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Chapter eight: Jane falls into the first memory of an Australopithecus

from The library of Jane Goodall by Federico Delfrati

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Before counting the last dot, she notes that the breeze has stopped. “Ups”, she thinks.
She touches the last eye and draws the last mark on her notebook’s second page.

The moment she closes the book, the eye blinks but doesn’t disappear. It grows instead, very fast, reaching enormous proportions in a fraction of a second. It wraps her with a silently deafening scream and becomes so big that she falls inside its pupil, attracted by the gravitational pull of the gigantic object. So heavy, crushing upon its own nuclear solitude without any trace of air keeping it in relative balance with the others. There are no others anymore. Each dot, each memory, counted on the presence of its neighbor to sustain its perfectly circular motion. A chain of reminiscences now completely disrupted by her straightforward and categorical analysis.
She holds fast on her precious notes while free falling inside the pitch black core of the very first explicit thought. “Whomever this first memory belongs to, it must have had macroscopic implications on what came after”, she thinks. “It’s too big, it’s too intense”, she manages to write in free fall while losing pages.
It’s a silent fall. No air is there to transmit sound. She starts to feel crushed by the gravitational intensity of the object. It doesn’t feel unpleasant though: more like emotional intensity.
“Emotional gravity”, she labels it.
And the moment she begins to think that this state could go on forever, something very small and grey appears in the distance and approaches her at a considerable speed.
She blinks repeatedly to focus on it. The grey thing looks like a circle, no it’s a sphere, no it’s an irregular sphere and it’s not completely grey either. It casts shadows on its surface. It has a surface. It has lines, scratches, bulks, it’s getting bigger. It’s a stone. It’s a big stone. It’s a massive stone. Oh, it’s a planet! It’s a planet. It has an atmosphere and she’s falling through its clouds. She sees better now: continents, mountain ranges, pole caps, oceans. She falls. She falls. She begins to hear herself screaming as the air fills the vacuum.

She is about to be a few kilometers away from the ground now. Turning her head backwards she notices that the eye she fell into, closed itself behind her. What was black nothingness of unknown and nearly unbearable emotional intensity, slowly begins to look like a rocky landscape under a blue sky.
Her fall slows down and she knew that somehow it wouldn’t harm her. With exquisite scientific delicacy she calculates where she’s going to land and sketches it in her notebook at the bottom of the first page.
She then touches the ground where she thought she would.

Herons fly backwards above her head. Rocks of all dimensions and shapes lay everywhere else.
Nothing else moves.

And then on her left, fast, agile, zigzagging, two figures, one clearly chasing the other.
She blinks, there’s no time to lose. She runs after them.

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from The library of Jane Goodall, released October 25, 2022

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