Orphaned
Page 2
Another boom rolls Snub down a slope
as if the black smoke has grown
arms and fingers
and shoved.
In the tumbling dark of
sharp rocks,
broken roots,
breast-beats of wind,
she grasps
nettles,
vines,
clods,
creatures that sting and squirm away
but slow her all the same.
Snub stands shakily,
swallows sour terror,
beats her chest once and then twice,
returning fear to the mountain.
It is only when she stops that she thinks,
What if the delirious mountain
staggers forward?
What if the mountain
carries its misery
to her family?
Broad, flat stone beneath feet and hands.
Nighttime ledge overlooking the lake.
Snub’s family has been on the daytime ledge,
has overlooked the daytime lake.
She smells them here.
Snub rises to two feet and beats her chest.
She heaves in deep gasping breaths,
undone by the undoing of the world,
her body nettling
where her reckless journey has split her skin.
She whimpers as she breathes,
her ribs a bruised and jagged place.
Her own sounds return over
murmurs of lapping moonlit water.
She beats her chest again.
Thump thump.
(Pap pap.)
Silverback!
Thump thump.
(Pap pap.)
Snub races along the lake’s edge,
tracing his sound.
The suffering mountain is getting closer,
sprays of earthblood filling the sky,
streaking lines of red over the lake’s surface,
too close now to be beautiful.
A hulking space of no light.
It cries to intimidate:
wragh!
Here is the pungent odor of Silverback’s fear.
Snub buries her face in his hair,
wraps hands and feet around wrists,
takes him as shelter.
Silverback’s hands are on her,
picking through her injuries.
It makes her pain greater, but her worry is less.
The mountain is merciful.
Maybe it saw Snub’s worry
and stopped suffering
before it could lumber into her family.
It sends out smoke, a few wisps,
like whimpers to remind everyone
what it has gone through.
Maybe Snub’s leaving won’t undo the world after all.
Frogs croak as murky lake water laps against reeds.
A bee lands on a length of bamboo husk.
An eagle cries against the blank and settled sky.
How was Snub ever dissatisfied by this?
When Silverback rolls out of the clearing,
Snub follows,
trailing her fingers along the tips of grasses,
enjoying their softness.
Every sensation that was once not enough
is now a source of
hoo.
Teased and Wrinkled barely look up.
They scarf green leaves,
doing the strange thing that only these
old gorillas do,
humming joy to their food.
Mother is here,
but Snub doesn’t have the courage
to look at her yet,
to find in Mother’s eyes
anger
sadness
or worse:
no feeling at all.
Mother.
She is resting against a tree,
the baby asleep on her belly.
acha!
Snub chews air.
She pulls up thistle but forgets to bring the stalks to her mouth,
strewing a purple trail of broken flowers.
She drops the limp stems left in her sweaty palm on Mother’s belly,
all over the baby.
An offering.
Mother grunts and turns away.
The baby picks up a palm-softened stalk and gums it,
peering at his own hands in surprise.
When Snub reaches a finger to him,
five perfect little fingers grasp it,
pollen dusting each black knuckle.
acha.
Ground shakes.
Fear sets Snub still and alert,
focuses her attention on Silverback.
Mother retreats to Snub,
presents her back for comforting.
Snub feels Mother’s infant
under her hands for the first time,
though she’s too nervous for any feeling of
acha.
Silverback feints one way and then another,
facing off against the invisible enemy
somewhere under the earth.
Only Snub has seen up close
the red torture that ripped out of the mountain.
Only Snub knows
that if that enemy has now come
to rip her family open
with its spurts of hot red,
not even Silverback will be able
to defeat it.
The air
is bitter.
The air
smells like the underside of a sunned rock.
The air
sets hairs prickling and tall.
The air
brings Silverback lunging at shadows.
The air
makes fingers squirm through black hair.
The air
makes Brother hide his face in Snub’s belly.
A startling rush, a flapping tremor.
The two magpies Snub once hurled a rock at
are flying over the family,
cawing raucously.
Those clever magpies are fleeing.
A new sound from the earth,
like it is belching air,
like it has eaten shiny green leaves
without licking soil first
to prepare its stomach.
Even Silverback is scared
by this new strange sound.
Dung puddles beneath him.
Smoke rises against blue.
The sun become a pale flower bulb.
Dusk arrives at midday.
From the lake above,
a troop of monkeys shrieks,
arrives darting in the trees.
One tumbles past,
yelping in pain,
steam rising from its fur.
Snub is the only one who turns
toward danger.
Her family searches for the ghosts of
hoo,
between mossy rocks and among the bamboo stands
where they foraged and napped.
When the sky itself is the source of fear,
and sky is everywhere,
where can gorillas go?
Only when the mountain rests
can the family eat.
Bright bitterness of dark leaves,
watery sweetness of younger buds.
Busy eating, Mother doesn’t notice
that the baby has one hand on Snub.
He lifts his other set of tiny fingers,
laces them into Snub’s wiry hair.
Feet in Snub’s hair now, too,
so that the baby is dozing,
gripping only her.
Snub stares at him,
ignoring the pain in her cricking neck,
the stabs from her scabbing wounds.
She breathes onto his face,
watches his long eyelashes flutter.
Snub pulls the baby to her ribs,
like she has seen Mother do.
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She strokes his smooth hair,
watches his little eyebrows unfurrow.
Mother works her eyeteeth
under bamboo bark
to get at the sweet food beneath.
Snub takes a chewed-up ball of green
from her own mouth
and pins it between her lips
so she can waft it under the baby’s nose.
He gums it.
Snub gives a sound ripe with satisfaction.
acha.
A moment stretches long in Snub’s mind:
hoo.
Eating clover with Silverback and Mother,
Brother pulling Teased’s hair.
Then the earth itself is the branch of a tree,
breaking under an untried weight.
It rolls the family
down a new slope of ruined ground,
tumbles them and crashes them.
Mother’s toes dig into the flesh of Snub’s thigh,
then they’re ripped away.
The water follows.
The lake is attacking,
sending its brown waters
rushing down.
Those waters suck through the jungle trees,
ripping up saplings,
whipping them into the mud.
Even as Snub spins and tumbles,
she sees the delicate white neck of an egret
struggling to free itself
but caught in a lashing wet vine
and dragged under,
its pale curve disappearing under tree-high
churns of brown and black and green.
Snub’s world is sky
and then mud
and then sky.
Dark chaos.
Silverback roars,
mrgh!
Gurgling and splashing.
A roar choked off.
A tree sloughs through the water, and though Snub
leaps
its roots snag her
and pull her
under the surface.
She drags herself onto the tree,
scrambles again when its trunk rolls her under,
climbs into the nest of its roots.
Snub’s ears are ringing,
and her mind can’t straighten the world.
Everything is on a tilt,
and the tilt itself is tilting.
She travels the river this way,
a gorilla
floating on the water
like a bug,
the land
too far to reach.
Snub struggles to understand
how a lake can fall.
Where there once had been a hillside
now there is a waterfall.
Trees bow and stagger in its flood.
Snub sees white bellies of dead fish,
and the green-brown of fish
that have not yet died,
that still show their correct side to the world.
More and more flood, a river
seizing the shore, taking it
farther from Snub even as
she staggers toward it.
The upturned ground is too far to reach.
Unaccustomed creatures writhe on it:
giant earthworms and millipedes,
ants everywhere, as constant as dirt,
scrambling over the glowing dots of their eggs,
a nest of pink rodents
writhing through the earth,
so young their blue eyes
are still skinned over,
feeling for their mothers.
Where is Mother?
The water slows.
The insects are all silent.
Snub has never heard
the world without insects.
The water is not water
on the surface.
It is ash, thick and gray,
swirling and chunking.
Snub sends a cry of
wragh
into the upturned world:
Where is her family?
The uprooted tree turns a corner,
and she is no longer alone.
A small body is there,
lodged among the branches
of a tree bowing against the flood.
Wet through, the baby
looks even more like a pink worm than before.
His body is limp,
fingers and toes pointing to the water,
as if some much larger creature
has discarded him.
Snub hoots.
There is no answer.
She feels a keening sense of worry, says
acha
for the wretched thing
acha!
hoping the baby will hear her
if it can hear anything
anymore.
Snub’s tree is floating
down the wrong side of the river.
It will not go close enough.
To save the baby,
she must leave the safety
of the floating tree.
She will do it.
When she eases off,
her bottom half disappears
into the wet ashy gloom.
She’s left the tree that kept her from
swallowing water
at the bottom of the flood.
The river is mostly cold,
though ribbed with currents of hot.
Around her legs
Snub can feel
rocks,
thistle and trees,
slithers of creatures,
slithers of vines.
The ash is soft,
like the inside of a mouth.
She tries to leap toward the baby in the tree
but her feet push against
ground that is more slippery than she thought,
plunge
into cold brown water.
Instinct brings her to all fours,
even deeper under the river.
Her throat fills with mud
before she can stop herself
from taking a breath.
Her body is too heavy
to get to the surface,
no matter how much she kicks and punches.
She hurls herself
—for one lung-gashing instant
she’s above water,
tries to gulp in air
but only gargles mud—
She’s down again.
Her shoulder lands in a sludgy thicket
of drowned ferns,
and her fingers grip their roots.
Pull.
Snub has been saved
by slick and muddy green.
Snub hugs the trunk
to ease her aching shoulders,
then places one hand and the other
higher up the tree,
reaching for the little creature.
Climbing a tree is familiar,
even in this changed world.
Climbing a tree
makes her say
hoo.
The baby
is flat across the branch,
arms and legs dangling,
like he’s asleep.
But he is not asleep.
Snub places a finger underneath
his tremoring chin,
examines it and lets it rest.
She wraps a long-fingered hand
around his rib cage,
carries him as gently
as an overripe fruit.
Against her breast,
like Mother would do.
Snub calls out loudly,
hoping her family will come.
Even Brother would be helpful.
But there is no response.
She will leave the river with this little gorilla fruit,
as water-plump as a fallen pear.
Gorillas are meant to be on land.
Even gorillas who don’t move anymore.
Snub cu
rls the little body around her neck,
slots her fingers between bumps of spine.
The muscles in her legs,
already exhausted,
burn in the cold river water.
She lands heavily on her back
in a stand of fronds,
sending out a brown cloud of crickets.
Broken reeds stab her back,
but the baby is safe against her belly.
His eyes quiver beneath delicate black lids.
His throat bobs, and a tendril of muddy brown
emerges from the corner of his lips,
running over Snub’s elbow.
She holds his feet high, so the ooze might drain out.
The baby’s eyes flutter open
and he coughs,
baby-warm ash splattering Snub’s elbow.
She presses him close to her breast.
He gums her nipple,
then his head dangles back.
He is alive.
He is asleep.
Snub stares and stares at his face.
Snub has saved Mother’s baby.
He is still the ugliest creature she’s ever seen.
Snub shifts her arm
so it covers the sleeping baby more.
Her eyes close, as heavy as his.
She wakes without realizing she fell asleep.
Snub is in a well of soft sunshine,
snorting as something tugs her nostril.
It is a little gorilla finger,
exploring the flat lobes of her nose.
She will never hate him again.
He is no longer a pink worm.
He becomes Breath.