“Akika . . . brother . . . friend.” She spoke to him in her tongue, and he replied, imitating her. Though their sounds were merely a pleasant noise to Thorne at first, the thoughts behind those noises grew ever clearer. In time he would learn their language more clearly than the one he had been born into.
He was quick to learn a dozen words that first day. She taught him which plants to eat, like stems, bamboo shoots, and fruits. He favored fruits the most, and she let him eat those. At first he was not strong enough to hold on to her back like Akika, but after a few weeks he could curl an arm around her neck and hold on just as well as her other son.
As the days passed, Keza settled into her life as a mother to her two children. The band of twelve gorillas she lived with were always tolerant, and often indulgent to both Akika and Thorne.
It soon became clear that Thorne had deft control of his hands and could peel bark on trees and could climb with the ease of the younger apes. He was slow to grow and did not prefer to walk on his knuckles, but Keza let him do as he wished. She saw in her own way as he grew stronger that his balance was better when he was upright. Every now and then Keza would walk upright with him, holding Thorne’s tiny hand in her right and Akika’s hand in her left.
Joy filled her whenever she saw her children playing together, wrestling and growling. She hooted and huffed in encouragement. Akika, the child of her body, and Thorne, the child of her heart. She could not be happier.
When Akika was nearly a year old, he fell climbing and a nasty set of spines from a bush below were embedded in his arm. Keza could not pull them free. But Thorne, with his slender fingers, stroked his knuckles over Akika’s face and head in a gentle, soothing motion before he began to ease the spines from the distressed gorilla.
Akika watched his pale-skinned brother with soft, loving eyes, and Thorne bared his teeth in the way that Keza now understood was not a threat, but his way of showing joy. Keza knew she had made a good decision taking the hairless ape into her arms that day, and her love for him became infinite.
Thirteen years later
Thorne stood at the edge of the still pool that fed into a small waterfall below. His family drank handfuls of water hesitantly at the edge. Gorillas could not swim easily and kept well away from it for fear of drowning, or the other dangers that might lurk within it. But Thorne did not fear the water. He was drawn to it, fixated by the way the canopy of moss-covered trees reflected perfectly in its glassy surface.
He crept up to the shore of the pool and peered into the water, glimpsing his face reflected back at him. This was not the first time he had looked into the water, but it was the first time he truly noticed how different he looked compared to his family.
Thorne’s face was narrow, with a thinner mouth, and his eyes were the color of an evening sky. A scruffy layer of dark-brown hair grew around his jaw and his loins but not over the rest of his body. His limbs were sleek, his muscles defined and yet so different in so many ways from his brother.
Thorne studied the different shape of his fingers compared to Akika’s. Even his feet were different. He’d never been able to grasp things with his toes as gracefully as his brother could. He’d been too afraid and ashamed to compare his body to the others. He knew what they called him in their grunts and huffs. The deformed hairless ape.
Perhaps he was not deformed after all. Perhaps he was formed as he should be, and he simply was not an ape? The idea, once formed within him, gave him a greater curiosity, a need for answers. Some nights when he lay alone, a little way from the other gorillas as they slept, he let his mind wander, and strange dreams came in that moment just between sleep and waking. Dreams of apes who looked like him, their voices soft, full of love . . . and other strange dreams of a world that in this lush jungle land seemed impossible.
Perhaps they were dreams born of fevered nights when the humidity threatened to choke him and he sought refuge high in the treetops, thrusting his head above the canopy to feel the wind on his face.
One truth that always came back to him, no matter how much it hurt him to think about it, was that he had not always been a gorilla. Once, long ago, he had been something, someone else.
Thorne touched the surface of the water, creating ripples that distorted his image in the pool. A quivering took hold of him as for the first time in his young life he accepted that he was truly not like his family.
G. Gorilla . . . A soft voice spoke to him through the mists of time. The forest around him almost seemed to hum in response.
He knew that he was something else. But what? Thorne’s heart grew heavy with shame at not being Akika’s true brother, but there was a glimmer of curiosity that defined his species—though he did not yet know he belonged to that species.
Thorne stared at the surface of the water.
If he was not a gorilla, then perhaps he could swim the way he’d seen the leopards do when they crossed rivers and lakes. They moved slowly, sleekly through the water, pawing their front legs in forward circular motions and kicking with their back legs. Thorne was not as big or as heavy as his kin, so perhaps he could do the same? He’d noticed he had a different mobility in his body, so it was entirely possible that he was capable of swimming. There was only one way to find out.
He flung himself recklessly into the pool. Keza’s scream of terror was muted as Thorne sank beneath the surface. He opened his eyes, seeing the murky depths of the watery world around him. His bare feet touched the bottom of the pool. He coiled himself tight and pushed up until he surged into the light and gasped sweet air. He moved his arms, testing their effectiveness, and soon he was pulling himself toward the shore, where his mother was pacing and wailing in panic.
Thorne, a little weary after such a new activity, crawled out of the water, breathing deeply. Keza rushed to him, balled a fist, and thumped his side with one hand, her touch gentle even as she reprimanded his behavior. Then she grasped his head and pulled him around, looking him over for injury.
He hooted in reassurance at his mother and grasped her large solid hands with his own, holding them to his skin. Gorillas thrived on physical touch, they lived for contact with one another, and Thorne was no different. He craved his mother’s brushing caresses over his hair and the light thumps of her loosely balled fist against his chest in greeting.
He glanced back once more at the pool, and a deep longing for more answers and more truths filled him. But he would have to return when his mother was not there to fuss over him.
The band finished drinking and worked their way into a group of fruit trees to eat their evening meal and rest. Thorne climbed the nearest mango tree; he alone among his family was still the most comfortable at such an activity. Once gorillas aged, they stayed closer to the ground.
Thorne plucked some ripe-smelling fruit from a tree and tossed them down to the gorillas below, where they divided the food. But he did not join them. He clutched a pair of mangoes in his hand and climbed higher in a hagenia tree until he leaned against the thin branches that formed the canopy. He pushed his head through the spreading branches and looked out over the tops of the forest that stretched for hundreds of miles around. Above him the sky was inky black, with a vibrant spread of glittering stars.
Stars . . . He knew what they were. Well, not exactly, but he knew the word. Stars. The word felt different on his tongue. It was not from the language of the birds, the leopards, or the gorillas. It was a language that was softer, clearer, yet just as beautiful as the languages he spoke now with love in his heart. The word stars remained inside him like a well-kept secret, spreading a warmth he could not explain as he ate his fruit and gazed upon the expanse far above him. There were feelings, not quite memories, that churned within him, calling in soft whispers.