. Perhaps a handsome thistle with good rhythm. Perhaps a moonlit encounter beside the irrigation ditch.

The grass had standards.

The dancers noticed.

They danced closer.

The grass rose around their knees, then their waists, brushing their costumes with thousands of green fingertips. The field became an enormous jazz club without walls, the moon hanging above it like a cheap overhead lamp nobody had bothered to replace.

Mel’s saxophone wandered through the darkness.