Backpack
This aye-aye backpack carries the portrait of Stan against the celadon green of the background, with a band in his three colors. Stan is nineteen, with enormous amber eyes and a black beanie with a small white skull embroidered on the front, and he is one of the characters in my Animal Kinhood series.
Foto: Rafael Peier (@rafaelpeier) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Daubentonia madagascariensis
Put it under Solofo's name, I was slow today.
Lowland tropical rainforest along the east coast of Madagascar and dry deciduous forest in the west and northwest, in a distribution fragmented into pockets: Masoala, Nosy Mangabe, Mananara Nord —where Aye-Aye Island, or Île Roger, works as a semi-wild sanctuary—, Daraina in the far north, and populations further south such as Ranomafana. It is endemic to Madagascar and lives nowhere else.
The skull on the front reads before the face does: white, small, in the middle of the black wool, with the big dark ears outside the beanie, at the sides. And there is one sentence Stan repeats without changing a word: "Nobody touches the beanie." He says it as a joke and it is not entirely one. Nobody has touched it twice. He has worn it pulled down to his ears since he was sixteen and has not reconsidered the matter.
The studs on the shoulders did not come with the jacket. The jacket reached him secondhand, stiff, with one sleeve scuffed, and he drove the studs in one at a time, backs on the inside, with a borrowed pair of pliers. The sleeve is still scuffed. One thing worth knowing about the aye-aye does not come across in the portrait: each one keeps five or six alternate nests inside its territory, spheres of branches and leaves twenty meters off the ground, and it almost never sleeps two nights running in the same one.
