‘Experiment with everything, not just fluids and plant-based matter,’ said Mr Manns before giving us the keys to the lab.

‘Be creative!’ He goes on, with an increasing and quite unmeasured euphoria. ‘Phosphorous, chalk, an egg yolk … a dead animal.’

My appointed lab mate is late. She’s ‘stuck in traffic’, or so she claims. We only have two hours to use the lab and this practice is 40 per cent of our final grade. So I look for something interesting to analyse under the microscope, but I can’t find anything. I run downstairs to the cafeteria, and take everything they agree to lend me for a while: a tomato sauce bottle, paper napkins, olive oil and a little jar of salt.

I consider my elements. I rule out the fluids as well as the plant-based matter. I’m left with the jar of salt. I remove its lid and put it under the microscope. There’s something moving inside (is it a bug?). I adjust the ocular lens, and only then I can see it clearly. Seemingly out of a dystopian ghost town, a tiny person walks down a salt dune. I see it crouching and plunging its tiny hand into the salt. Out of the blue, a gigantic salamander pounces on the tiny person and locks its jaws on their hand. I can see their tiny mouth moving, but I can’t hear what they say. Desperately, I look for some device… a microphone, anything. I find a stethoscope and when I finish installing it by the little jar, the tiny person is already talking to another being.

‘Tire it out and then use this!’ says a grasshopper mounted on a salmon while it hands out a cat.

I gawk at the salmon with long black horsehair where its dorsal fin should be.

‘Use it, use it, it’ll make the salamander sneeze!’ urges the grasshopper.

‘Aaaaaaaaaccchhhooooooo!!!’

The tiny person shakes their arm covered in blue saliva dripping down its forearm.

‘Let’s go, it’s very late,’ hurries the grasshopper while its salmon-steed slides down the salt dunes at full speed.

‘Where are you going?’ asks the tiny person.

‘To the cypress forest!’ the grasshopper yells before disappearing.

The tiny person (who’s growing on me now) rolls down the salt dune without hesitation. There they are, I can see the cypress forest! There’s also a long table where a few guests mumble unintelligible phrases, pausing to suck on their pipes and blow out mouthfuls of orange blossom-flavoured smoke.

‘Barbarism!’ sentences a caterpillar at the head of the table while overdressing a salad.

The tiny person spies from the bushes.

‘It’s about the eviction,’ informs a nasal voice.

The nasal voice belongs to an echidna that appears from behind them. It is wearing All-Star sneakers and a crooked bowtie.

‘They demand to evict the caterpillars because they set their chrysalids in the middle of the rose gardens,’ explains the echidna.

‘Wicked fiends!’ continues the caterpillar and then it rambles on about the reprisal on part of the silk workers union. It stands up furiously and leaves with a sauce stain on its sweater.

A door slammed startles me. It’s my lab mate who arrives offering apologies and explanations.

‘I brought super interesting stuff for our observation, look!’ she exclaims while revealing a cypress branch, a salmon-coloured rose and a dead caterpillar. Mere coincidence?

Zoe Gomez Cass is an Argentinian writer based in Melbourne. She writes stories and poetry about all things magical, gothic, bizarre and futuristic. She hosts The Exophonic Writer Podcast and you can find her on instagram @the_exophonic_writer.

Translation into English by Zoe Gomez Cass.