Kilt

The helicoptering seeds that fell from the trees were slicing people up real good. Real good. That was our first clue. There would be many more clues to come, but as far as clues go, that first one was a doozy. The messages written on the leaves, spelled out in faint branching vesicles, were almost unnecessary, redundant, superfluous. WE’RE GONNA SLICE YOU ALL UP REAL GOOD, one of them read. Well, yeah. Message already received, you mighty, murderous oak or elm or maple.

I probably don’t need to go into much more detail about all the deaths. You’ve all seen the Shyamalan film. No, not that one. No, the other one. The shitty one. No, the other shitty one. But why were we so surprised by it all? We really were taken aback. The first time someone got sliced up real good by twirling tree seeds we chalked it up to unfortunate happenstance. The second time was a freak occurrence. The third time was a wrong-place-wrong-time kind of situation. The fourth time was just plain bad luck. The fifth time was a one-in-a-billion type deal. The sixth time was a rare skin condition coupled with hemophilia. The seventh time was drugs. The eighth time was God’s will. The ninth time was bad luck again. The tenth time was a deadly confluence of multiple contributing—

What are we doing? one of us finally had the guts to ask, and we all soon followed suit, as if we were all looking at ourselves in a very large mirror. Why are we trying so goddamn hard to debunk this? Let’s just call a spade a spade here. The world done want to get us all kilt.

I, for one, was glad the poet laureate of North Dakota had spoken up. What was happening was obvious to everyone. You couldn’t escape, either. It was in the soil.