Hey Guys and gals,
I'm a member of an online writing group and occasionally we'll have "writer's duels". Basically someone will give a set of parameters and we all have a week to write a short story about it.
A cuople of weeks ago there was a challenge requiring the following elements: had to have a man, woman, monkey and a gun in it, and it had to be absurdly funny.
So I thought back to some of the bizarre animal rights wack jobs I've encountered over the years and wondered what it would be like if one of them was my neighbour. So I came up with the following story...
* * * *
Saturday evening. For any Canadian male that means just one thing: Hockey Night in Canada on CBC, utterly sacrosanct, especially when that Canadian male lives south of the border in the United States.
Thus was my satellite t.v. tuned to that most revered channel while I sat comfortabley on the chesterfield, Molson Ice in hand and bag of chips in lap, watching as the referee dropped the puck for the opening faceoff. Mats Sundin won the draw for the Toronto Maple Leafs; so far so good.
"Maybe they'll actually win tonight," I had just muttered when I became aware of a face peering in through the picture window on my right. I paused, a potato chip halfway delivered to my mouth, and slowly turned to look at it.
It was a monkey, standing out there with his hands and face pressed against the glass, gazing at me with unbridled interest. Before I could react he was gone, scampering into the night.
I chuckled, smirking and twitching my head in amused appreciation at the way shadows can play tricks on the eyes, when something hit the window with a reverberating 'bong' and slid down the glass, a revolting brown streak marking its progress.
"Oh, you did not just fling poo at my window," I said as the grinning simian reappeared to gauge my reaction. Then I remembered, groaning; my ex-hippie, crunchy-granola neighbours had brought home another Earth Family member this week to add to their menagerie of birds, cats, lizards and rotten yappy little dogs.
I went into the kitchen, snatched the phone from its cradle and dialed furiously.
"Hello, is this Moonbeam? Your new monkey's at my house. Yes, he is a mischeivous creature, isn't he? Please come and get him," I asked very reasonably, all things considered.
"Sorry, hon, you know our policy about animals," she replied, and I did. There wasn't one, and that was the problem. "Animals were meant to run free, not live like slaves to humanity with all this training and discipline we force on them."
"I see."
"I mean, who are we to dictate terms to the other creatures on this Great Ball of Life anyway? Animals lived in peaceful co-existance for millions of years before the human race arrived and ruined everything."
"Your monkey's about to get ruined," I muttered, trying to keep an eye on said monkey as well as the last few seconds of a Toronto powerplay that I had somehow missed since dialing the phone. I put on the phone's wireless headset and went back into the living room, but the monkey suddenly disappeared. Vertically. I could hear his awful little paws scritch-scratching on the drainpipe.
"He's on my roof now. No, he's not clever. Please come and take him home."
"But he is home, hon. I've always believed that an animal's home is anywhere the sun shines or the rain falls, and we humans just have to learn to respect..."
Glass shattered in an upstairs window; the monkey was in my house. I told Moonbeam as much.
"Well, this is just a classic example of an animal trying to take back his natural habitat from us encroaching humans..."
"His habitat is a jungle in New-f*cking-Guinea, not southern Indiana," I snarled into the mouthpiece, dashing up the stairs two at a time to confront the flea-bitten boarding party.
"Now hon, there's no cause for negativity or bad language," Moonbeam admonished in my left ear as I moved down the darkened hallway like it was a scene from the movie Aliens. "I've always believed that if you just radiate positive energy then all of Nature will respond with..."
"Will you be quiet, you stupid woman, I'm trying to sneak up on him," I hissed as I gingerly pushed the door open. My heart pulsed in my throat as I scanned the room, half expecting Curious George to fly at me, all teeth and fangs and rabies.
"Where is he," she demanded. "Have you found him? Oh, he's probably terrified the poor little..."
"Sundin passes to Tucker... he shoots, he scores," the play-by-play announced suddenly shrieked through my t.v.'s speakers. The Leafs had scored a goal in my absence, an actual puck-in-the-net occurance. It might be the only one they got for weeks and I'd bloody-well missed it!
The monkey used this distraction to bolt past me and race downstairs, and by the time I got there myself he had taken my remote control. With a great cry of rage I launched myself over the chesterfield to tackle him, but he was too fast. As he scuttled away he changed the station to The Estrogen Channel and as I vainly scrabbled at the t.v.'s manual controls to get the game back the monkey stole my bag of chips and fled.
"He's got my chips," I whimpered.
"You're not supposed to feed animals our unhealthy human food," Moonbeam shouted as I grabbed one of the hideous-but-solid crystal candlestick holders my mother-in-law had sent us for Christmas, but before I could brain him with it the monkey retreated down to the basement.
"Oh, the poor little creature, he must be so scared," Moonbeam wailed as I pursued him. He scarpered across the basement floor and through the door to the attached shed. Moments later I heard the sound of an engine fire up.
"He's on my tractor. The bastard has stolen my lawn tractor, Moonbeam," I said.
"Well what did you expect him to do," she snapped. "When he's being hunted by a predator of course he's going to try to escape any way he can."
But I was no longer listening to her. As the monkey drove off into the sunset on my tractor my right eye began to twitch; like the man said, that was the camel that broke my straw back.
I went to the storage room that my wife calls The Man Cave, where stood my gun safe. I twirled the combination, all the while listening as the monkey raced around my yard doing untold damage to my lawn, and pulled the heavy steel door open.
I was immediately hit with the perfume of ancient cosmoline and traces of spent gunpower co-mingled with the heady scent of Hoppes No. 9 cleaning solvent. I breathed deeply. Inhaling it reassured me that all was well with the world, or soon would be.
I reached for my latest acquisition, a Yugoslavian SKS 59/66 rifle, and a handful of stripper clips, each holding ten rounds of ammo.
"Maybe you're right," I told Moonbeam conversationally as I pulled back the rifle's bolt with a loud and reassuring 'clack'. "Maybe this modern human domestication of animals really is cruel. Maybe I need to treat dear little monkey the way a primitive caveman would."
A primitive caveman with a semi-automatic rifle, dammit, I thought as I inserted a stripper clip and thumbed its ten rounds neatly into the magazine. I pulled and released the cocking bolt again, chambering the first round as I ran across the basement and out the door into my back yard.
"Alright Monkey, let's do this," I snarled, flipping off the safety.
"Do what," Moonbeam asked suspiciously. "And what was all that clacking I heard?"
The monkey seemed to know what was up, however, and gunned the tractor's motor, steering into the trees at the end of my yard. As he went he thumbed the remote control, switching on my stereo with its outdoor speakers. The Rolling Stones belted out 'Gimme Shelter' as I charged across the lawn into the twilight after him.
I threw the rifle to my shoulder and squeezed off a couple of shots and he put the tractor into a series of twists and turns to throw off my aim.
"Oh my god, you're shooting at him," Moonbeam shouted.
"I know," I said, and emptied the magazine in Monkey's general direction, the muzzle flash lighting up the dark and heavily treed terrain. He responded by driving over a raised hump of dirt and jumping across the creek dividing my property and Moonbeam's.
"Be careful, the warranty's expired," I shouted at him as the tractor crashed down on the other side and kept going.
I leaped the creek after him and reloaded on the run, slamming the bolt closed and firing from the hip, stitching Moonbeam's fence mere inches behind Monkey's retreating head, the rifle's action spitting empty shell casings in all directions.
The monkey spun the wheel and engaged the whirling blades of the mowing deck as he came back towards me. I dove to one side to avoid being run down by my own f*cking tractor, rolled and came up firing again, wincing as one of the slugs punched a hole through the tractor's body.
I chased him around a hedge into a different part of Moonbeam's yard, which contained some strange looking plants, rows of them. Plants hidden from sight by a fence on one side and a hedge on the others. It suddenly occurred to me what my neighbours had been growing back here all this time.
As Monkey began gleefully mowing the Cannabis plants into mulch I laughed and lowered my rifle, decocking it and switching the safety back on.
"So it looks like your clever little monkey's wiping out your weed farm," I told my neighbour.
"He's what?! Well don't just stand there, stop him, what are you waiting for," she demanded, looking out her window at the scene of destruction.
"Sorry Moonbeam. Animals were meant to run free, not live like slaves to humanity with all this training and discipline we force on them," I said.
"Harold, get out there and stop that damned animal before he wipes out this year's harvest," she bellowed at her husband.
"Now, now, what's with all the negativity, Moonbeam," I asked. "Whatever happened to 'animals reclaiming their habitat from us encroaching humans', and all that?"
Moonbeam treated me to a long, uninterupted stream of foul language, at which point I hung up and went back home.
After putting the rifle away I discovered that I was just in time to see the Leafs score the winning goal in overtime, and realised that I didn't even mind the shocking disturbance of the peace as Monkey drove around his yard on my tractor while Moonbeam chased after him, screaming.
It sounded like victory.
The End
[Note - The author wishes to say that he would never actually chase a monkey around the neighbourhood while discharging a firearm. He is fanatically safety conscious and lives by The Four Rules of Firearm Safety.
Nor are his neighbours actually reefer addicts, although their behaviour occasionally leads him to suspect as much.]
I'm a member of an online writing group and occasionally we'll have "writer's duels". Basically someone will give a set of parameters and we all have a week to write a short story about it.
A cuople of weeks ago there was a challenge requiring the following elements: had to have a man, woman, monkey and a gun in it, and it had to be absurdly funny.
So I thought back to some of the bizarre animal rights wack jobs I've encountered over the years and wondered what it would be like if one of them was my neighbour. So I came up with the following story...
* * * *
Saturday evening. For any Canadian male that means just one thing: Hockey Night in Canada on CBC, utterly sacrosanct, especially when that Canadian male lives south of the border in the United States.
Thus was my satellite t.v. tuned to that most revered channel while I sat comfortabley on the chesterfield, Molson Ice in hand and bag of chips in lap, watching as the referee dropped the puck for the opening faceoff. Mats Sundin won the draw for the Toronto Maple Leafs; so far so good.
"Maybe they'll actually win tonight," I had just muttered when I became aware of a face peering in through the picture window on my right. I paused, a potato chip halfway delivered to my mouth, and slowly turned to look at it.
It was a monkey, standing out there with his hands and face pressed against the glass, gazing at me with unbridled interest. Before I could react he was gone, scampering into the night.
I chuckled, smirking and twitching my head in amused appreciation at the way shadows can play tricks on the eyes, when something hit the window with a reverberating 'bong' and slid down the glass, a revolting brown streak marking its progress.
"Oh, you did not just fling poo at my window," I said as the grinning simian reappeared to gauge my reaction. Then I remembered, groaning; my ex-hippie, crunchy-granola neighbours had brought home another Earth Family member this week to add to their menagerie of birds, cats, lizards and rotten yappy little dogs.
I went into the kitchen, snatched the phone from its cradle and dialed furiously.
"Hello, is this Moonbeam? Your new monkey's at my house. Yes, he is a mischeivous creature, isn't he? Please come and get him," I asked very reasonably, all things considered.
"Sorry, hon, you know our policy about animals," she replied, and I did. There wasn't one, and that was the problem. "Animals were meant to run free, not live like slaves to humanity with all this training and discipline we force on them."
"I see."
"I mean, who are we to dictate terms to the other creatures on this Great Ball of Life anyway? Animals lived in peaceful co-existance for millions of years before the human race arrived and ruined everything."
"Your monkey's about to get ruined," I muttered, trying to keep an eye on said monkey as well as the last few seconds of a Toronto powerplay that I had somehow missed since dialing the phone. I put on the phone's wireless headset and went back into the living room, but the monkey suddenly disappeared. Vertically. I could hear his awful little paws scritch-scratching on the drainpipe.
"He's on my roof now. No, he's not clever. Please come and take him home."
"But he is home, hon. I've always believed that an animal's home is anywhere the sun shines or the rain falls, and we humans just have to learn to respect..."
Glass shattered in an upstairs window; the monkey was in my house. I told Moonbeam as much.
"Well, this is just a classic example of an animal trying to take back his natural habitat from us encroaching humans..."
"His habitat is a jungle in New-f*cking-Guinea, not southern Indiana," I snarled into the mouthpiece, dashing up the stairs two at a time to confront the flea-bitten boarding party.
"Now hon, there's no cause for negativity or bad language," Moonbeam admonished in my left ear as I moved down the darkened hallway like it was a scene from the movie Aliens. "I've always believed that if you just radiate positive energy then all of Nature will respond with..."
"Will you be quiet, you stupid woman, I'm trying to sneak up on him," I hissed as I gingerly pushed the door open. My heart pulsed in my throat as I scanned the room, half expecting Curious George to fly at me, all teeth and fangs and rabies.
"Where is he," she demanded. "Have you found him? Oh, he's probably terrified the poor little..."
"Sundin passes to Tucker... he shoots, he scores," the play-by-play announced suddenly shrieked through my t.v.'s speakers. The Leafs had scored a goal in my absence, an actual puck-in-the-net occurance. It might be the only one they got for weeks and I'd bloody-well missed it!
The monkey used this distraction to bolt past me and race downstairs, and by the time I got there myself he had taken my remote control. With a great cry of rage I launched myself over the chesterfield to tackle him, but he was too fast. As he scuttled away he changed the station to The Estrogen Channel and as I vainly scrabbled at the t.v.'s manual controls to get the game back the monkey stole my bag of chips and fled.
"He's got my chips," I whimpered.
"You're not supposed to feed animals our unhealthy human food," Moonbeam shouted as I grabbed one of the hideous-but-solid crystal candlestick holders my mother-in-law had sent us for Christmas, but before I could brain him with it the monkey retreated down to the basement.
"Oh, the poor little creature, he must be so scared," Moonbeam wailed as I pursued him. He scarpered across the basement floor and through the door to the attached shed. Moments later I heard the sound of an engine fire up.
"He's on my tractor. The bastard has stolen my lawn tractor, Moonbeam," I said.
"Well what did you expect him to do," she snapped. "When he's being hunted by a predator of course he's going to try to escape any way he can."
But I was no longer listening to her. As the monkey drove off into the sunset on my tractor my right eye began to twitch; like the man said, that was the camel that broke my straw back.
I went to the storage room that my wife calls The Man Cave, where stood my gun safe. I twirled the combination, all the while listening as the monkey raced around my yard doing untold damage to my lawn, and pulled the heavy steel door open.
I was immediately hit with the perfume of ancient cosmoline and traces of spent gunpower co-mingled with the heady scent of Hoppes No. 9 cleaning solvent. I breathed deeply. Inhaling it reassured me that all was well with the world, or soon would be.
I reached for my latest acquisition, a Yugoslavian SKS 59/66 rifle, and a handful of stripper clips, each holding ten rounds of ammo.
"Maybe you're right," I told Moonbeam conversationally as I pulled back the rifle's bolt with a loud and reassuring 'clack'. "Maybe this modern human domestication of animals really is cruel. Maybe I need to treat dear little monkey the way a primitive caveman would."
A primitive caveman with a semi-automatic rifle, dammit, I thought as I inserted a stripper clip and thumbed its ten rounds neatly into the magazine. I pulled and released the cocking bolt again, chambering the first round as I ran across the basement and out the door into my back yard.
"Alright Monkey, let's do this," I snarled, flipping off the safety.
"Do what," Moonbeam asked suspiciously. "And what was all that clacking I heard?"
The monkey seemed to know what was up, however, and gunned the tractor's motor, steering into the trees at the end of my yard. As he went he thumbed the remote control, switching on my stereo with its outdoor speakers. The Rolling Stones belted out 'Gimme Shelter' as I charged across the lawn into the twilight after him.
I threw the rifle to my shoulder and squeezed off a couple of shots and he put the tractor into a series of twists and turns to throw off my aim.
"Oh my god, you're shooting at him," Moonbeam shouted.
"I know," I said, and emptied the magazine in Monkey's general direction, the muzzle flash lighting up the dark and heavily treed terrain. He responded by driving over a raised hump of dirt and jumping across the creek dividing my property and Moonbeam's.
"Be careful, the warranty's expired," I shouted at him as the tractor crashed down on the other side and kept going.
I leaped the creek after him and reloaded on the run, slamming the bolt closed and firing from the hip, stitching Moonbeam's fence mere inches behind Monkey's retreating head, the rifle's action spitting empty shell casings in all directions.
The monkey spun the wheel and engaged the whirling blades of the mowing deck as he came back towards me. I dove to one side to avoid being run down by my own f*cking tractor, rolled and came up firing again, wincing as one of the slugs punched a hole through the tractor's body.
I chased him around a hedge into a different part of Moonbeam's yard, which contained some strange looking plants, rows of them. Plants hidden from sight by a fence on one side and a hedge on the others. It suddenly occurred to me what my neighbours had been growing back here all this time.
As Monkey began gleefully mowing the Cannabis plants into mulch I laughed and lowered my rifle, decocking it and switching the safety back on.
"So it looks like your clever little monkey's wiping out your weed farm," I told my neighbour.
"He's what?! Well don't just stand there, stop him, what are you waiting for," she demanded, looking out her window at the scene of destruction.
"Sorry Moonbeam. Animals were meant to run free, not live like slaves to humanity with all this training and discipline we force on them," I said.
"Harold, get out there and stop that damned animal before he wipes out this year's harvest," she bellowed at her husband.
"Now, now, what's with all the negativity, Moonbeam," I asked. "Whatever happened to 'animals reclaiming their habitat from us encroaching humans', and all that?"
Moonbeam treated me to a long, uninterupted stream of foul language, at which point I hung up and went back home.
After putting the rifle away I discovered that I was just in time to see the Leafs score the winning goal in overtime, and realised that I didn't even mind the shocking disturbance of the peace as Monkey drove around his yard on my tractor while Moonbeam chased after him, screaming.
It sounded like victory.
The End
[Note - The author wishes to say that he would never actually chase a monkey around the neighbourhood while discharging a firearm. He is fanatically safety conscious and lives by The Four Rules of Firearm Safety.
Nor are his neighbours actually reefer addicts, although their behaviour occasionally leads him to suspect as much.]
