• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2372 0

our common ancestor: they gained language and lost their hair. In becoming human, I realized that I was faced with the daunting task of reenacting about five million years of parallel evolution, all by my little self. I had gained language, check, but now I began to want a physiognomy that was closer to human. It wasn’t just that altering my physical appearance made me more attractive—though it certainly did—but that I was disgusted with myself. Humans: I wanted to be one of them, and I simultaneously hated myself for this dirty disgusting perverted desire. I couldn’t go back to the zoo. I couldn’t go back to being a chimp, not after everything I had learned. I was between species. I still am. I don’t feel at home in either genus, Homo or Pan.

My body looked ugly, so goddamn ugly. I hated my face. I hated my nose. I hated my fingers. I hated my toes. I hated my long arms. I hated my stubby, ridiculous legs. I hated my grotesque feet. And now most of all I hated these sickly-looking, uneven patches in my once-thick coat of fur. I decided to simply get rid of it, to mow the field. To cover up my unsightly hair loss, one evening I shaved off all of my body hair. I was alone when I did it. I found a canister of shaving cream in the cabinet under the bathroom sink—the kind that squirts out a jet of green ooze that becomes thick foam when one agitates its molecules by rubbing it against the skin. I stood naked in the bathtub, sopping wet, and squirted this stuff into my remaining fur and lathered it in. Then I took the razor—all this equipment was Lydia’s—and, swishing it between strokes in the lukewarm bathwater I stood in, I scraped off all my hair, except for the few areas in which humans are hirsute: the top of the head, the underarms and the neat corona haloing the genitals. This was an adorable but futile gesture, for these four remaining patches of hair soon afterward also fell out. I had learned how to shave from watching Lydia shave her legs in the shower, a ritual I had observed hundreds of times. I wasn’t accustomed to using a razor. In the medicine cabinet I had found a package of plastic disposable razors, and I ruined every one of them during my full-body shave, nicking myself so frequently in the process that it seemed a gallon of my blood trickled out of me to swirl sickeningly red-brown in the water below. I had so much hair all over me that it took six or seven passes to get down to the skin. This is one instance in which having these long, flexible arms was a tremendous help, as I needed no assistance to reach my back. The shaving took an hour to complete. I depleted the entire can of shaving cream in the process. When I drained the water, the bathtub was coated an inch thick all around with a sodden carpet of soapy, bloody chimp hair. Imagine how it smelled. I scooped it up in sopping handfuls and dumped it all in the toilet, flushing repeatedly until it was gone, all gone, and then showered off all the residual hairs still clinging to my skin. When I was finished, I presented me to myself in the mirror. I scrambled onto the bathroom counter and clung to the rims of the sink by my opposable toes, to look at the full length of my naked and newly hairless body in the harshness of the four incandescent bulbs above the bathroom mirror. I stood inches away from the cool silver glass. I liked the way I looked. The novelty of this moment—the autoerotic thrill. In the next room I heard Lydia shift in bed and mumble something in her sleep. I caressed myself, sensuously smoothing my arms up and down my hairless torso. It wasn’t just the feeling—the newfound tingling hypersensitivity all over my body, the visible prickles of gooseflesh—it was also that I had never before looked so achingly human. I gazed into the mirror. What gazed back at me was no longer recognizably Bruno the chimp. In that reflection was undeniably a person, after a fashion. His legs had thickened out considerably with the years of exercise they’d been getting from all his bipedal walking. He stood on two feet, and rigidly upright—this creature no