The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale Read Free Book Online Page B

chimps? By the time I was six years old I had seen thousands and thousands and maybe I don’t know
millions
of human beings, I had practically become an
aficionado
, a
connoisseur
of the human form, I noticed all their interesting differences in size, shape, texture, tone, style—upon seeing a human for the first time I immediately remarked to myself upon that particular human’s differentiating characteristics, height, heft, age, color, and sex, and if the sex was female then boy oh boy did I notice so much more!
    When did my love of Céleste become tainted with physical revulsion? I’d seen Céleste scrounge parasites out of her fur and
eat
them! Am I expected to be attracted to a girl of such grotesque manners? Hell, she eats
my
parasites! But wait!—
I
do that, too! They’re good! No!
No!
Go ahead and eat your own delicious goddamnparasites, Céleste, but Bruno’s moving up in the world!—even if it means leaving you—even if I do, in a very primitive and uncomplicated way, love you. Female chimps—when they’re in estrus their ugly plump vulvae inflate and swell out behind them, and they drag around these bloated pink balloons of flesh between their legs as they walk, their sphincters oftentimes plugged with repugnant globs of partially excreted shit. And those flat gray mealy breasts and protruding bellies and rangy hairy bodies and bald heads and scrunched-up noses? No, I’m sorry. It’s true, I am a deviant and depraved pervert: I have no desire to have sex with other chimps. But look—
look!
—look at all those
human
girls we see sashaying in all their anthropic glory past the Wall all day: all that long hair growing insanely out of the tops of their heads, those nearly hairless lower bodies propelled bipedally forward on those powerful, columnar legs, those massive round breasts so absurdly disproportionate to their bodies! So, as my father was loping around the habitat indiscriminately screwing any moist sluice he could find—my mother, my aunt, a
frog
for God’s sake—I had always been secretly pining for humans, longing to someday get to slither between the legs of those dazzling
sapiens sapienettes
I saw clip-clocking past me all day in those high-heeled shoes that make their calves taut and thrust their beautiful bulbous asses up, up, up in the air, just a little closer to God, like a streaming buffet of delicious desserts on display for Bruno behind impenetrably thick glass, to be admired but not to be touched.
    Do I digress? Very well, then, I digress. I am large, I contain multitudes.
    So there was Lydia, standing in the doorway of our habitat, bending to the ground and beckoning to me with her arms—so pink and smooth and fragrant—and into these arms I scrambled, and wrapped my hairy self around her neck, rested my head in the crook of her shoulder, and tossed a last parting glance upon myfamily as she took me away. And Lydia held my hand and guided me through the first chapters of Bruno’s bildungsroman, the journey into manhood my life has been ever since. I did not bid good-bye to my mother, I did not bid good-bye to my brother, I did not bid good-bye to my father, and I did not even bid good-bye to Céleste. Instead, I went with Lydia. I went with the human. I went with love, I went with lust, I went with language. I went with Lydia.

V

    H ello, Gwen. This will probably be a brief session, I’m feeling moody and ill at ease today. We’ve only got twelve days to go before our performance of
Woyzeck
, and I fear my actors are still woefully unprepared. I was forced to make some criminally drastic cuts in the script owing to the fact that most of my actors cannot speak. Leon has volunteered to play the role of the Doctor whose psychological experiments drive the beleaguered Woyzeck deeper into madness, and I have convinced Sally—the assistant researcher who works part-time here at the research center on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—to play Marie, the widow whom I, Woyzeck,