“My guests!” said the host, now standing once more. There was another empty chair to his right. Who had been there? A man with a mustache or a woman with a braid. Someone with a gleaming emerald ring. I drank more wine. “You are far too polite!” the host said. “We have hundreds and hundreds of songbirds for you, and hundreds more waiting in the kitchen! Try the goldcrest. Try the warbler. Don’t leave until you’ve tasted the regent bowerbird. The Gouldian finches are purple, turquoise, black, and blue. How can you argue with that?” he said. “Enjoy them while you can because they’ll be gone before you know it.”

What the host meant is that we were running out of the birds not on the table but rather: on the Earth. True, just that morning we had lost the yellow-bellied gecko, the North American mountain lion, the Tunisian hunting rat, the African nutria, and the Japanese water rhinoceros. The week before went the spotted dolphin, the reddish arctic leopard, and the subterranean crow. It was a tragedy, but we were growing used to it every day. I sighed to think that I had never tasted any of them.