Unrequited Love: Man’s Oldest Story

Unrequited Love: Man’s Oldest Story

If words could not describe the way that Terg felt for Mep, only part of that was due to the fact that his limited cerebral cortex and stiff, underdeveloped larynx rendered he and his entire genus capable of only ~25 monosyllabic utterances, which can only generously be called words.

If words would have served him better, perhaps he would have liked to describe Mep as “a lady with facial hair finer than that from the underbelly of a newborn cimexomys”, or, as a femme “with hips that make a Neanderthal so hot he could send the next iterative Ice Age back another 10,000 years.”

But Terg didn’t say these things. He didn’t “say” anything to Mep. In fact, he never uttered any of the ~25 monosyllables that one can only generously call words to anyone he knew. He was too ashamed.

No one really said anything to Terg, either. Certainly none of the men. Not when Terg had that pathetic bum arm that hooked outward as if had had been screwed into his shoulder wrong.

Even the nice, stupid males of the group would periodically ambush him and hold him down to hammer his arm right with their fists —or worse, one time with a small slab of rock. After all, they thought beneficently, what Neanderthal man couldn’t hunt? Terg didn’t understand that they were trying to help in their own way. But Terg didn’t even understand himself why his arm was the way it was. He didn’t even really have the capability to ask. He was defective, and it just was how it was.

Terg would have been a goner, if it weren’t for the leader of the tribe, Ung, Mep’s father. He was the one who found Terg, with his arm badly broken—hooked like it still is—along with patches of thorns nettled in deep gashes along his bare furry back. When Ung approached the mewing foundling, he unsheathed a sickle shaped saber tooth from his baggy grey furs. Ung knew he needed to kill the foundling and bury it, in case a predator from along the ridge had picked up the scent of it or its parents. Ung knew this especially well, because he had had to bury a bawling infant last week. His nephew, in fact. (Although it should be noted that ofr most Neanderthals tribal affinity supersedes a familial relation as distant as uncle-nephew.)

But this baby wasn’t bawling like his nephew was. He was whimpering. Cowering, before Ung had even approached it. His eyes looking away, and his little mutts pawing at the air like an upended turtle. As if he knew what was coming—knew what the white sickle against the coal black sky meant for him.

But Ung couldn’t do it. Or he didn’t. Whichever—he was the leader of his tribe, so it didn’t matter whether it was a “want” or a “can’t”. Ung gathered the foundling in and handed him off back at the site to his nubile young mate, who was already nursing their own young one, Mep. Ung pointed at the furry new foundling he had stuffed under his mate’s armpit. “Terg”, he declared.

While at the time, ‘Terg’ meant something like luck, opportunity, and imminence, given the fluid morphology of their prehistoric tribal linguistic structure, Terg came to mean a “bad surprise”, or “shit”, giving it the distinction of being the first formalized curse word to enter any spoken language. This meaning was so engrained that by the time Terg was a young adult, even Ung had stopped feeling remorse when he cursed out loud, “TERG”.

Perhaps because of this, before Terg had even reached speaking age, he developed a sworn hatred of language and communication. But it’s hard to totally attribute his muteness to this, because it’s not like he would have been the most social cat around the cave, even if his name weren’t synonymous with shit.

The only one who didn’t use Terg’s name whenever they snapped their sharpening tooth or discovered their portion of meat was luridly infected was Mep. All he could do to thank her was stare at her while they both strung together their allotment of tanned boar leathers, while the men—the real men—were out hunting. Mep reciprocated the silence. Terg took this as a sign of kindness. For this, Terg was grateful beyond words.

As the only pre adolescent female in a tribe with a half dozen other Neanderthal young males, Mep was quiet by necessity. Even from a young age, when the boys begun to gouge each others eyes out for the opportunity to rub their loins on her, Mep learned it was just safer for herself as well as the tribe as a whole if she didn’t play any favorites. When the boys grew old enough to swing clubs serious enough to crack femurs, Mep learned not to look at any male. Ever.

Not until it was her time, at least. No one told Mep about this part, but she knew, having helped fasten extra hide to her parent’s bed furs how she would know her time.

When her time came and she awoke in the morning for the first blood between her legs, she gathered her sleeping furs up in a fright. She had to wash them in the river, before anyone else saw. Her eyes darted around the cave, wherein the pre dawn halflight crept intrusively. Fortunately, the other young males’ sleeping spaces had been moved to the other side of the cave, because Mep found it difficult to sleep while the cave boys around her humped the ground all night, grunting her name. But even from here, she saw their bellies heaving up and down, up and down. As she was up against the cave’s dark wall, the only sleeping space next to her belonged to Terg. Suddenly, she realized she was looking at the patch of wet stone where he should have been lying down. He wasn’t there; instead, he standing beside her, staring right down at her red sleeping furs that Mep had balled in her hands.

Terg looked at Mep, with her large white eyes hopelessly floating around her dark rimmed sockets. Mep stared back at Terg, pleading to him without speaking. Silence. Mep was horrified, desperate. Terg was delighted. Mep was to be a woman, he must have thought, and by what she was telling him with her silence, she was to be his woman. For the first time in his life, he wanted to open up his larynx and speak.

            One would think that given the limited verbal abilities as well as expectations of cavemen, that what any caveman could say immediately before attempting to engage a cave woman sexually couldn’t possibly be as utterly pathetic and stupid as what contemporary homo sapiens say. But somehow, in a matter of two or three stifled grunts, Terg asked under his breath, before leaning in for what he hoped to be his first “kiss”, something to the effect of, “I must leave to poop” and “will you be eating this?”

Needless to say, Mep did not feel like reciprocating the kiss, but to shut the fellow up from speaking any more, she pressed her lips against his, only to push him away and dart out the cave.

As Terg looked out upon his unrequited lover, who had quickly become a disappearing figure over the dewy morning ridge, Terg spoke deliberately for the second time in his memory and in the past five seconds.

“Blerg, Terg,” he said, which roughly translates to either “Terg wants”, or “wanting is shit”.