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Consider the Lima, written and read by Catherine Rundle.

It is probably best not to take advice direct and unfiltered from the animal kingdom.

But lemurs are, I think, an exception.

They live in matriarchal troops with an alpha female at their head. When ring-tailed

lemurs are cold or frightened, or when they want to bond, they group together in a furry mass known as a

lemur ball, forming a black and white sphere that ranges in size from a football to a bicycle wheel.

They intertwine their tails and paws

and press against one another's walnut-sized swiftly beating hearts.

To see it feels like an injunction of sorts,

to find a lemur ball of one's own.

The first lemur I ever met was a female,

and she tried to bite me, which was fair, because

I was trying to touch her, and humans have done nothing to recommend themselves to lemurs.

She was an injury, Lima, living in a wildlife sanctuary outside Antanarivo.

She had an infant, which was riding not on her front like a baby monkey, but on her back

like a miniature Lester

Piggott. She had wide yellow eyes. William Burrows, in his lemur-centric, eco-serrealist

novella, ghost of chance, described the eyes of a lemur as, changing colour with shifts of the light,

obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond.

The stare of this, Indry, resembled that of a young man at a nightclub who urgently

wishes to tell you about his belief system. But her fur was the softest thing I have ever touched.

...