Tails, next book

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Competition always favours the crayfish
I have far too many fantasies
to be a mere house-wife.
I suppose that I am a fantasy myself.
Marilyn Monroe
The crayfish is shy like a Sunday school girl and promiscuous like an experienced pornstar. During the day she hides underneath the river’s stones, underneath our saucy thoughts, penetrating the aquatic undergrowth, the roots of the riverside trees and from there she lures, taking all the required measures in order not to get caught. Cautious, especially with humans, who prey upon her relentlessly, even though it is said that the crayfish was the only being that followed Orpheus when he descended into the underworld to meet Eurydice. She was burning with curiosity to see Eurydice, to see the woman that inspired such majestic and inextinguishable passion. However, when the crayfish finally met Eurydice up close, she was disappointed, as she had expected her to be much prettier and more attractive. With overabundant confidence for her own beauty, she crawled, the narcissist, to the world and started her dissolute nightlife, provoking a storm of gossip among the other animate beings, even humans. The crayfish is the only aquatic animal that manages to canoodle both lying on her back and on all fours and to mate for over three months in a row nonstop. She lies on her back on the soft flow of the river, where the oxygen is above 7ppm and the riverbed is smooth like a comfortable mattress and then, with ease and grace, she turns on all fours, enjoying her fantasies undeterred, relaxed and, above all, completely free from the prejudice and the habits of the other animals of the planet. Her great confidence has no limits as she takes on the task of appropriately protecting her fertilized eggs for nine months underneath her body. The time required for her eggs to hatch used to be less, six months at the most, but since the crayfish returned form the underworld and recognized her own enchanting existence as unique and unquestionable, hatching time for her eggs became elongated to nine months with an eye on competing on equal terms with man. This competition appears to have favoured the crayfish which became a source of endless inspiration for painters, authors, musicians, designers, makers of home appliances, even football clubs that had her printed on their kit. Further to this, the crayfish also inspired human sex life; infamous are the crayfish parties where the guests take off the weight they have been carrying, like the crayfish strips off of her exoskeleton and fling themselves into erotic orgies surpassing in temerity even the Roman ones, while her career (hers and others species’ of the crustacean superfamily) in the porn industry is admirable as she has taken part in tens of porn movies where she is the protagonist. Imperfect competition? Perhaps. However, the crayfish with her cool attitude says no to nothing and if she could speak she would state that “competition is the whetstone of talent”. Translation Alaxandra Samohtraki








By Niko Kalaitzaki