But there is a patch of barren ground at the very heart of the forest. The ground is cold and hard, like icy rock. No plants cling to it, and animals instinctively avoid it.

That is, all except a small, black gorilla, who squats at the very center of this strange, bald patch. The gorilla wears a grimace and makes soft hooting noises to himself. His fingers make abstract patterns on the hard ground, trailing through the hard dirt like old crayons on paper. From time to time, his grimace melts into a glower, directed everywhere and nowhere.

No human being has ever seen this gorilla, yet somehow he is known in certain esoteric circles. Indeed, he is known quite well, and has been for many centuries, dating back to the discovery of a fragmented clay tablet buried in the once fertile land of Mesopotamia.

The cuneiform covering the fragments of this tablet, if it has been pieced together correctly, tells a strange story.

The story begins with a prideful young gorilla, so enamored of his virile masculinity that he spent all of his waking hours copulating. This would have been bad enough if he had contained his activities to the simian realm, but he overstepped his boundaries and soon small marsupials, tree sloths, and even appropriately shaped trees felt his amorous embrace.

This angered the gods, especially when the forest began to fill up with the offspring of these unnatural unions. Simians with pockets like kangaroos; branchy, treelike apes launching their monstrous, spindly forms through the forest canopy; and strange, hairless little creatures who stood upright like trees, but with much less grace. These last creatures were the final straw, as they grew numerous and had voracious appetites, consuming plant and animal alike.

The gods were confused at first. They were at a loss to explain the origin of these creatures, or at least until they came upon the randy gorilla mating with one of the secretive giant earthworms that only come out on moonless nights. The gods were amazed that such a union would bear fruit, and quickly came to realize that their creation plan had a few glaring errors. They could no longer control or predict what kind of creatures roamed the forest.

The gods met and conferred long into the night, and through the next several hundred nights as well.

During this time, the new creatures discovered how to efficiently utilize opposable thumbs, how to shape their vocalizations into speech, and, more alarmingly, how to make fire, which up until that time had been a closely guarded secret.

The gods had to interrupt their meeting in order to extinguish several roaring blazes. During this time, as they rushed about feeling most undignified, getting soot under their celestial fingernails, they came to a mutual conclusion that the gorilla must be punished.

They interrupted him in the act of sodomizing a parrot. He protested loudly, but soon grew quiet under the withering stare of the gods.

After a short, unfair trial, they sentenced him to remain immobile at the center of the forest until the damage he had wrought had been repaired. They left him no hints as to how it could be undone.

It took the gorilla centuries to fully realize his mental powers. He started killing the forest at a rate of an inch every hundred years after that, focusing on the ground and willing it into barrenness, like the salted lands of Carthage.

At this rate, he had a long, long way to go before his now teeming descendants felt the sting of his millennia-honed powers.
J4b(3)