An unsteady flame drank the oil of an unwitting whale. Black followed the whiskers of the boy's brush, a shape labeled both Abyssinia and Junglelands. He mapped borders from his father's notes, whose pith helmet saddled the boy down to his chin. His father's notes documented very few roads, but the boy could remedy that. The boy improvised capillaries for the heart of darkness.
The night, the flickering, and his Abyssinia had him baying feral serenades to his dusk-cloaked baboon troop to return him to wilderness. All baboons can tell a boy from one of their own. He loosed long and lonely yowls of no effect, no response.
His father returned, sternly plucking his helmet off his son. The son watched his father pencil in the homestead where mother lived, far away from the teeth of cannibals and baboons. The boy painted a red line from Junglelands to Mama.
'Oh, no, boy. She must stay in Harar with grandma and Isabelle. What have you done?'
The father shook his head as he noticed the revisions his son inserted into the notes. It was all edited with black and red paint: nineteen months of accumulated trade routes, botanical sketches, big game surveys, village censes, weather patterns; nineteen months of distances, inclines, infections, parasites, heartache, agnosticism. The boy had excised anything that separated Junglelands from Mama.
The father turned and saw no one. Twilight dimmed with the boy's lonely yowls and pattering paw steps.
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