2024 Competition

Andy Craven-Griffiths

The illusion of being a separate individual

might persist until you press rewind

and the baby giraffe walks steadily backwards,

staggers to a standstill astride a puddle

of amniotic fluid, collapses under

buckling knees and fidgets its way to stillness,

meditating a moment before it flies into the air,

hooves first, and is swallowed vaginally

by its mother (whose unique pattern

of tectonic plates is an almost exact match

for its own). The mother giraffe then drains

the nutrients from her battery of a baby, over

the course of fourteen sun-baked months.

At first, the baby shrinks with no discernible loss

in detail. Every ridge of muscle fibre, every

eyelash, every egg cell nestled in the foetal

ovaries perfectly preserved, simply

reducing in scale, a time-lapse

of increasingly tiny Matryoshka dolls.

At a certain point, the specialised cells,

(the eggs, the erythrocytes, the long

spindly neurons), start to generalise back

into stem cells: hard little hooves becoming

softened rubber ones on the ends of leg-stumps

sticking out of a translucent blob of body,

LED-heart pulsing like a lighthouse

through thickening fog. Then, cells fold

themselves into each other like raindrops

racing on a window suddenly touching

and merging with a little glub. The embryo

packs itself away into genetic code,

tears itself apart right down the double helix

and ejects half of the data, just in time

for a daddy giraffe to collect it

with a judder. The mother lifts her neck

up, stretches her dark blue tongue

to the highest branch she can reach and

un-spirals it to reveal a perfect leaf that

beams energy in a direct line to the sun.

Inside the mother, the egg of the baby

she absorbed (in order to charge the leaf)

travels up her left fallopian tube and nestles

amongst a clutch of other egg cells

in her ovaries. Elsewhere, the body of this

mother giraffe’s own mother stands up

with a gasp, as sudden as one of those toys

that collapses at the push of an

underneath-button, having its pushed-button

released, the elastic tightening in rickety limbs,

the old giraffe staggering, then walking,

more and more steadily, backwards.