Yesterday, I got an emergency call.

Eliza B Gentle, our field biologist, had just tracked down the last breeding site of the elusive Yucatan flying tree kangaroo.

Talk about ecstatic!  Or maybe the ex-static cling jacket I was wearing that repels excess charged particles from taking residence on my person.

The last time I had seen a Yucatan flying tree was…oh, I don’t know, scribbled on a torn page dangling from the molded, faded journal of Enrique Soulever Janemail I found at a trinket shop in Marrakesh when I was a midshipman aboard the trawler, King ‘Enry The 18th Man.

How these trees’ve evaded capture, let alone discovery, amazes me even more.

Looks like a walking stick with wings.

To avoid letting these half-plant/half-animal creatures fall into the wrong hands, biologists and others unable to handle working in an office environment (say, almost every scientist in existence, and most who’re dead tired of pushing up daisies), no Latin name has been assigned to these miraculous survivors of the early days of cross-species breeding.

In these cautious, late planetary maturity times, most species stick to their own kind.  But there were the glory days — call it Paradise, Eden, Shangri-La or any place but a modern, smog-filled metropolis we call Progress — when sets of states of energy intermixed without regard to genetic incompatibility.

Eliza contacted me via through our secret subwavelength network (if you eat a submarine sandwich at a certain pace, your mandible becomes an antenna that can broadcast signals through any medium (as long as the medium hasn’t been drinking too much laudanum filled with a flagellating paramecium or two — you’d be amazed how much media like the ocean, mantle or magma can drink!)).

I pulled the folding bicycle out of my backpack, turned a few screws, which transformed the bike into a one-person capacity autonomous drone, hopped aboard, pressed the energy transformation button which converted me and my stuff into a stream of dark matter that allowed me to pass through Earth from my location in Turkmenistan straight to Eliza’s undisclosed location in Quintana Roo.

And that’s how I got here, in this form, for all intents and purposes a direct relation of the Yucatan flying tree kangaroo.

Squirrelly being!

The kangaroo mimics the behaviour of the Yucatan flying tree in order to lure its prey to get close enough to be blasted into cosmic oblivion.

The kangaroo feeds off the energy as solids become liquids, liquids become solids and lipids join the incredible Mr. Limpet in a serenade to evolutionary deadends.

The kangaroo is not completely cruel, however.

It takes the leftover energy and does its best to reconstruct its prey into a unique combination of the prey’s self and a likeness of the Yucatan flying tree kangaroo, which has a God complex second only to members of Atheists for a Romney-Putin-Ahmadinejad Triumvirate Trifecta, mixed with a little Merkel, Singh, Gillard, Cameron, and Chavez for a spicy effect.

I’m thinking about becoming a runway fashion model, what with my sticklike legs, winglike arms and insectlike skeletal head, very much opposite of the puffy-faced effect Lindsay Lohan is going for in her appearance as Saturday Night Live hostess-with-the-mostess tonight.

Carlin would be proud — the Mass Media (an ephemeral, if not effeminate collection of prune-faced producers who were constantly made fun of as kids) has reinstituted the list of banned words in order to pretend to be a decent group of control freaks.  The new list:

• slut
• chink
• bitch
• employed
• happy
• optimistic
• intelligent

Eliza wants to clarify that she is in no way related to the field reporter named Elizabeth Gentle who was credited with creating the “bed intruder” meme.

Time for me to hop on out of here.

Despite my many disguises, the Committee hasn’t forgotten about me and wants me back in charge of deciding the fate of a species on an obscure planet in a tiny solar system of the Milky Way — the countdown clock says we’ve only got 13943 days left!