Leland Was a Flea

Leland was a flea who was enchanted by the unlimited possibilities of life. He roamed the earth, bounding like, well really like nothing other than a healthy flea, because when you take relative size into consideration there really isn't anything on this earth or any other that jumps anything like a flea, you'd have to have some kind of super-engineered hybrid kangaroo or something with titanium knees to even get close, because even if you shot a regular kangaroo that high out of a cannon, you'd have a serious mess of kangaroo eggs over-easy when it hit the ground.

And that's just if it was a female kangaroo. A male kangaroo would spank his nuts so hard on the ground you'd hear the bark in Antarctica. And that's only if they landed on their feet, otherwise you'd just have a big kangaroo-shaped hole in the ground with some kangaroo jambalaya at the bottom of the pit. Yikes. That's the part they never show in the cartoons.

So really, I don't know how fleas do it, but those sumbitches can jump. And Leland was no different. He liked nothing better than bounding across the land, or carpet, or a dog's back or wherever he actually was bounding. That's the problem with being that small, really the downside of the coin to being able to jump like a freakin' madman without hitting the ground at pulverizing speeds, is that you're too small to really see or comprehend where you are in the big picture, if you're out in a field or if it's just some coyote's ass hair, you just aren't in a position to know. And that has to be a bummer because you can get all of these romantic concepts about where you're hopping around, all poetic and whatnot, and it can turn out that you're actually stuck in a discarded sweat sock or wherever.

But although he wouldn't have known better himself, take my word for it that Leland was in nobody's sweat sock, and he really was out bounding through some romantic field in Italy or some romantic place like that. He loved nothing more than bounding along and feeling the wind whipping through whatever it is that fleas have instead of hair. I mean, I can't imagine that they actually have hair, since that would require a scalp and I can't even wrap my mind around the idea of fleas having skin at all, that just seems wrong. What have they got? Armor? I imagine it's some kind of bug thing where their skeleton's on the outside and they're just bug paste on the inside, some kind of freaky nightmare like that. So I guess Leland had ridges in his skeleton-armor or little bumps or something he could sense the wind with, and it pleased him.

Leland spent his days bounding along, enjoying the breeze and biting things that were too big to really even see him and definitely too big to bite him back. He wasn't sure why he liked biting things, it was some kind of flea tradition that dated way back and he wasn't really the kind of flea to rock the boat on the whole biting issue. So he hopped around and enjoyed the breeze and bit things, and did his best not to get eaten by anything bigger than him. It was tough, since really virtually anything could eat him, he was pretty small and wasn't possessed of horns or poison or any kind of effective porcupine-quill-type defenses. The bigger question was what would actually want to eat him intentionally, and what kinds of things eat fleas at all.

He wasn't sure. Birds? Possible, but that would have to be one eagle-eyed damn bird to see him hopping along and swoop down out of the sky to grab him. That didn't seem terribly likely. Maybe an anteater? That seemed somewhat more likely but those things always looked pretty slow and you never exactly saw one of them flicking its tongue out at lighting speeds to snap up a bug like a frog would.

A frog! Now that was definitely something to look out for. Man, you always forget about the frog.

Leland hopped about and looked around for frogs for the rest of the day. Then he died because fleas don't live all that long.

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