Still awake? The centipedes are. The centipedes are darting away from the exposure, away from light a leaf no longer covering them exposed them to. They burrow, bury themselves beneath the Earth's crust, beneath the leaf litter layer they believed would protect them until proven otherwise. Until someone still awake turns over the damp leaves and the centipedes burrow down towards darkness, away from the gaze of a curious human looking down at the life beneath the leaves. That life doesn't only consist of the soil centipedes, no, there are luminescent mushrooms poking out of the ground, some emerging from partially decomposed wood. Crickets chirp, a chorus of frogs can be heard in the distance, and a full round moon shines overhead. The night is peaceful. The human leaves, content with having glimpsed some small nature.
The night is peaceful, but the centipedes are far from it. Peaceful, that is. One is hungry, and she smells prey. She smells a larval beetle, and is ready to conquer said wood-dweller. She also senses multiple springtails occupying the same stick of dead wood, but her mandibles snap closed on the beetle grub first. The beetle larva wriggles unsuccessfully before being consumed, and the centipede is on the hunt again, darting after springtails with speed, though the majority of the small creatures hop away, to other parts underground, far from centipedes on the hunt, or at least far from this specific centipede.
Some may end up in the mouthparts of other predators, some may even spring themselves up to the open air, aboveground. They would be invisible beneath the cover of night, moon and artificial human lights the only illumination, in this area said human lights consisting primarily of car headlights, but the street is not where the springtails emerge. No, they live in the yard adjacent to the street, the street that leads to another street that leads to another street that leads to the highway, wherein cars move as quickly as the centipede did underground. Cars travel down highways, springtails travel up blades of grass, or between root nodes of flowers, and centipedes follow them, comparable in size to the eighteen wheel trucks the highways hold when contrasted against an ordinary car.
Still awake? The highway never sleeps, nor do the minute ecosystems that surround human habitation. Both continue ceaselessly as nighttime drapes over them like the blankets over ordinary humans, asleep in their suburban beds, ignorant to the tiny dramas occurring in their own yards.
ns18.222.231.86da2
