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It Made Me Believe In, I Don’t Know, Life
by Alice Scornajenghi
FICTION | APR 2 2026
Translated from the original Italian by Dante Silva.
When we arrive at the colony, we’re welcomed by an assortment of odors, acidic and nauseating, from the plums that have fallen. There are flies, midges, whatever, and still I find it comfortable.
The orchard feels romantic; it creates a sense of peace in me. I approach a tree and pick a plum, but before eating it, I turn to see what the panda does. The panda, wearing a peach-colored costume (which he does to disguise himself as a human), encourages me.
T. Flynn
While I eat the plum, which is delicious, I look for someone, something in the orchard. I see a rectangular construction, and on it, lying in the sun, I see naked people. People, I’m sure. Who knows what these people are like? Who knows what language these people speak? My heart starts to pound; I haven’t seen a human in ages. It’s as if there’s something running around inside of me, and I’m not sure whether I want to faint or to start running myself.
“Hello,” I scream out.
A male with light eyes and pupils that look like pinpricks raises his head to see who I am. He lowers it, bored, and then raises a few fingers to acknowledge me.
This makes me anxious.
“Hello,” I say to a woman with big breasts who’s eating a peach. From her reaction, I’m not sure whether she’s upset with me or with the sour taste of the fruit.
I wave my hand around, and she continues to eat the peach. Another human makes a sound of acknowledgement, and then turns away.
I come from a smaller zoo, where I was almost always alone. I lived there for twenty-two years. There were other humans when I was a child, my parents and then two other women, though all died within a few years. It was a shame that I was alone, since I’m young and still fertile, so the pandas sent me here for the reproduction program.
The pandas, for what reason I’m not sure, don’t want us all dead. The pandas care. The pandas at my zoo cried when I left. There was even a reddish ring in the fur around their eyes. They always treated me well.
“How’s it going?” I ask the woman with big breasts, who at least has her eyes open. "Nap time?"
“No.”
“Ah, OK. I just arrived, it’s all new to me, I haven’t seen another human in two decades. Seventeen years, actually, but that’s still a lot. I sometimes talk to my own reflection—”
“You have a shrill voice.”
“Oh,” I say, and I start to speak drastically softer. “Did I wake them?”
“Who? Them? You couldn’t wake them if you screamed in their ears.”
“Ha.” I’m still upset about the “shrill” comment, so I try to sound more serious, sophisticated. “I tried one of the plums. It was good. How’re the fish?”
“JESUS, ENOUGH. I CAN’T TAKE IT.”
I almost burst into tears, then I realize she’s not looking at me. She’s looking over my shoulder. I turn around and see two pandas in the distance.
“What’s happening?”
The pandas are in their flesh-colored costumes, one peach, the other caramel.
“What’re they doing?”
The woman couldn’t care less about me, she throws her peach on the ground and gets up. She goes to the male with pinprick eyes and touches his shoulder. He raises his head just enough to see the pandas coming, and then lets it fall, heavily.
“What do you have to do?” I keep asking them.
“Reproduction.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Lovely? You know, when his dick is hard and he comes in—”
I understand that she’s speaking aggressively so as to bother me, but I’m not sure what she’s on about, so I just smile with embarrassment.
The two glare and leave me alone. Meanwhile the pandas arrive and approach the male, caressing his shoulders, handing him berries.
One of the pandas grabs something, a cylinder made of leaves and bamboo, and fills it with what appears to be fig pulp. He then sticks it on the male’s cock and starts moving it up and down. The male looks at the ground, tired and indifferent, as if they were playing with someone else’s cock.
The other panda takes a hand from the male and places it on the female’s shoulder, to make contact. The male looks at the female, bored. She shrugs and lies down next to him. When his cock is slightly hard the pandas place the fig pulp on the female’s pussy. They then place the male’s cock inside of her.
The humans don’t collaborate in the slightest.
The pandas push the female back and forth against the male, while the female wearily looks at the pandas, then at fruit saplings, then the pandas again, and then removes something from her knee.
It makes me believe in, I don’t know, life.
The pandas move her with conviction, working to change positions every now and then, but nothing changes. After a while, against the background chorus of cicadas, the pandas abandon the project. It’s pathetic. They look as if they’re heartbroken, asking themselves what went wrong, and what the problem with humans is, those inadequate creatures.
“Wow,” I say while the couple cleans the fig mush off of each other.
I’m not sure what I watched. Is that how children are made? I can see that my crotch is swollen. I want to put it down somewhere.
“Can I desire you?” I ask.
I rush at the couple. The male pushes me aside and looks at me, disgusted. “It’s bad to touch, didn’t they teach you that as a child?”
No one taught me that as a child.
*
I go to rest. There’s a man beside me, his face wrinkled, his hands stained. He looks at me with curiosity and suspicion. It’s the first time I’ve seen a human like this. I don’t say anything. He introduces himself as Gigi. I tell him that I expected a different welcome and my eyes swell with tears, despite myself.
Gigi offers to explain how the colony works. He’s kind, but I’m struck by the color of his chest hair, which makes me struggle to listen to him. It’s white, the color of a panda’s hair.
“How do you have the same hair as the pandas?” I ask.
“It’s not like theirs, it’s softer. Here, touch. If you live long enough yours will be the same.” He points towards my crotch.
He tells me that, all in all, it’s not so bad here. There aren’t many visitors. The fruit is good. There are even chickens, and the water comes from a fountain. The only problem is reproduction, though he tells me I can avoid that by pretending to be asleep, or to be in the dark corners of the sleeping room, where the pandas can’t see. Their eyes are almost useless in the absence of light, he tells me.
I have the feeling that I’ve made a friend. I love him, but I don’t dare touch him.
I look at the corner he pointed out. I don’t understand. I’m here on purpose, the pandas brought me here, I wonder when I’ll be called for the program.
“Why don’t you do what the pandas want?” I ask.
“We don’t want to,” he says from the floor, his arm under his head.
“What do you do?”
“If you know how to read, we have books from the human age.”
The books are colorful and full of illustrations. The characters are all animals that speak our language. The animals walk up and down the street, deceiving each other.
The pandas do know some words of our language. I’m not sure where or how they learned those. It’s just enough to instruct us to look, don’t look, move, don’t move. For the most part the pandas speak their own language, and when I hear it I feel alone.
“Gigi, wouldn’t you like it if the pandas spoke like we do?”
“I don’t know, I understand them anyways, at least most of what they say.”
I didn’t know that was possible.
“What do they say?”
He stays still for a while. “Nothing.”
“Please, tell me something.”
I insist. He doesn’t teach me, though he does confess to not knowing as much as he suggested. What he does know is that children are made through reproduction, though almost no children are born these days, even when reproduction is complete. He’s also heard that we’re lazy, that we gorge ourselves on fruit, and that the pandas have gathered the last of our species here.
I walk to the chicken coop. I ask if anyone wants to come, but no one wants to. I walk alone, the sun shining on my face. When I come back, everyone is unusually busy.
Someone asks, “What if I was stung by a lot of wasps?”
Someone else responds, “It won’t work if you aren’t allergic.”
“What if you suffocated me?”
“I don’t have the strength, and what would the last one do?”
Everyone nods in affirmation.
*
The rest of the days are the same, but I’ve found a pastime. I go to the chicken coop and have raw eggs and peaches, and then I picture the reproduction. I see the female’s movement on the male. No one can see me. There’s a heat in my abdomen. I see her, pushed by the pandas back and forth. It’s as if the rhythm holds a secret. It drives me crazy.
Behind the chicken coop, against the fence, there’s a large stone. I straddle it and stand there. I rub myself, and as I do I look at the horizon, outside the zoo. I see the birds fly over the poles and barbed wires without problems. I want to leave too, but where would I go? I hold my own breast and wonder if it’s like the female’s.
One morning, I wake up and the warm air and white light make me skip my usual routine. What luck, while I’m on the floor I see two pandas arrive in flesh-colored costumes. Is it time for reproduction? I raise my head to look at them. My movement alarms the female, who starts to say that she can’t take anymore.
She shouts at the male, “The dark corner!” But the male sleeps soundly, he bats her away like a fly. The pandas are close. I have to pretend otherwise, because it doesn’t seem acceptable here, but I would like to know what it’s like to rub myself against the male instead of a stone. I decided to approach him, hoping something, anything will happen. I start to doubt myself. I disgust him, I’m sure.
There’s a paw on my shoulder. It spreads fig mush on my pussy. I feel cared for, I want to push myself against whatever is inside of me. I can’t do that. I decide to pretend I don’t feel pleasure, like the other female.
The other panda prepares the male, who almost apologizes to me, and then resumes his indifference. His cock is straight. He’s cold and still.
I look at his cock, enchanted. The pandas each lift one side of me and place me on the male. They insert his cock inside of me without any excitement. There’s a pain I didn’t expect. Is that the reason the female doesn’t like reproduction? Then the pain disappears into the nothingness it came from. There’s another sensation that comes over me. It’s like a sponge that’s swelling inside of my pussy. I can’t pretend to be indifferent. The pandas look at each other in surprise.
The other humans come out of the house, including the other female. They look stunned. It would be better to stop, but the sensations ask me not to. I don’t know whether I’ll ever feel this, or this much, again. I start to feel ashamed. I want the humans to leave.
Then something happens. There’s a warmth at my side. It’s the male’s hand. His eyes have lit up, his pupils fill most of his celestial eyes, he observes me. His hand accompanies my movement. I hear him start to sigh. The pandas are barely breathing, fearful of disrupting. The male touches my breast, then both, his lips are parted, I want to kiss him and I understand that he wants to kiss me, I bend over him, our mouths almost touch, and then I’m thrown to the side. I’m surprised. I see the female.
She beats the other male, and the pandas. Gigi takes me into the house.
“What are you doing? What did I do?"
“We don’t want another human. We want to die. We don’t want to die with the pain of leaving another human in the hands of the pandas. You’re so selfish.”
“I didn’t know.”
I’m sent to the dark corner.
Gigi brings me some hard-covered picture books, all worn out, and some candles. I’m heartbroken. There’s a fairy tale about a little girl with matches. It ends badly. I read several stories about stupid donkeys, wise elephants. I’m passionate about the adventures of a mouse that’s also a detective. It starts to scare me, I lose sleep. I come across a book with bees, which explains how humans are born.
There’s one mother and one father, both pink and naked. They smile, covered by a sheet. The bee says that the mother and father love each other. I know what happens down there, under the covers. The same thing I did with the male, though I don’t love him.
I start to remember the sensations. I bring my hand to myself. I continue to look at the book and reconstruct the details, pushing the imagined cock as deep as I can. I want to taste his saliva. I push, but I can’t get to the bottom of where, and what, I want to feel. I’m not satisfied.
“You okay?”
It’s Gigi. I want to ask him for a hand.
“Yes, I found this book. I have a strange feeling.”
“What book? What feeling?”
He starts to look through the book. He seems intense and completely indifferent to me.
“Gigi, please help me.”
“What?”
He starts to leave.
“You can leave, just touch me first.”
“What? Where?”
“There, I feel strange.”
Gigi comes closer to me. He says that my crotch is red and swollen. He touches me delicately because he’s afraid of hurting me, though I beg him to touch me more. He wants to call others and I tell him not to. I don’t want him to leave.
“This is how I recover,” I tell him. I don’t make sudden movements, I don’t want to scare him. I ask him to put his hand on my side. I relive the sensations from earlier. Gigi’s hand is rougher and warmer. He starts to hold me with more force. He looks at me with a large, surprised look, like he wants to eat me.
He licks my chest. His cock is straight. He touches me everywhere. I start to move my pelvis towards him and he tells me that I can’t, he can’t put his cock inside me there, he saw it in a book somewhere.
The other male comes over. He asks what’s happening.
Gigi tells me that I can have his cock anywhere except for there, either the ass or the mouth. The ass seems closer to the area from which the madness comes. I propose the ass. I get on all fours, my hands flat on the ground. There’s a punch against my ass. Gigi says it doesn’t work. We need something damp. He spits his saliva on it.
“We’re there,” he says. But he’s still not inside me completely. There’s resistance. I want to feel full more than anything, so I arch my back and push against him. “It’s a beautiful feeling,” he says.
He caresses my back, as if to thank me. With a thud the male drops the book on the ground and reveals his hard cock.
“Put it in my mouth,” I tell him. “Gigi said you can put it in the mouth,” I add, for reassurance. He does. I start to lick.
I’m happy, I don’t know how else to put it. I want the moment to last forever, like a setting sun that stays fixed on the horizon without falling.
That’s when two women arrive, including the female from earlier. The male asks if she’d like to do something. It’s lovely, he adds, and looks at me. She says she wants me to lick her. I lick her.
The bodies around me are all rearranging themselves. There’s a tongue inside of me as well. It’s beautiful. We’re children with a new game. Then Gigi takes himself out of my ass and says, “I also want a cock somewhere.”
“Can I put it in your ass?” the other male asks.
“It should be safe,” Gigi says, on all fours. It’s difficult. It’s not lubricated, so I start to tongue Gigi’s asshole. Then we watch the other male’s cock disappear. I start to touch the female’s tits, the ones I thought about so much. They are magical, beautiful, something I would like to fill my palms with every day, they are alive and attentive.
Our screams conjoin.
We stand there, stunned and loaded.
“We can’t stay here,” Gigi says. “It’ll be too difficult to not give in to the program.”
“Let’s go then,” I say.
“Where? How?”
“There are hiding places all around.”
There are moans of disappointment.
“You can get through the fence. Have you been there?”
“We’ve never been there.”
We collect some clothes, tools, blankets for the night, and then we start to see the first light of dawn. We have to hurry. We take a couple of chickens as we pass through the chicken coop.
We just have to lift the barbed wire of the fence and then we’re out. But that step takes a while. We rest our feet on the ground with caution. The ground beyond seems different. But it’s the same, the same earth, the same smells, the same plants. The same flies and birds that move from inside to outside, as if there were no inside and outside.
Instead it feels like we’re tearing ourselves away from something, as if our skin is caught in the barbed wire. There’s a fear in my blood. But when I step outside I see the perfection of the moment. We want to move as much as possible.
We settle when we are more tired than terrified. There isn’t much time til sunset. We find a dark cave that’s perfect for sleeping. I already feel at home.
“This is where the last of the humans will live,” Gigi says, softening the moment with laughter.
“The last?” everyone asks.
Gigi says that he heard the pandas talking amongst each other, that I was the last hope for the species.
Everyone starts to jump around. There are shouts.
I share the enthusiasm. We want to celebrate and love each other again and again. We want to touch each other until the end of humanity.