Don’t let the pretty flowers fool you!

*As if summoned by my glance, the doors began to slowly groan open, the glowing gap between them widening with every screech of the copper plates against the floorboards. A pause. The silence of the air grew into a bloated minute of suspense. The only noise to pierce the silence was the lullaby of a far-off bird, humming melodically like a sorrowed bow against a violin. The doors began to stutter forward once more, and for the first time, I saw the patent leather shoes of Mister Francis.*

In the jungles bordering the budding city of Leopoldville, a man fatefully killed and ate a chimpanzee nearly a century ago. Unbeknownst to him, the chimpanzee carried a variant of the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), which would ultimately mutate to become HIV-1 and HIV-2 during the years to come.

This is a thinking out loud piece, mind to paper. These are just my opinions and are unsubstantiated by any research.  There are a dozen metaphors I could use to describe the climate crisis in a digestible, less frightening way than what reality presents. I’ll begin with one of the more comical ones.  Imagine you…