Little Aristocrats (Early April)

From ground to branch, the flowering season has begun in earnest. In the traffic roundabouts and private school gardens, buds open colorful, fragrant, onto a world renewed—rainfall within the historical average—for one more year at least. That dinosaur killing asteroid is said to have struck in the springtime—whole species, whole genera, whole orders of tetrapod wiped out, mass cancellation, no reboots, no reruns.

But for today, various designer pets root carelessly among the flower beds. They are, like their owners, enlivened somewhat, whatever public law or private policy will allow, leashed dogs and leashed cats, various other carnivora, not exactly healthy, not exactly well behaved, their family trees a miracle of data visualization. Every somatotype, every physiognomy can be seen: the lank and the squat; the furred and the hairless; brindle, piebald, spotted. They snarl and hiss and snuffle. The flowers themselves, in their profusion, are similarly raised, or rather produced, with a plethora retail and wholesale options: petals fringed or scalloped, every color of the spectrum, practically, free shipping anywhere in the continental United States.

Strange forms take life when heredity becomes the medium. Sire and dam, their various issue. Even in this most democratic of cities, no airs or heirs, allegedly, sleeping under bridges forbidden to all, little aristocrats walk the boulevards, little aristocrats sprout vibrant from the earth.