The watermelon seeds
I was on my small terrace in Lyon with the Cat, enjoying a juicy watermelon (that magical fruit we use to endure European heatwaves).
"Stop spitting the seeds, you dirty thing!" I clumsily asked. She replied that she wouldn't, arguing that men spend the whole day spitting on the streets, buses, trains, soccer fields, and any place with a floor. So her spitting was a kind of feminist activism.
A few days later, a plant with rather strange leaves appeared on the terrace. The Cat claimed it was a watermelon and was excited about it, although I doubted it. We decided to test an old botany book; indeed, it was a watermelon. We watered it abundantly at night, and during the day, we tried to cover it a bit to prevent it from burning.
After a week, I saw the plant in a pot inside the house and thought the Cat had moved it there to protect it from the sun. The next day, it appeared in another pot, and the day after, it was back on the terrace. "Good thing you returned it, so it will benefit from the rain," I told the Cat. "Wow! I thought you were the one moving it around!" she responded, and we got scared.
We went back to the botany book, and upon closer examination, we discovered it wasn't a watermelon but a "miscanderia." According to the book, it's the only species in the natural world that is both fauna and flora at the same time. Charles Darwin used it in an essay to support his theory of common ancestry but could never showcase it publicly because the darn plant always escaped him. Just as we closed the book, the plant jumped off the terrace, and we never found a trace of it.
That night, marking the end of the heatwave, we were engulfed in sadness. "We were foolish to let it go," the Cat commented while continuously spitting watermelon seeds.
