mrgh.
imagining sharp stones slicing into Breath, racing faster and faster, grunting in terror, stopping, Orphan stopping Snub by biting into her leg, Snub realizing she’s been dragging the child along, Orphan’s spindly body skidding on rocks, Snub releasing Orphan, Snub heaving in air, the plateau is silent.
The not-gorillas have not followed.
Orphan is curled on the ground, crying.
Breath is still clamped tight to Snub’s chest.
Snub stands as tall as she can on all fours,
her blinding
mrgh
slowly draining.
Snub can think again.
She nuzzles Orphan,
hoping to provide some comfort and
needing
Orphan’s comfort in return.
Orphan shows no feeling on her face now.
Orphan has disappeared into Orphan.
Snub climbs a tall rock to look back.
The not-gorillas have not left.
Neither are they following.
They stand silent where the plateau begins.
Not daring to follow.
The plateau has no food on it.
It has barely any green at all.
Sun beats without mercy.
Its heat gnaws at Snub’s thoughts,
scrambling and stealing them.
Salty water appears in Orphan’s hair,
beads in the light.
Snub grooms it from her, but more comes.
Snub loses track of their direction,
does not know which way they are meant to go,
so Snub doesn’t move her family forward or backward.
They chase the shade
as the sun shifts in the sky.
They hunker down, licking cracked lips
during the hottest center of the day.
They spend a night huddled together on the rocky ground,
in an unknown place, without a silverback.
Is Silverback alive? Is Brother?
Come dawn, Snub finds it hard to move.
Everything aches.
Orphan is the one to start them along the plateau,
heading away from the sun
and the not-gorillas.
She is nervous to lead,
flipping her lips from her teeth and back,
cringing and looking to Snub for comfort,
sometimes collapsing to the ground, overwhelmed,
waiting for Snub to groom her
before continuing on.
As the heat increases,
Breath is an unmoving weight at Snub’s chest.
Though fear of the not-gorillas
keeps Snub’s mind tense and overfull,
like a sunned blister,
setting her head to aching,
the not-gorillas have not followed.
As Snub and Orphan and Breath
press forward through the day,
the green begins to return.
Breath is alive, but he is still, still, still.
The canyon opens out
into a meadow
that Snub remembers.
Here they once spent the night in yellow grasses,
Here they followed a gully filled with cormorants
escaping the black ash pond.
Here is closer to home.
Snub leads them to the center of the meadow,
where a dim memory tells her Silverback
once brought them to browse.
Within the thick blades are shoots young enough to eat.
As Snub settles her family in to forage,
she finds herself craving the wetness
inside the grass more than its taste.
As more and more grass goes into Snub’s belly,
her headache begins to withdraw.
It has been so much a part of her
she stopped noticing it.
At first Breath will barely open his eyes.
He’s left trails of dung all down Snub’s body.
Snub takes a big mouthful of grass in,
chews it into a wad,
pries Breath’s mouth open with her fingers,
and drops it in.
He blinks at her, surprised,
his eyes opening fully
for the first time all day.
Then he chews and swallows,
wincing as he forces the pellet of food
down his throat.
Orphan stays close.
She watches Snub eat, then
chews on some of the youngest blades.
as if eating grass is strange, when
it is Orphan who is strange.
The magpies land right next to Snub,
picking through the grass,
looking for a meal in the same place.
Snub does not mind, because magpies
eat things that gorillas will not eat,
spiders and egg sacs and pale wriggly grubs.
One of them uses Breath’s foot as a perch.
Snub watches the bird peck at the earth.
The hunt for green to eat
leads Snub’s family
steadily toward the dark pond.
Toward what was once home.
Where has the pond gone?
At first Snub thinks she is in a different place,
that she has been mistaken.
Then she realizes that the pond
has been replaced by a new meadow,
by a thick circle of feathery,
powdery greens and powdery browns,
broken by rotting trunks of fallen trees.
The same kind of monkeys that Snub remembers
clinging to the floating tree during her dark night
scamper up and down,
hopping to the lush soil,
then into the fallen tree’s branches.
Snub noses into the open area.
Orphan’s hand is on one flank,
Breath’s hand is on the other.
Wildebeests graze the new grasses at the far side,
but these animals do not put fear in Snub’s heart.
She makes her way forward more boldly now
into the place where
land has filled the pond.
Snub stops, heart seizing.
Her body falls into panic,
her throat grunting
wragh.
Her hands beat her chest and
her legs run her in tight circles.
As she hurtles, her mind catches up to what she saw.
A monster cascading down the slope.
A giant slug, longer than any creature should be,
a shiny black thing as long as the mountain is tall.
Frightened by Snub’s terror,
Breath dashes behind her,
screaming,
little arms flailing.
They are out of the meadow and deep in the jungle,
huddled at the base of a tree,
before Snub realizes that Orphan is not with them.
Worry for Orphan overcomes worry for herself.
Snub threads through the trees,
she and Breath calling out
wragh,
fear pungent all around them.
Snub prepares for the sight of Orphan
snared in the giant black slug’s tendrils.
But she finds a curious sight:
Orphan is not at all afraid.
She is standing right next to the slug
that reaches to the top of the crater.
She is tapping its black flesh.
It rings out.
It is not flesh.
Orphan turns toward Snub, wonder on her face,
and points into the surface of the big black thing.
Snub and Breath cautiously make their way over.
At first the surface is all dancing light,
but then Snub makes out
two b
lack forms on all fours,
one larger and one smaller,
and one lighter-colored figure on two legs.
They are all staring back at Snub.
Seeing foreign gorillas,
Snub fills with a feeling of
wragh,
beats her chest and races
to the far side of the shining black
to better see the gorillas trapped
inside the stilled stone slug.
But the gorillas face her on the other side,
too, only now they’re in pieces,
colliding in front of her eyes,
disappearing entirely when Snub charges them.
Why is Orphan not scared?
She makes soothing sounds toward Snub.
She raps her knuckles against the black shiny surface,
making it ring out again.
Calmed by Orphan’s calm,
Snub stares into the black stone
while the dream gorillas glint back.
When she is not aggressive toward them,
they are not aggressive toward her.
When she bares her teeth at them,
they bare their teeth at her.
It is up to Snub what those gorillas will feel.
It is like she is a silverback.
Snub now knows this enormous black thing
is no animal but something else,
a part of the land.
This is where the mountain’s suffering
once streamed a hot river,
only now it has cooled and hardened
so it is a shiny sort of stone
that reflects like the surface of a puddle.
It traces the whole length of the ruined mountain
up to the top of the fallen crater ridge.
It is a scab of the land’s old wound.
If Snub followed this scab up,
she would be back in her old home.
If it is still there.
Snub keeps her distance
as she follows the black scar,
clambering over rocks and soil.
The earth is still ravaged,
but its edges have softened,
are covered with soft green fuzz,
tendrils of struggling plants,
beginnings of bushes and trees.
Snub runs her fingers
along the tops of the greenery,
yanks up handfuls of it,
pressing buds into her mouth.
This soft green is all young,
This soft green can all be eaten.
As they near the top of the crater ridge,
the plane of the mountain’s scar expands.
Orphan is the first to step onto the glossy surface,
holding an outcropping with one hand
before placing one foot and then the other
on uneven ground.
The rock frays and crunches under her feet.
She makes a few leery steps,
then puts all her weight down,
bobbing her head toward Snub.
Come.
Breath climbs to Snub’s back
as she starts forward.
The shiny surface crunches and splinters
beneath her fingers and toes.
It is like walking across a field
of freshly broken bamboo.
It is not sharp enough to hurt Snub,
but Orphan’s skin parts for it,
latticing the soles of her feet with red.
Snub feels a strange inversion of
hoo
to approach this land
that used to be all she knew,
to climb the stone memory
of the mountain’s pain,
with her new family of
a young gorilla
a young not-gorilla.
Breath fusses to get down from Snub.
As soon as he’s on the sharp terrain
he raises his arms to be lifted back up.
Snub places him across her belly,
like he is a younger gorilla than he is,
and hurries to catch up to Orphan.
The familiar old lake has come back.
The brown-blue of the water
has taken on a new shape,
is now a long and skinny oval overhung
by an enormous new rock.
Around it are surviving trees,
some standing tall but others growing sideways,
upheaved.
The ground is dotted in light greens:
ferns and stonecrop,
the beginnings of larger plants,
all of it edible.
Home.
Overcome, Snub sits right where she is.
Breath wriggles out from under her.
Orphan leads them forward.
The climb down is hard—
it would be difficult for an animal
without feet,
like a rhino or an elephant.
Maybe even the wild dogs
could not get over these rocks.
hoo.
Where are Silverback and Brother?
They are not here.
They have not been with Snub for a long time.
Even still, her heart is baffled to be here,
home, without the rest of her family.
hoo
without them is a different sort of
hoo.
Soon there will be
familiar rocks and trees,
favorite napping spots!
Snub clambers down the rock,
grunting in excitement.
Breath gets down and walks alongside her
once the grass begins,
tumbling and grunting in pleasure.
As they barrel along, Snub realizes that Orphan is not following.
She looks back to find Orphan
sifting through shards of black shiny rock,
testing each one by hefting it in her hand
before shaking her head,
casting it to the ground.
She finally selects one,
gripping it tight as she starts down the slope.
Even though she is family now,
Orphan is still a not-gorilla.
Orphan still wants a sharpened rock.
They will not travel to the very center of home.
Snub does not wish to be reminded
of the worst
of the mountain’s suffering.
As Snub leads her family
into the trees,
monkeys scatter.
These are not the small brown ones
that used to live here.
These monkeys have long black hair,
a white stripe down the middle of their backs.
Maybe the mountain spat these monkeys out
after it finished spitting out the hot river.
Once they’re deep into the trees,
Snub brings her family to a stop,
stands on all fours,
breathing in the humid air,
full of the scents of leaves,
of mud,
of decay,
of food.
She lets her eyes travel the scene,
like Silverback once would have done.
Snub had thought she would have to find a new home.
But it has been here all the time,
recovering.
Waiting for them to return.
For some of them to return.
The magpies arrive soon after Snub and her family,
arrowing into the upper reaches of a tall palm.
Their home is so high!
When Snub tries to see them
she is dazzled by sunlight,
can make out only their vague shapes
as they dart in and out of the fronds.
Snub and Breath barely go more than a few paces in a day,
picking through the grasses for the choicest seeds and blades.
Orphan wanders farther,
sometimes disappearing for long enough
that the sun is on the other side of the sky
when she returns.
She departs in a corridor flooded with light.
She reappears in a corridor flooded with shadow.
It makes Snub wonder
what happens inside Orphan.
Once Orphan appears at the clearing’s edge,
making sounds that Snub now knows
are Orphan’s version of
amrcha.
Orphan gets her sharp black stone in hand
before starting back out of the clearing.
She looks over her shoulder,
chattering at Snub.
Snub shakes her head, confused.
Breath heads to Orphan, excited,
tripping through the clearing.
Snub follows more cautiously.
Orphan is leading them into the center of home,
where the mountain’s suffering first started,
where the lake fell
where animals burned
where Snub’s long journey first began.
Even as Snub grunts in protest,
Orphan urges them onward, faster and faster.
Snub stops and gives a roar like
Silverback might have made.
Snub makes the loudest pap pap that she can.