1

I don’t know if Sunyi was her name, the word in Indonesian for solitary, but I do remember it started with an s. She was a skinny orangutan who was stuck on a piece of land when the black river rose in Kalimantan, in the jungle where we researched her kind with Birute, the Jane Goodall of that lesser known ape. Birute didn’t want to rescue Sunyi right away because she was the worst thief of them all, stealing our clothes and stringing them from trees. We needed a break from her antics. After a week Sunyi ran out of fruit, the river sank, she came back, and she grabbed my hand on the pier as I fed her pineapple. She placed my hand on her forehead and made the sound of weeping. Sunyi, I realized, had been lonely.

2

Orangutans are known to be the solitary apes. When you try to teach them sign language, they throw down your hands and shake their heads. But Sunyi was like me. I steal from lives while I eavesdrop in hot tubs and scribble conversations in my lonely office. I caress, I sex, I decorate trees, I grasp hands of lovers I later throw down. I am not orange like fruit but the color of rust—the wearing away of self from loneliness or another’s needs, chapped tits and empty days all tangled up in the paradox of my life.

3

Rusty bodies in my western world are train cars covered in graffiti, their plaintive whistles both lulling me to sleep and keeping me up. I had a mother who did the same, a father who did nothing but gave me a reason for her lullabies. I wonder if Sunyi slept on that fruit tree as she slowly denuded it of its lonely promise. I remember the feeling of her hand, how thick her dark skin, calloused from climbing, rough against mine, her brown eyes meeting mine like dark paint spattered on a journey I had taken to find her and a journey I would take to leave her, alone in that jungle and rescued not by humanity, not by anything other than the vicissitudes of time and the way everything sinks like a head into a pillow, again and again, so we can walk, hungry, across a bridge to shore.

Kika Dorsey

is an author in Boulder, Colorado. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and her books include the novel As Joan Approaches Infinity (Gesture Press, 2023), and the poetry collections Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010); Rust (2016) and Coming Up for Air (2018), both from Word Tech Editions; and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), winner of the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection. Her poems and stories have been published in Freshwater, The Columbia Review, The Comstock Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and numerous other journals and books. Her work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net.

Ms. Dorsey is currently a lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.

Author’s website: http://kikadorsey.com