Free The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage

the process I inadvertently flung the creature across the room—it struck the wall with a loud
tick
. It was quite dead when I found it in the morning; a large black beetle.
    During the past several months I have moved my bowels once every day with clockwork regularity. I mention this because the ai shits and pisses only once a week—a remarkable achievement for what seems otherwise a rather stupid animal. It does it at the base of its tree. It feeds on leaves and pawpaws. Studying the photos in my book, however, it seems to me its head is too small for its body, and not just because it appears to have no ears. We seem to have here a violation of some sort of universal law of proportions. Curiously, this is something I have thought about myself as well, that my head seems to be less than normal size. Did I never tell you that? I am not the only one to have thought this. At school they called me BB head. My head is, in fact, not exceptionally small, or only slightly smaller than the norm, as I have verified with statistics at my doctor’s. Do you remember it as being smaller than the norm? It only looks that way because my neck is unusually large, and in the absence of contrast the head appears smaller. A simple case of optical illusion. Nevertheless, I’m still self-conscious in this regard—the wounds of childhood never really heal, do they? I prefer winter for that reason, as it permits me to hide my neck in two turns of woolen scarf. Did you ever notice this about me?
    You are thinking, aren’t you, how he does go on? And you are right, for I have not yet disposed of the ai. Perhaps you are not interested. Fortunately for me I can’t discern that from here. Poor Harold, you were always such a wonderful listener. In college I made jokes about the “agricultural engineer” I had for a roommate, amusing my friends with tales of your ineptness and bucolic ignorance, and your comical mispronunciations of unusual words. I still smile when I think how you would accent “plethora” and “amorous” on the second syllable. Marcus Quiller and I used to compete to see which of us could maneuver you into saying one of them in conversation. While in fact just being able to sit on my bed at night, and talk, and have you, in your bed, listen, were among the happiest moments of my college years, the only moments in which I felt I could be myself. I am sorry about the jokes now, perhaps because I have a feeling something similar is happening to me.
    The ai (pronounced “I”) gets its name from the Portuguese in imitation of the whistling sound the baby of the species makes through its nostrils when it fears it has been abandoned by its mother. “Aie,” as you might know, is also the sound a French person makes when slightly wounded, equivalent to the English “ow.” Isn’t it wonderful how even something as natural as a cry of pain requires a listing in the dictionary? I was thinking someone should do a little booklet containing a list of those words from all the languages of the world, An International Dictionary of Pain. I think I’ll do that next. Meanwhile, I have been practicing, and I believe I have learned to do a pretty good imitation of the sloth’s cry. I place my thumbs firmly against the openings of my nostrils, blocking them completely. I then give a vigorous snort and at the same time fling both thumbs away from the nostrils in a decisive forward motion. The result is a woofling whistle which I imagine is quite close to what a young ai must sound like. I did it at the post office the other day when the clerk told me I had insufficient postage on my package. She was a mousy creature, so you can imagine the effect when I flung my thumbs from my nose in her direction and fired that noise at her. I could hear them all buzzing behind me as I was leaving the building. In the future I’ll always use this device when I want to express contempt, though that’s probably not what the baby ai does with it. Do your