A Brief History in Social Distancing
by Bryan Harvey
At night the storm churned through the overstory
as a shrewdness of apes huddled in the cathedral branches.
In a predawn haze, a male and a female slid down damp bark.
The two figures landed awkwardly in the mud and glanced upward—
perhaps they saw a constellation of eyes—their mythic past surveilling
an unknown future. A sibling picked an insect from behind another sibling’s ear—
a small action filled with grace. The sibling tasted the louse, crunched it
in ice cap molars and swallowed. No one remembered the escaped male
and female having ever performed such ritual care. They often bruised themselves
with rainwater reflections. On the move now, the male and the female swayed
like pendulums, having risen on two legs, having grown smaller and smaller
as they etched toward the horizon. In the shadow of the canopy’s geometric shapes,
an opposable thumb and a forefinger took measure of the departed pair, squashing them
in the yellowing light, and in the eaves, a light chirping stirred the air—perhaps an attempt
at it’s okay. A leaf fell shrewdly to the ground, and some scratched their heads,
not having forgotten their names but having no names to remember.
Would they remember to write? Those two who baptized the morning—
Would they remember to consecrate the world left behind
or was muting that wisdom part of the pact they had made?
The two looked back, freezing in their tracks:
They were struck by the tundra of home as a vast and hollow place
you could not escape and would hardly dare to visit—ice as bright and clean as salt.
Bryan Harvey's writing has appeared recently in Hobart, Rejection Letters, and The Daily Drunk, and it has appeared less recently in The Florida Review's Aquifer, Gravel, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives and teaches in Virginia and tweets @Bryan_S_Harvey. He dreams about basketball on long runs.
