short story

I watched a king cobra swallow a banded krait. The “mutual bite” question answered itself.
The flashlight hit the king cobra when most of the banded krait was already down its throat. The last section of tail hung outside, black and yellow bands stretched by the swallow. The tail was still looped around the cobra’s neck. It looked like a rope that had gone slack. The cobra turned into the grass. Beside it, a small duck lay dead with its neck caught in the net. The net was still there, its mesh just wide enough to trap a snake whose head could pass and whose body could not.
By Jin2 days ago in Earth
The Shore That Keeps Moving
Once, my child went to the park by our compound to look for friends to play with. He didn't find anyone, but he lay down quite contentedly on the round archway. I took out my phone to take a picture of him, and he caught me. Lowering his voice, he said, "Don't make a sound. There's a bug on top of the archway (I don't know its name), and it's crawling very slowly." He just lay there, staring at it, as if guarding some enormous secret. I stood beside him for about two minutes. My legs began to ache, and my mind drifted to what we should cook for dinner. Suddenly he said, "It turned." There was a very serious kind of surprise in his voice.
By Jin6 days ago in Earth
I Spent My Childhood Trying to Swat One Fly. Here’s Why I Never Could.
Why You Can Never Swat a Fly 1 I believed insects had eyes in the backs of their heads. Summer. Yard. A fly on the table corner, wings open. I crouched, held my breath, moved my palm closer. Then I slapped down.
By Jin16 days ago in Earth
He Was Reassigned to Equine Science. Then He Became China’s Only Undergraduate Farrier.
One When Fu Huadong got the call from admissions, he had already accepted that he might not go to college. He scored 522 on the gaokao. He applied to Sports Rehabilitation and checked “do not accept adjustment.” His score fell short. His file came back. He lost his spot. Then the phone rang. Would he accept a transfer to Equine Science? He said yes.
By Jin16 days ago in Earth
They Dumped 20,000 Fish Into a River and Called It Kindness
An animal-release group in Guangzhou found the official reporting rules too strict. The group released 20,000 mud carp directly into a river. One person said, “Why should doing a good deed require a report?”
By Jin18 days ago in Earth
We Lost 11.3 Trillion Tonnes of Ice in 44 Years. Greenland Is Why It’s Worse Than It Sounds.
What 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice means From 1979 to 2023, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets together lost about 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice. The study was completed by the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) team. It draws on 27 satellite missions and 42 independent estimates. It was published in Scientific Data , a Nature sub-journal.
By Jin27 days ago in Earth
The Earth Is Not a Sponge: Why the Oceans Don't Drain Into the Planet
Rain falls into soil and disappears. A river seeps into its bed and disappears. The sea strikes the shore, slips into cracks, and disappears. If this kept up forever, the planet's water should dwindle. The oceans are still here. The waves are still here. The monsoon is still here. The water has not vanished.
By Jin28 days ago in Earth
They Can Dive 70 Meters Without Gear. The Law Says They Don’t Exist.
At five in the morning, the sky was not yet fully light. Amir pushed the lepa boat out from the shore. The wooden hull scraped across the sand of the shallows with a dry, rasping sound. He stood barefoot on the boat’s planks, his toes gripping the grain of the wood as if gripping a familiar stone. There was no diving equipment on board. No fins, no tank, no wetsuit. Only a pair of wooden goggles, the lenses old plastic, the edges wrapped in tape, and a spear gun, its shaft forged by a blacksmith, its head bound with rubber bands.
By Jin28 days ago in Earth
Why Humans Wear Clothes When Every Other Animal Goes Naked
Shave a polar bear and put it in the Arctic. It will die. Put a human in the Arctic with a down jacket, a snow house, fire, and an oil lamp. They can live.
By Jinabout a month ago in Earth
Earth Already Has Immortal Creatures. Evolution Still Chose Death.
“Immortality” splits into two meanings. Biology has one. Physics has the other. Biological immortality means no built-in expiry date. If nothing eats it, crushes it, infects it, or drops a catastrophe on it, it will not die of old age. Physical immortality means nothing can kill it at all. No knife. No fire. No radiation. No black hole.
By Jinabout a month ago in Earth
The "Wife-Stealing" Festival Is Not What You Think
The Gerewol Festival: A Photograph, a Headline, and the Women Who Choose In July 2015, a photographer in In-Gall, Niger, took a picture of dozens of Wodaabe men standing in a line. Their faces were covered in red ochre, their eyes outlined in black, their lips painted with a pigment made from burnt egret bone. White ostrich feathers rose from their hair. A British tabloid ran the photo under the headline "The Wife-Stealing Festival." Three days later, Chinese websites picked it up. The comments were about the makeup. Nobody asked why the men were wearing it.
By Jinabout a month ago in Earth
Man-made?
Man-Made? — It Doesn’t Exist The concept of anything on this planet being “man-made” is an illusion created by society. Human beings may manipulate the Earth’s resources or assemble them in different ways, but everything still originally comes from the Earth.
By ChezaLunaabout a month ago in Earth