Mug
The inside and the handle of this aye-aye mug are black, the same black as the beanie Stan wears pulled down to his ears. Stan is one of the characters in my Animal Kinhood series: a nineteen-year-old aye-aye with a pale face and two enormous amber eyes.
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.
At sixteen he bought the beanie at a bale-clothes stall in the Andapa market, down in the lower part, where his sister Fanja sews and sells. He asked her to embroider a small skull on the front. Fanja stitched it that same afternoon with the white thread from her machine, and she did not ask him why he wanted a skull. Since then the beanie goes out with him every day, in the flowering season and out of it.
In the scalding season, with the boilers lit and the water at a rolling boil, the soda splits his knuckles open. He only ever shows Fanja, who gives him something from the pharmacy and makes no comment. When somebody asks about something he does not intend to explain, he answers short and without looking up: "It is just that I get nervous, that is all." And he gets on with the next chest. A note on the real aye-aye: in 2019 a tiny pseudo-thumb was described under the skin of its wrist, a small bone with its own fingerprint.
