Julia Elliott - The Wilds

“I guess we literally dig in,” says the tax attorney.

She reaches out, claws at the pork with her manicured talons, and pops a strand into her mouth.

“Oh, it’s very tender,” she murmurs, licking her fingers.

We go at it, at first politely, avoiding each other’s paws as we pick meat from the carcass. But then, ten minutes in, something about the flickering torches, the throbbing percussion, the wine that tastes of summer forests, something about the rich, fatty taste of the shoat helps us relax. Soon we are tipsy, laughing. Soon we are ripping off hunks of meat and stuffing them into our maws. Soon we are talking with our mouths open, sharing anecdotes, heedless of the grease dripping down our chins.

I am Vogmar, daughter of the Blackboar Clan, supping under the moon. Jeff is Bogwag, son of the Shaggy Bear People, tittering and mock-growling. The periodontist howls like a wolf, showing off his transplanted gums. The tax attorney sloughs her sequined cocktail dress hesitantly, revealing the cavewoman garb beneath.

“Didn’t have the guts to wear this out, but now I’m drunk.”

Everybody laughs.

“You go, girl,” says the belly dancer, who is already sporting her standard-issue fur bikini. They high-five. We all hoot and roar. I am Vogmar, daughter of the Blackboar Clan, tossing bones into the shadows. I am Vogmar, huntress and medicine woman, studying the messages of the stars. I am Vogmar, slurping wild wine and feeling uncomfortable as Sexgoth, the belly dancer, begins to undulate under the moon and Bogwag of the Shaggy Bear People growls his approval. I am Vogmar, feeling pudgy and bloated despite the fact that I have not consumed a single carb since my arrival. I try to think of something clever to say to Bogwag, but he’s chatting up the nearly naked tax attorney.

“I’m here to vanquish this paunch,” she says, pointing at the barely perceptible mound of her belly.

“What paunch?” says Bogwag, who actually pokes her stomach with his finger.

“Bless your heart,” says the tax attorney, flashing a mouthful of perfect, predatory teeth.

The djembe troupe, clearly drunk, is trying to play the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

“Groovy,” says Bogwag, smiling at the tax attorney. He bobs his shaggy head to the beat.

The night deepens. The moon spills its primordial silver. Whispered rumors flit around the table: moon worship, pagan sex cults, animal sacrifices, and roving bands of actors impersonating cannibalistic Neanderthals. The belly dancer claims she’s already spotted the Neanderthals, staring intensely at her from a patch of jungle beyond the swimming pool.

“For real?” says the tax attorney, sounding like an adolescent. She stands up, slinks over to the bonfire, and Bogwag trots after her.

I hear my phone buzzing persistently in my purse. It’s my fiancé, but I don’t pick up. I picture him hunched in his office, bathed in sickly computer light. Perhaps my absence has prodded him out of his chair for a walk around the block. Perhaps he has emerged from what I call his “hibernation,” which started a year ago when he began doing search-engine optimization work at home. I picture him standing stunned on our weedy lawn, blinking at the sun like a prairie vole. One tipsy evening last spring, I’d joked that he was agoraphobic. He kept running toward the edge of our yard, pretending to strike an invisible force field, falling on his butt and laughing. Finally, snarling, he broke through. He turned toward me like a hero in a dystopian film, arm extended. Holding hands, we ran off to a neighborhood bar to get wasted. But under a trellis entwined with Confederate jasmine and strings of Christmas lights, he kept looking at his phone.

“What, exactly, do you keep checking?” I tried to smile.

“The usual.” He made a point of turning his phone off, tucking it away. “E-mails from clients. Various accounts.”

Clouds floated across the pocked face of the moon. My fiance’s hand crept across the table like a tarantula toward his phone. He did not turn it on, but he could not refrain from touching it.

Imagining him at home now, compulsively checking his phone for a sign of life from me, I’m tempted to text him. But I don’t. I scroll through pics on my iPhone, flashing backward through time into our courtship phase, his image multiplying into a swarm of smiling, impish men — and there he is on our first date, eyes alight, lips whispering wry comments about the ridiculous paintings of naked game-show hosts at the art show we’d attended. Comparing Pat Sajak to a “startled marsupial,” he made me laugh, softening me up for our first kiss, his lips full and feminine and tasting mysteriously of figs.

The next morning at the Primitive Technology Workshop, Jeff is sitting by himself. The tax attorney is also there, at another table, chatting up some handsome triathlon type in clownish fitness apparel.

“Birds of a feather,” says Jeff, glancing mournfully in her direction. I sit down next to him.

At the front of the room, Ghunthag, a disgraced anthropologist rumored to have been arrested in the seventies for smuggling opium in a dead gorilla’s chest, demonstrates the Levalloisian flint-chiseling technique. Dressed in a deerskin tunic and Birkenstocks, he shows us how to produce a tortoise-shaped spear tip. He compares this particular tip type to the Clovis point, discusses the nuances of the Susquehanna projectile point, and then lets us go at it — twelve cranky, caffeine-deprived wretches, pounding at flint chunks with crude stone chisels. Sipping from a ceramic mug, Ghunthag strolls among us, offering tips and pointers on tips and pointers and making bad puns.

“What do you think he’s drinking?” I whisper.

“Green tea,” says Jeff. “The fucking hippie.”

“I would kill for a caffeinated beverage.”

“But would you steal for it?” Jeff points at something he has hidden under the table: Ghuntag’s thermos, glimmering and mermaid-green.

“Want to blow this joint?” says Jeff.

“Hell yes.”

As Ghunthag shows the class how to bind a flint point to a spear with deer sinew, Jeff and I slip out and hightail it toward the woods with our contraband tea. Laughing like hoodlums, we plunk down in a wild olive grove.

We open the thermos, sigh as steam purls out. Kneeling reverently, we take a long, luxuriant sniff.

We pour tea into the thermos top. Pass it between us. Sip.

We relish this brew of civilization, nectar of gods, exquisite perfume of the Orient. We perk up. The sky is the blue of flame. Purple olives glow in the branches above us. Wildflowers waver in the breeze, and two yellow butterflies zigzag amid the beauty.

Bogwag of the Shaggy Bear People reclines on his side. His Art Zoyd T-shirt gapes. I try not to look at his belly fur, so bearish and frank compared to the smooth, coy abdomen of my fiancé. I most definitely avoid the moist bundle of his genitals, which rests against his sunburned thigh. I keep my eyes fixed on the sky, the branches, the dangling fruits.

I think I hear Bogwag grunt.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“Nothing. Oh, shit. What the hell?”

Bogwag leaps into a crouching position, points toward a cluster of brambles. I stand up. Some kind of redheaded, ridge-browed, ape-thing is peering at us through thorny vegetation. Now I see three ape-things mumbling behind the brambles.

“Agbagaba,” says one of them. It leaps forward, hunched and frizzy, spear in hand. And then a dozen of these creatures crawl from the bush, closing in on us.

“Fake Neanderthals,” whispers Jeff. “Actors. No worries.”

“Still kind of creepy. Like those cannibalistic hominids in Quest for Fire .”