curled over himself,
fists tight and eyes scrunched.
He’s gotten rheumy during the night.
His sleep breathing is wheezy and wet.
Snub lies down next to Breath.
She runs a finger along his thumb,
tugs it free of the tensed fingers,
picks through the red curl
on top of his head,
marveling at his body.
Breath has no scars.
That was Mother’s work.
Snub hears bees, follows the noise and returns
with a molten glob of honeycomb,
dripping yellow onto dark green.
It is for Breath.
It is what Mother would have given Breath.
Before Snub can feed it to him,
Silverback looms over Snub,
breathing out heavily,
his throat in the shape of
wragh
so that,
even though he isn’t making his intimidating bark,
fear quickens Snub’s pulse.
Snub will not give up this honeycomb.
She gutters air out her nose,
holding perfectly still,
avoiding Silverback’s gaze
until he grunts in irritation and charges away,
pretending there is an enemy that needs scaring.
Snub waves the honeycomb under Breath’s nose.
He moans and jerks awake.
Leaning back against Snub,
he lazily accepts the piece,
staring into Snub’s eyes as he groggily
chews it and swallows it down,
honey matting the hair of his chin.
Snub offers him another piece.
When he bites it this time,
something changes inside Breath.
He squeals, nips Snub on the knuckle,
runs across the clearing, shrieking away.
The last piece of honeycomb has fallen into the dirt.
Brother picks it up and eats it,
though it is covered in leaves and mud.
Breath runs from Snub all morning,
kicking at trees, rocks, the magpies.
Snub does not mind.
The work of following Breath
keeps her own thoughts away from Mother,
from the sorrow that is Snub’s version
of Breath’s anger.
Sometimes Breath will stop what he’s doing
and stare off into the distance,
always in the same direction,
always toward the place
where Mother pressed him into Snub’s arms.
You must take him.
I will die here.
When the sun is at its highest
it makes its own trees of light,
glistening mote-filled trunks
of empty brightness
between the dark-leafed spaces of the jungle.
Snub wakes to orange-brown valleys of aging light.
Brother is investigating a termite mound,
his lips smacking loudly as he tries to chew down
muscled termite guards before they can bite his lips.
His moans and whimpers make Snub think
Brother and the termites are evenly matched.
Silverback is still asleep.
Without his pool of sunshine he must have gotten cold.
He has dragged fronds over his broad back.
Snub reaches her arms tighter around Breath.
But there is no Breath.
She darts to all fours, turns circles,
grunts out her worry and
acha.
Breath isn’t anywhere.
A branch is broken,
dripping white sap onto the sodden ground.
Snub heads that way,
holding out a finger to capture some of the sweet, tangy fluid,
bringing it to her mouth as she goes.
Without quite expecting it,
Snub is back in the clearing
beneath the willow leaves.
The grass is still bent where once was Mother.
Snub’s heart pounds with the loss of her,
but riding above that feeling,
insistent,
is her worry about Breath.
He is not here.
Snub makes a quick pap pap on her chest,
like she once did
when she hoped Silverback would rescue her.
But now she is hoping to be the one to rescue.
Far off, a response.
The cry of a young gorilla.
Snub wants to race headlong toward Breath,
but here
the not-gorillas could be nearby.
She creeps as quietly as she can,
wincing when a vine turns out to be
brittle,
crackling under her toes,
or a pile of leaves hides a hole
that makes her grunt in surprise.
On the far side of a muddy puddle
teeming with water striders,
Snub finally spies Breath.
He is at the edge of the jungle,
staring into the open grassland
where Snub once spied a not-gorilla
making a dull stone
into a sharp stone.
Waves of yellow-green grasses
shake and flatten
with every shift of the winds.
Breath totters on two legs,
hopping as he tries get a view over the tall grass.
The not-gorillas are there.
There are more not-gorillas than Snub has fingers.
The carcass of a boar hangs from a wood frame,
legs splayed, hide peeled partially away,
the edges where meat joins skin
dripping runny red-brown juice into the grass.
One of the not-gorillas is hacking into the corpse
with a sharpened stone,
the soft thin hair along its body
matted with sweat.
Another, much smaller one
is watching, hefting a rock of its own.
Other not-gorillas are in poses that a gorilla might make:
lounging together,
examining a nutshell for any morsel left inside,
grunting.
There is so much to watch.
Snub can understand why Breath is looking out at them
with such wonder.
None of the not-gorillas has seen him,
but they will soon.
Grunting as loudly as she dares,
Snub creeps through the grass,
stopping right behind Breath,
snaking out a finger
to flick the tuft of white hair on his rump.
He squeaks in joy,
falls into Snub’s arms,
trembling with fear
or relief from fear.
The not-gorillas raise their strange voices,
the dry grass
swishing
rasping
along with them.
Snub and then Breath wriggle on their bellies
back into the cover of the jungle.
As Snub gets to all fours and begins to speed
back toward Silverback,
Breath bites her hand.
He toddles back toward the not-gorillas,
pausing at the edge of the jungle to watch them.
If she pulls him away,
he will shriek and reveal them both.
Chest heaving, Snub curls beside Breath,
her arm around his tender belly,
waiting for him
to want to leave
the creatures that attacked Mother.
A female not-gorilla has a child
that is Breath’s size,
but unlike Breath this child
does not hold on to its mother.
Useless child.
The mothe
r must use one arm
to keep it on her hip
while she roots in the soil with the other.
Every time the not-gorilla mother leans forward,
the child dips to the earth,
squalling as its head lolls.
Three males sit in the tall grass.
One is watchful,
looking toward the more distant grassland,
where Snub can see a small-eared elephant.
Short trunk, downward tusks.
The not-gorilla is intent on it,
fingers clenching and unclenching
a large animal bone at its side,
as if to strike out with it.
Strange.
Though it is excited, the not-gorilla
makes no sounds out of its feelings,
is being completely quiet.
That elephant is so large.
The not-gorillas can pose no threat to it.
The other two males are standing on two legs.
Why does it not cause them pain to stand for so long?
The female grubbing in the dirt
pulls out a root,
clods of earth raining from it,
plinking into the grass.
Snub has never considered this,
digging food out of the ground,
but recognizes the eating pleasure
of the female not-gorilla.
The tuber makes a satisfying crack
when the female bites into it,
like bamboo.
Snub imagines it in her own mouth,
crisp and watery.
One of the males hears the cracking sound, too.
He knocks the tuber from the female’s hands,
picks it up from the dirt,
tears into woody flesh with strong jaws.
Breath watches the not-gorillas.
He thrusts his shoulder into Snub,
leaning hard into her belly,
so hard it hurts.
His fingers twist into the hair on her legs and pull,
and she scrunches her eyes at the pain.
Then his hands finally relax.
Breath goes limp.
He will let them leave now.
Snub holds him tight to her and turns around,
picking her way into the jungle on all fours.
When she takes one last look back,
she sees a not-gorilla child has noticed them.
This one is older, closer to Snub’s size than Breath’s.
This child does not raise the alarm.
She does not let the others know.
Her arms are slack by her side,
wonder is on her face at the sight
of something as ordinary
as a pair of gorillas.
That not-gorilla child looked at Snub.
Even more than that—she saw Snub.
As she and Breath escape into the jungle,
Snub glances back, afraid to see
the child following, part of her
hoping to see the child following.
The only movements she sees, though,
are vines and leaves set springing
by Snub and Breath’s passage.
Back in the clearing,
back with Silverback and Brother,
time slows again.
Snub forces herself not to think
about the not-gorillas.
A patch of greens drenched in sunlight.
Is there any better place for a gorilla to be?
hoo?
Breath is not satisfied.
Snub recognizes the mischief in his face
but cannot stop him before he has
plopped in between Silverback and his food.
While Silverback eats,
Breath wallops him on the wrist,
then sprints away,
wailing in terror.
Brother staggers out of the way
as Silverback charges after Breath.
Snub tries to place herself between them,
but Silverback
wragh
knocks Breath to the jungle floor,
rolling and biting him,
Breath crying.
When Silverback releases him,
Breath limps away before
tumbling on his wounded leg.
Snub tries to groom away Breath’s pain,
but it stays until the next morning.
Breath spends that day at Snub’s side,
avoiding Silverback,
his body always touching Snub’s somewhere.
Home.
Here at the lagoon,
where there is green life
and blue water,
it is harder to remember
what felt so good about
her old home that
Snub was willing to risk everything
to get back there.
Home.
It used to exist
in the feeling of Silverback,
but with Mother gone
and Breath ever near,
home
is a feeling of keeping him safe
instead of a feeling
of being kept safe.
Snub cannot keep her hands on Breath always,
because then she would not eat or groom.
Breath is calm
for long stretches of the day,
and then he takes off,
and by the time Snub finds him
he is already watching
the not-gorillas,
drawn to the animals
that attacked Mother
as if watching them
will help him figure out
where Mother has gone.
Though the not-gorillas terrify Snub,
Breath will shriek if she tries
to drag him away early,
so she watches with him
until he tires.
Snub learns they like to pile bones.
They like to sleep on the skins of dead animals.
They sometimes howl and chant,
moving in ragged formations.
The drumming that Snub once heard was from
elephant skulls that they beat
with elephant bones.
After the drumming, blood mats their thin hair.
Great clots of it dangle from their mouths,
some of it still attached to meat.
Snub understands it is not their blood covering them
but some other animal’s.
No gorilla would eat an animal this way.
No monkey would eat an animal this way.
The not-gorillas eat like lions and hyenas do.
A fight.
Silverback and Brother run away from
the sounds of it,
but Breath runs toward it.
Maybe he hopes now the not-gorillas
will answer
the question
of Mother.
Snub follows Breath, and they watch
from the jungle cover as a new family
of not-gorillas uses the bones
of dead animals to attack the not-gorillas
that Breath and Snub have come to know.
One with silver hair grips a tusk in both hands
and swings it around,
knocking a male flat on his side.
The female who dug up the tuber
comes to the male’s defense,
throwing herself in front of his body,
and the silver-haired not-gorilla
turns the tusk on her instead.
Her child,
the one who saw Snub,
is a few feet away,
hands at her side,
wailing.
Breath is stirred,
making his sad hoots
as he tries to get out of Snub’s lap.
None of the other not-gorillas
dare come to the defense
of the pair
being smashed into the ground.
They cast their hands and feet above them,
trying to fend off the blows.
Anguished cries become
gurgling cries, then those, too, eventually stop.
The silver-haired not-gorilla wrenches
the tusk out of the bodies on the ground,
points it at a giant rock in the distance,
makes one of their strange high-pitched utterances,
and begins to walk.
The others shuffle along with him,
picking up their animal skins and rocks as they go.
The tiniest not-gorillas are scooped into the arms of females.
The rest of the young are led by the hand.
The small wailing child has been rooted
ever since the attack started.
Once the silver-haired not-gorilla is far away,
she throws herself into the grass
with the bodies of the dead.
Over time
the child’s wails muffle.
She sits up,
hair streaked with the liquid leaking from her eyes,
and continues to cry.
As the not-gorillas shuffle farther away,
the child stops crying.
She gets to her feet and dashes
toward the departing group.
The silver-haired male with the tusk
whirls and barks something at her.
The child seizes and goes still,
staring back at him,
slack-jawed and mute.
She steps toward the silver-haired not-gorilla.
He hurls the tusk at her.
Though it goes wide, the child’s face
Orphaned Page 7
