The textbook tells you chimpanzees go for fingers and toes first. Pressure, a snap. Ten snaps, muted gunshots. The little effort it would take. With every loss, your bones running from you. And afterward, the book reads that they plunge for the ribs, which is only strange for their centrality: one spoked shell, the few needles kept from sewing you shut. And from there—the ears, which is too specific to be true, you think. But it is true. The book suggests someone come find you then. That someone shoot the bastard just above its flat cherub nose—precision, or the risk of further damage. You look at your hands, think of your mother’s. How little they could hold, the stumped uselessness were this ever to happen to you. The final page holds in it one photograph: a little girl, searching for plantains in frayed pajamas, smiling at a mandrill’s iridescent nostrils.
Peter Kispert
kispertp@gmail.com
Modern Life
Mattea Harvey