'Solidarity' by Lisa Ferranti

The woman nurses her baby on a bench in the zoo’s rain forest. In front of her, a mama orangutan paces behind glass, a baby clinging to her chest, too, leathery knuckles scraping the faux jungle floor.

The woman observes the orangutans’ habitat. Burlap sacks, bunches of leaves, bowl of browned bananas. It resembles the disarray she left behind that morning. At her house, Cheerios on linoleum, spit-upon onesies, parenting books flagged with sticky notes. No matter how many she reads, it can’t make up for her missing mom gene.  

The mama orangutan sits down in front of her, baby still attached. She stares into the hairy mama’s droopy brown eyes. Maybe if she looks long enough, she’ll get the answers she’s seeking, all of motherhood’s secrets.

Her baby stirs, disengages himself with a loud smack of lips, his eyes drooping. She lies him in his stroller, and he quickly falls asleep. Where was this baby last night? He half smiles, a dimple indenting his right cheek. She would eat fire for this kid. Heave herself in front of stampeding wildebeest. One minute she would, really. And the next, she fantasizes about abandoning him at the orangutan exhibit. Would the mama in front of her raise him as her own?

The orangutan sets her baby down in a pile of leaves and slowly reaches alien fingers toward the glass, continuing her steady stare. The other mother stretches her hand out, slowly, so as not to startle, and their fingers meet on opposite sides of glass. The mothers look into one another’s eyes, and the human mother, feeling somehow not so distant from the orangutan mother, holds her gaze, an invisible line connecting them, a solidarity, as if both are saying, I know, right?