The flies and horses, the goldfish and the turtles in Skursula songs don"t live in Candyland or the universe of the Care Bears, devoid of all Cloud Quakes and evil spirits influencing wrongdoing camp goers. They are spoiled by their innocent longings, but they exist in gothic temperatures and churning waters that feel boiling to the bare touch. Though these characters give off the feeling of being the products of straight-up anthropomorphism, they"re actually reflections of the opposite procedure - the girl as the field mouse and the heart as a bird of prey, perhaps just circling, but perhaps more when the steely night vision kicks in.
These animals and insects can be the people that you meet while you"re walking down the street tomorrow or the next day, but the revelations of these characteristics is more that they aren"t naked eye material. One thing that Ursula Dial and Skye Carrasco (women with two names like that were bound to meet at some point on a college campus, taking some of the same classical music classes) might have to deal with in their giving of these feathery, noble, honest and occasionally sexy qualities is that once they give animals the characteristics of real life human beings that they know - or even those of people completely fabricated for the sake of a yarn - they"ll find that getting them back can be a real headache.
Whomever they borrowed these characteristics from should be prepared to never have them returned. They should operate under the assumption that their abilities to rationalize and problem solve, in some cases, might be gone forever. The turtle"s got that. There are tradeoffs. For the guy whose qualities were used to invade the horse"s life - one that will see a self-inflicted co-habitation with a mouse that constantly whispers sweet nothings into its ear - he"ll suddenly and potentially forever be able to open it up and stampede or rumble a china chest with a whinny from the guts. Who knows what"s put into these humans to replace the stolen characteristics - cotton or balled up Sunday newspapers would be my guess.