CHIMPO’S HOLY THOUGHT

Chimpo again, and he gets a bright idea.

In days that have been forgotten for so long that they might never have existed (and you might add probably didn’t) there was a little bit of adjustment to the DNA of life that Chimpo’s people sort of were created and one of them subsequently evolved to become … Chimpo.

And Chimpo himself was part of that evolution in that he got to asking the sort of questions that nobody’s answered successfully in the several million years since then.

Because he asked where he came from. Where the gruff old twosome who called themselves his parents came from. Where Kunny, the love of his life and bearer of his own offspring, came from. Where the mighty Bossmonk with his retinue of pert little slaves who clung like limpets to his dangle came from. Where the trees of the forest (and the world, it seemed, was mostly forest back then) came from.

And, he asked himself, what were the stars. Those lights that sparkled and twinkled at night. That might have lit the way to his privy safely distant from his nest had they been just a little bit brighter. What were they and more importantly how did they work and where did they come from? He could do with one of his own some nights when the brats were squawking and Kunny was stressed out and maintaining in her guttural grunting voice that he was to blame for everything. He could have taken himself, holding his own personal star aloft, and found a maiden to deflower. He loved deflowering maidens even when they were ugly. After all, he told himself, there’s no call for looking at faces.

There was one thing that Chimpo was particularly unique at and that was the processes involved in abstract thought. He’d discovered it and found that forming a conclusion from different observable things led him quite often to concluding the existence of a third that he couldn't actually see, and then, miracle of miracles, he discovered it. It hadn’t existed. He’d imagined that it did and hey presto, there it was! Like when he’d come upon a squidgy brown mess in a foetid heap, one that stank of something truly acrid and was steaming unpleasantly, and then proceeded to observe a huge creature with a nose to be proud of gnawing at the bones of something long deceased, and concluded that consuming matter from dead bones caused the long-nosed creature (as yet unnamed) to develop foulness in its body, foulness that found its dreadful way out into the fresh air via its bottom. And the discovery of that connection had sent him scuttling back to Kunny in order to warn her about eating long dead bones. It was then, incidentally, when his guttural grunting language first used a version of the word s**t.

But back to his yearning for a personal star of his own and its potential when it came to deflowering.

There was, it so happened Clacker who dwelt not a hundred paces away from his own nest, and Kunny was up to her old tricks, nagging him because they had three offspring by then and the male one was constantly being objectionable and needed the firm hand of its father, and Chimpo remembered the firm hand of his own father and decided that there might be another way of controlling the uncontrollable without the use of firm hands.

“Better go and find him then!” snapped Chimpo irritably and rather cruelly, and he stomped out into he black world outside the nest. Once there he decided he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face let alone trace the hundred or so steps to Clacker’s nest, and tempt her out, away from her parents who were famous for the way they protected their daughter with fits of violent rage if they suspected anyone in the neighbourhood was in a deflowering mood.

So he sat on a cold stone and pondered on his other thoughts, involving the damned stars.

What were they? They shone in the skies (though not tonight, which was a shame) but were truly tiny. Were they dead fireflies And why were there so many of them? Did fireflies do a great deal of dying? And once dead, do they spend eternity high above his head and above the clouds? He knew they were above the clouds because when there were clouds about there didn’t seem to be many stars. Sometimes there weren’t any at all.

Then he had a brilliant idea.

Here he was urgently requiring a star of his own to cast its own beautiful light on the lovely Clacker and her body which, he suspected, was badly in need of deflowering, and if he had one shining with him all would be well with the world. And he can’t have been alone with such a requirement, could he? All males would happily spend their entire lives of nights deflowering maidens if only they could see their way to them.

There must, he decided, be a place high above his head in which others like himself needed light when they went about their sleazy nocturnal adventures. Maybe above the clouds, far, far above the clouds where the moon had its kingdom, there was special place where such creatures dwelt.

He could picture them, these creatures like and yet not like himself. Their land was fresh air, yet they could walk on it as they carried their personal stars with them, going from ethereal nest to ethereal nest doing a great deal of deflowering as they went.

The very thought excited him and he squirmed where he sat.

They were there all right. He’d seen their lights, so he concluded there must be someone for whom the lights glowed. Or not just someone but loads and loads of someones. It stood to sense. Lights wouldn’t shine for nothing, would they? And dead fireflies couldn’t be the answer, could it?

And, unlike himself, they had a strange power because when he jumped he fell back to the ground but they floated up there, and didn’t. Why, once he’d climbed a tall tree in order to see how high he could climb and he fell out. His leg, the one he’d crushed when he landed, had hurt for more than one turning of the moon. And even when it stopped hurting it had showed signs of a strange twisted deformity. But the star people didn’t fall, did they?

Maybe they drifted down like gossamer threads on a summer breeze. Maybe the gossamer threads were part of them. Maybe, when darkness fell, they returned to their lands high in the sky. He’d never seen gossamer threads at night, had he?

Maybe they ruled everything in their own magical way. Maybe some of them commanded the trees, others ordered the rivers and streams, some of them even causing him to deflower Clacker and all the other fillies in the tribe for some secret reason of their own, making it not his fault if he got caught.

Yes, that was it!

The world, that until that moment had seemed disordered, suddenly had order in it. And he knew what that order was.

He returned to Kunny, a beam on his face, though she couldn’t see it in the darkness.

“I have it,” he said in his odd guttural language, with many a clank and click along the way. “There are gods, powerful ruling gods, and I know where they are!”

© Peter Rogerson 27.10.19