The Jumping Monkeys

J.A. Tyler

And before we are out of the jungle, where everything is caged in with this thin wire that we can hardly see unless we are looking for it, we find the one place that looks likes batting cages, like where my dad takes me to practice because in our backyard I can’t hit anything, I barely connect.
…..CHOKE UP, he is yelling and I am, my eyes crying and I don’t want to look back because I know already that through this batting helmet and the speeding baseballs punching at me, he already knows. KEEP AN EYE, KEEP AN EYE, and I am doing the best I can do. Him behind me, my dad, and I can some days like this feel his disappointment, thick, I could spoon it into my hands it is so heavy then.
…..OKAY, I say through a closed throat, hoping he doesn’t hear me and how I sound choked up, hoping for a day to be some other kind of boy that maybe my dad will like.
…..THAT A BOY.
…..I am a boy, but some days, not the right one.
…..A tall pole up top that is like it was made to hold a sail but is instead holding this mesh, this wire caging, here to hold in the monkeys that fly.
…..They swing on ropes that dangle down from all these places in the ceiling and some of them hang right out to us, splattering themselves onto the cage with their tiny fingers wrapped around, sometimes even like cats, hissing at us. There are a lot of monkeys here that hiss at us, at my mom and my dad and me as we walk through this part of the zoo, watching the monkeys swing on ropes.
…..The ground is lettuce leaves and carrot stems, red and white balls covered in teeth and claw marks, sticks and what these monkeys must play with and eat and leave behind.
…..THESE MONKEYS WILL OPEN A KID RIGHT UP, my dad says and I don’t want to be opened up. I don’t want to see what is inside of me. I have seen the inside of a fish and the inside of a rabbit and I don’t want to see the inside of me.
…..FANGS LIKE FUCKING KNIVES, my dad says and my mom, I look at her to see if she is going to say something about him saying FUCKING, about how we shouldn’t, but today she sees that it is what is called a lost cause. Someone, maybe my teacher or my mom, they told me that a lost cause means something that isn’t worth fighting against. Or fighting for. Either way. At least that is what I remember them saying when I asked, WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN SOMEONE SAYS I AM A LOST CAUSE?
…..SHRED, my dad says and I don’t want to be shredded is all I can think but I just say like I do, YEP, and keep watching from my mom to the monkeys, wondering who is going to hiss first.
…..And today, here, neither of them do.
…..So I do, I make the sound of a hissing monkey, like a cat, I hiss.
…..My dad, he just looks at me and his face is open and blank. He doesn’t know if it is funny or strange or if I am even the kind of kid that he ever even wanted.
…..A monkey swings from the side to the ceiling. A monkey swings from the ceiling to our faces. A monkey swings from the rope to the ground and puts his hands on a leaf of lettuce, turns it around in them and takes a bite, chews and spits some out, and back up the rope the monkey goes.
…..KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL. WATCH IT ALL THE WAY IN.
…..I cry sometimes in my bed, when no one is around. And if my mom hears me and comes in I pretend to be asleep, faking the wheeze and movements, like shifting when we are asleep. I don’t want my mom to know I am crying anymore than I want my dad to see it running below a batting helmet. In our family, my mom and my dad and me, there is enough wreckage already to make the nights go long.
…..My mom and my dad and me.
…..We are standing watching until my dad he says, COME ON. ELEPHANTS. RHINOCEROS. HOME. There are other things in-between but it is close, the end of this, and we go on walking.
…..Elephants, Rhinoceros, then back home and to how it always is, when we are not here walking, taking in another animal.

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J.A. Tyler is the author of the novel(la)s Inconceivable wilson (scrambler books, 2009), SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE (ghost road press, 2010), IN LOVE WITH A GHOST (willows wept press, 2010), and A MAN OF GLASS (fugue state press, 2011) as well as the chapbooks ZOO: THE TROPIC HOUSE (sunnyoutside, 2010) and OUR US & WE (greying ghost, 2010). His work has appeared recently with Sleepingfish, Caketrain, Hotel St. George, elimae, and Action, Yes among others. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. Visit: www.aboutjatyler.com.

This was the inaugural run of the Emprise Review 1,000 Words or Less Contest. Submissions for the contest will open again on May 1st 2010.