The miserly jungle minds what she misspends, calmly reclaiming her bitterest fruits, her clumsiest birds, her laziest hogs, and her unfittest mothers; conserving her losses by the ways of worms and mulch. You were born by these jungly notions. Shortly after birth, the ants redistributed both your unfit mother and your limp placenta accordingly. Yet they spared you, abiding by some unknown etiquette.
When you neither stood nor stirred, I feared you too may decay. When you finally cried, I feared the tigers may near. Standing, you rose too high, out-of-arms-reach to rout up a meal of grubs and tubers, and I feared you may starve. I feared the many fears the jungle instilled in her denizens. You were my kin but hardly my kind. I did not yet know you were fashioned for survival.
Cradled by haphazardly thatched palm fronds, you gurgled and warbled so curiously. Your ruckus attracted no predators, only witnesses: the bears and lions, subdued by awe; the parrots and cicadas, quietly confused; the centipedes and snakes, neutralized; the apes, agape: My perplexed brothers hung from branches above, dolloping upon me gobs of dubious silence in place of the congratulations and condolences respectively due to a new father and widower. They were ominously still, very wary, sensate to the supernatural: of the jungle's many gambles, you were a rare yet portent cast, as enigmatic as six pips for six dice.
Your debut elapsed that night; and the jungle, but not your father, forgot about you.
Among the treetops, I introduced you to the ways of me, your father, of your passed mother, of my perplexed brothers, and soon, of you. You never felt at ease. Your furless body shivered itself to sleep, sending the canopy boughs fluttering all through the night. When the troop meant to migrate, you desperately moored yourself to the sturdiest branches, distrusting your agility and gravity's stern reputation.
I offered my hand to help you down and I noticed our digits did not interleave. In fact, you hadn't digits at all, but fine fingers and a stubbornly misplaced thumb, attached all wrong. Certainly from your mother's side, the defuncts of baboonery. I considered wrenching the deformity into its proper place, but it made sweet memento of your mother and the peculiar love we shared. So the two thumbs remained.
I knew you would leave us soon. You lost interest in ripe mangoes, in male bonding by brawling, in sharpened sticks, in hooting to claim domains, in courtship and in copulation, in peeling bark, in territorial scents, in lice, in the jungle's etiquette. At all this, you observed us simple creatures, twiddling your peculiar thumbs.
