Gigantopithecus

 

 

 

Step through the big-handed ferns, over branches long dried that will betray your

footfall, note the glyphs of lichen on every third tree. Keep low to listen and taste the

air. What you seek only seeds in his footprints. Some grow three inches down and

require rooting, a trained pig’s sensitive snout. Their caps will be crabshell pink and

spotted white like a certain small bird’s egg, the kind served coddled in boulevards

far from here. Once found, ingest. Behold that which you are intended to behold.

Wake twelve years later, completely the same, except for the feeling of

dissatisfaction. This is not at all what was promised at the consciousness conference.

One should not deceive amongst the majesty of the taiga and so many natural hot

springs, but the supreme leader had done just that. His reedy voice drunk on

knowing. Pupils like silver dollars. His subjects sat lotus at his feet, quaffed deeply

from the toppled flagon, palmed their sacred prisms and wept as he began to vibrate

for them, until he proved all motion to be an illusion. They split his eucharist like

light and in doing so realized we are indeed descended from the same stooped

creature, though nobody has ever seen him. I like to think that he is always over the

next ridge, that the stories are really a desire we haven’t gotten around to naming yet.

I have watched the stitched home videos and pried open the minds of hunters and

hill people, those widowers of yesterday’s country. They see him for the same reason

they don’t; because he is us, slipped into a glacier, kept perfectly intact for epochs

until the great thaw. Of course we would be scared, more comfortable among the

thickest pines, pillows of snowdrift, a cave with flat limestone walls upon which he

might paint the world he doesn’t yet understand. More and more he repeats the

cowardly sounds the hairless one made as it stomped through the underbrush. He

has no way of knowing this is the prayer that invents him, but he learns it all the

same, and with time he is the one giving instructions. 

 

Originally published in PLINTH, Issue IIII (September 2015).