The Ape Man's Brother by Joe R. Lansdale

I t begins with The Big Guy.
    The Big Guy, truth to tell, had few friends. There were some humans he liked, and many he tolerated. A few he killed. His true friends were that lovely woman, and me, who they came to call by a fictional name because of all those stupid movies. I’ll not even repeat that name here. The whole thing makes me angry. The way I’m presented in the films, doing all those little tricks and throwing my feces—they didn’t show that in the movie, and it never directly appeared in the books, but it’s commonly known chimpanzees haven’t any pause about filling their hands with their own mess and throwing it. Well, yes. I did it too. But that was when I was uncivilized. I have learned how to act, so that no longer applies to me.
    I guess there’s a little jealously there, that damn ape stealing my thunder. But let me get back to what I was saying, and let me start with how I came to know The Big Guy. Forgive me if I trail off from time to time. I’m healthy, and all my external equipment still works, but my mind, though good, has many alleys, some of them blind, so I apologize in advance. Now, having come to a dead end in this alley, I’m turning about and coming back, looking for the light.
    Let me start by saying I was there when the plane went down. Some accounts say it was a great sailing ship and that it crashed on a faraway shore, or that it was taken over by pirates, or that the child and his family were set adrift in a small boat.
    All of these versions are false. These storytellers, these experts, also place events farther back in time as to when they really happened. This is partly so the Big Guy, as I call him, can be seen as ancient as Methuselah, but with muscles; a hero of folklore, not reality.
    But, it wasn’t a boat, and it wasn’t a ship, and there were no pirates. It was a plane crash. We had never seen a plane, me and my tribe, and we had no idea that it had flown in from Greenland.
    It looked like a great dragonfly falling out of the sky, buzzing and coughing and churning smoke, soon to explode. I know now, these many years later, that it was a small plane and it carried a husband and wife and baby. The parents were archeologists, scouting what they believed to be abandoned ancient ruins in the jungle of a lost, walled-in world.
    They were right and they were wrong. The ruins were not abandoned. They were our home and had been the home of our ancestors for many years. Some of our culture had been lost, and the jungle had crept around the stones and swallowed them up and mossed them green. Our great scroll books had turned to dust. Our history was by then nothing but rocks, some scratches in the dirt, some huts, fuzzy memories passed on carelessly from the old to the young. Bottom line, we were pretty ignorant and there was a flea problem.
    There were lots of reasons for our decline. No doubt we had fallen back into ignorance due to disease and human sacrifice. That sort of activity cuts down on the population. Offered sex organs were popular. Cut those buddies out and lay them on a sacrificial stone, set them on fire, and everyone thought the rain was coming.
    But there was no rain for a long time, and there weren’t enough private parts to go around for sacrifice, and by the time it was decided the gods weren’t listening, or that perhaps they didn’t have quite the taste for privates as were first assumed, half the population’s genitals had gone up in smoke, and therefore half the population.
    Our folk started disappearing into the jungle to stay attached to their equipment, and finally the sacrifice thing died out, and then the priest died out, and pretty soon we were eating bugs off trees and digging for grubs and trolling for anything edible that didn’t eat us first.
    Anyway, a lot of wing-dang-doodles were saved and we lost our faith in gods, which, though we were a primitive lot, put us way ahead of most everyone else in the world.

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