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Friday
While, for much of the country, March is coming in like a lion, here in Appalachian Tennessee we need a hybrid simile since sometimes we are experiencing lion weather (it’s going down to the twenties next week), sometimes lamb weather (it went up to 72 two days ago). So how should we describe what’s happening?
Thanks to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, there’s an answer. We can say that “March has come in like a liobam.”
Liobams are the product of a laissez-faire dystopian future in which crazy, gene-splicing Dr. Frankensteins do whatever they want with animal and human DNA. There are pigoons (pigs that can be harvested for human organs), rakunks (rats and skunks) and fluorescent rabbits that glow in the dark. There are also edible hybrids, like soydines, chickeanpeas and beananas. And then there are liobams.
Here is Toby’s first encounter with a flock of them. Or should I say pride of them? Flide? Prock? Anyway, Toby is one of the environmentally oriented survivalists who manages to survive the human-manufactured plague:
Toby stares at them, fascinated: she’s never seen a liobam in the flesh, only pictures. Am I imagining things? she wonders. No, the liobams are actual. They must be zoo animals freed by one of the more fanatical sects in those last desperate days.
They don’t look dangerous, although they are. The lion-sheep splice was commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists in order to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They’d reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together. But the result hadn’t been strictly vegetarian.
Still, the liobams seem gentle enough, with their curly golden hair and twirling tails. They’re nibbling flower heads, they don’t look up; yet she has the sense that they’re perfectly aware of her. Then the male opens its mouth, displaying its long, sharp canines, and calls. It’s an odd combination of baa and roar: a bloar, thinks Toby.
We heard bloaring the other night when we were under a tornado watch. That was March coming in.