Peripatus: some notes

Before there were mammals,[1] there were these:

David discovers an impression of a soft body captured in mountain geology,

using new methods for uncovering traces of things without skeletons.

In a half-billion years, they move from rock pool to hollow tree. They move,

says James,[2] unusually. He explains, — They don’t have muscles like us,

instead a series of inner chambers between which a fluid is moved.

Perambulation is achieved as each chamber is flooded (and emptied) causing

the lobopods to inflate and deflate.[3] Ends James, — It’s a matter of

hydraulics.

We once kept them in fish tanks filled with leaf litter, says Di. We wrote

questions on waterproof paper. (What temperature is their blood? Do they

have eyelids?) The heart is tubular, like an unfinished balloon animal, and

runs the length of the body. They feel for the tremors of blind crickets, and

lock-on, throwing lassos of slime. We see their teeth through a night vision

lens; imagine kitten claws, pop-out vampire fangs.

Edge of the forest, I see one harvestman nestled against a velvet body, caught

in an old spell.[4] Closer still, the lobopodium inflate and deflate across the

hot skin of my palm and a blob of dragonsbreath is released in complaint.

At night under tree roots we see freezing spiderwebs and the pinprick

embers of glowworms. Oh, a peripatus, says Katie. The name means “walking

orm”. We are silent while she searches for the folklore, but they have none. 

Sunbeams will shrink their bodies, she concludes. I say, — They keep

ancient ways.

[1] Marine, middle-Cambrian: where lived monster starfish and every single ancestor.

[2] —taken with a grain of salt.

[3] Lobopodium: an organ resembling a limb.

[4] The skin is brontosaurus-blue, or rhinoceros-grey, depending on the angle of the eye.

Kerry Donovan Brown

Kerry Donovan Brown is a Wellington-based writer. The night he was born he was taken from his mother and put in an incubator. Celine walked in her sleep across the ward, searching bedside cupboards and dressing gown pockets for some imagined missing thing. Kerry’s first novel, Lamplighter, was published by VUP in 2014.