a basilisk, irradiated by a dark moon in its egg, hatches to find that it turns all of the stone that it sees into flesh. pebbles become slime molds, sand turns into millions of dead ants, mossy boulders transform into the fresh corpses of woolly rhinoceroses, seized by the rivers they sat in and pulled lazily downstream
the creature dies, bereft of nutritious stone to eat, in less than a month; we are all ignorant of how much luck we spent in that, in its starved wanderings, the lefthand basilisk never departed from its old forest, onto the white, flat plains beyond, and never saw, with its sharp yellow eyes, the mountains on the horizon

American visionary Howard Finsters painting “And the moon became as blood”
Picnic (Shunji Iwai, 1996)