Gorilla gorilla gorilla by Sara Hills

When Gladys the gorilla starts to touch herself, I’m in the gorilla house watching Bernice tongue a peach candy into the ball of her cheek. We’re wearing matching pink coats and handing out gorilla-stickered candy, two by two, to the third group of children from Missionary Baptist church. The kids swing their cardboard ark baskets, point at Gladys’ saggy boobs and splayed legs, and laugh. Behind them, Miss Richter sucks in her pruned lips and gasps, stammering, “She’s only scratching, dears. Scratching.”

Miss Richter ushers the kids away, toward the orangutans and macaques, leaving Bernice and me gawping. Bernice, who was ready to read a story about gorillas boarding the ark; me, ready with gorilla facts: like their scientific name, Gorilla gorilla gorilla; how Gladys is almost thirty-two; and my favorite bit about her having fingerprints. Fingerprints which are now rubbing at the furred split between her legs.

There’s a weird tightness to Gladys’ leathered face, her leathered fingers still working, when Bernice says, “I don’t think that’s scratching.”

And for some reason we both sigh.

Bernice balls another candy into the pouch of her cheek, crumples the wrapper, and asks if I knew about her and Jeremy Baer doing it last summer.

I feign surprise and say no, though it’s all I’ve thought about for months, and even though it’s supposed to be a sin, every time I imagine Jeremy and Bernice it changes in my head and becomes me and Bernice, me and Bernice, like it’s changing now, slicking my neck with sweat and making my kneecaps wobble.

I fix my eyes on Gladys and stroke the smooth wool of my pink coat, finding the buttonhole edges with my fingers, and that’s when Gladys stares straight through me. Like she knows.

And my cheeks burn and my heart squeezes and before I can take the words back I ask Bernice if she liked it, liked doing it, doing it with Jeremy Baer.

“I thought it would make me feel different,” she says.

“And did it?” I ask, but Bernice only shrugs.

I pray for her to say it was boring, that it was over fast, that it felt like nothing and shouldn’t it feel like something, like everything? Shouldn’t it? But before Bernice can answer, Gladys rolls back her eyes, slaps the ground with her free hand, and, I swear, all three of us shudder.

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SARA HILLS — Sara is the author of The Evolution of Birds, an award-winning collection of flash fiction. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and journals, including The Best Small Fictions, SmokeLong Quarterly, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Fractured Lit, Cheap Pop, Cease Cows, and elsewhere. Originally from the Sonoran Desert, Sara lives in Warwickshire, UK. Find her online at sarahillswrites.com and @sarahillswrites.bsky.social.

Art by FRANCESCA LEADER — Francesca is a self-taught writer and artist whose images have appeared on the covers of Pithead Chapel, Cobra Milk, the Adanna Literary Review, the Harpy Hybrid Review, and Cream Scene Carnival. Her Cobra Milk cover was nominated for a 2023 Best of the Net award for visual art. Her debut poetry chapbook, “Like Wine or Like Pain,” is available from Bottlecap Press. Learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.