MONKEY
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2011 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
Also by this Author:
Urban Fantasy
Rook: Allie's War, Book One
Shield: Allie's War, Book Two
Sword: Allie's War, Book Three
Shadow: Allie's War, Book Four
New York: Allie's War, Early Years
The Alien Club
The Slave Girl Chronicles
Middle Grade (Children's)
Jack Dervish, Super Spy
Maya Papaya
Monkey: An Indian Tale
Elephant
Table of Contents
Bonus Pages! Rook: Allie's War, Book One
A man named Tugli lived inside a metal box, which stood like an oven-shaped cabinet alongside a narrow road. On either side of his metal box, vendors hawked wares from hand-knitted blankets and colorful shawls to embroidered bags and tops and jewelry made from amber and silver and lapis lazuli.
Everyone who worked on the narrow street knew Tugli, and they fed him momos and bowls of porridge and pieces of chicken from their grills.
One of them, a kind old lady who could barely see from the cataracts in her filmy eyes, gave Tugli a bag of fresh pickles every day.
Tugli didn’t like pickles.
He didn’t have the heart to tell the old woman that he couldn’t eat what she brought. He knew she lived on the kindness of her grandsons, who owned the international cuisine restaurant at the end of the dirty street with the sewage trenches met in an ugly cross on their very doorstep before running along either side of the narrow street where Tugli’s metal home lived.
The brothers scraped out a living there, feeding their eleven kids, respectively; that was in spite of the bad smells that sometimes drove the lighter-skinned tourists away, and even a lot of the locals. In the monsoon, it was worse for them; in fact, many days, Tugli heard from the other vendors, they didn’t bother to open at all if the grates were all flooded.
Still, they managed well enough for their family.
They let the old woman wash and fold the napkins so she could feel a part of their business, and they fed her and let her sometimes make the sauces on the dishes that came from the back room...especially those filled with spices and plants and special nuts from the old country.
In particular, she had a fondness for pickles...so much so that the brothers feared that the smell of her daily cooking of the same, along with the sewer trench smell outside, might scare off even more of their customers. So they did not sell the pickles in their store; instead, they threw them away out back, or sometimes fed them to the cows, who lowed in complaint. Whey they saw them lounging on the stairs down to their four room apartments, they fed them also to the goats which bleated the same irritated critique as the cows.
So the day their grandmother offered to give the pickles to the man Tugli in the box, who some said was a sage, some said was a crackpot, and some said was simply a nice, polite man with bad teeth, the brothers gave a sigh of relief. They handed her the largest bag of the pickles they thought she could carry easily, with kind words to their grandmother about how much Tugli said he loved her cooking, and would enjoy the company.
They did not do it to be cruel. They really did not know that Tugli disliked pickles.
However, being an even-tempered sort of person, which was what allowed him to live so happily in the metal box in the first place, he supposed, Tugli did not really mind.
Not at first.
They did, however, tend to smell up the inside of the metal box.
After a few weeks of daily pickle deliveries, Tugli got in the habit of putting those bags of pickles on the roof of his metal box. He waited until after the kind old lady had gone back to her restaurant on the corner of the same street, and then snuck them up there, feeling only a little twinge of guilt as he worried about the smell of vinegar and garlic penetrating the walls of the stupa that stood at the back of his metal box.
The very first day he did so, he was delighted when he checked an hour later, and the pickles had disappeared.
The following day, he put the bag of pickles in the exact same spot.
That day, too, the pickles disappeared.
The day after that, the ritual repeated...and Tugli continued to be delighted when he found it produced the exact same results!
Just to be certain he wasn’t passing on his troubles, he asked around to all of his neighbors, the vendors in front of the main stupa of the old road, the sellers of blankets and prayer wheels and small pictures of the stupa and jewelry, to determine that they had not been saddled with disposing of the soggy bags left by the kind old woman. Concerned he had merely transferred his problem to one of his friends, who did so well by him, feeding him and giving him free blankets, he asked them if they had anything to do with the pickles’ disappearance, or were annoyed by the smell or the sticky juice in any way.
Every one of them gave him a puzzled look.
Then every one of them said the exact same thing, scratching their heads and cocking them at him in a way that told Tugli that they once more wondered if he was a sage, an idiot, or just a simpleton with good manners and bad teeth.
Every one of them also said the same thing, after that wondering pause.
“What pickles, Tugli?”
Every time, after they spoke, Tugli sighed a rather large sigh of relief.
Whatever phantom made the pickles disappear (in approximately 13.2 minutes, every day, by Tugli’s estimation, when he finally got around to counting the gap between his leaving the bag and its mysterious disappearance)...it was not one of his neighbors, throwing away the smelly sack in irritation at Tugli’s odd ways.
The thought comforted Tugli.
In fact, it was a very fine arrangement, in Tugli’s view.
The old woman was delighted to find that not a single one of her homemade pickles remained in Tugli’s box the day after her last delivery of a large bag of the same. The brothers, sons of the sons of the kind old lady, were relieved that they had only to perfume the front and inside of their store to deal with the sewers that ran in the trenches in front of their door, and not to douse it a second time to cover the thick, vinegar-y and garlicky smell of pickles as well. Tugli was pleased that he did not have to disappoint or hurt the feelings of the kind old woman, yet his box remained free of anything but the faintest waft of those garlicky, vinegary pickles.
And someone, somewhere, seemed to be making very good use of those pickles.
Or so Tugli most sincerely hoped.
It went on that way for what seemed a very long time. Every day, Tugli took the bag from the kind old woman with a sincere smile of gratitude, asked her about her day and about her sons and about the business she helped them with, folding and washing napkins and making fine sauces from the old country, and every day, she chatted with him cheerfully, pleased with his pleasure at her gift, and happy for the company herself and to be doing a good deed for him.
Tugli continued his other rituals as well. Smiling at the people who came to visit the stupa, singing them songs from the old country and eating and chatting and drinking chai with his neighbors. He chanted with the monks who ascended the high stairs of the painted stupa behind him. He sang traditional songs with the children as they skipped back from school, and threw words back and forth with the Sikh and Hindi sellers in the stores above the road. He waved at the heads and smiles that poked from the wooden shutters of the guest house overhead.
And every day, the pickles disappeared.
Until one day, the kind old woman didn’t come.
Tugli waited well into the afternoon, wondering why she did not come, as she had not missed a morning delivery in probably six years.
She came in the monsoon rains, holding her umbrella to keep the crumpled bag dry inside her gnarled hand. She came when it was hot, holding the same umbrella and smiling at him in the shade of her rainbow-covered awning. She came on the holidays, on her way down the hill to count prayers with the other old women from her neighborhood in the old country.
She even came the day one of her grandsons’ wives had another baby. She was in a bit of a hurry that day, it was true, but she chatted with him anyway, telling him all about the delivery in the coldest hours of the morning, the pink, waving fists and the scream the little girl let out when they finally wrested her from her mother.
But on this day, she did not come.
Tugli waited all through the sunlit hours and even into the night, when the store and restaurant lights brightened up the narrow, pothole-ridden street. When he finally closed the doors of his metal box and latched them from the inside, he did his usual checking of the condition of the metal and the dryness of the walls, but he did not stop thinking about her.
When he finally lay down in his metal box, which really wasn’t so very much bigger than an oven, or a deep clothes cupboard, perhaps, he worried about the kind old woman still more, wondering what had happened to her.
Still, the old woman did not come.
He waited another day for her. And another.
By the fourth day, Tugli found himself very worried. He could not eat the grilled chicken his friend at the roadside tent made for the passersby. He could not eat the porridge his neighbor gave him when she first opened up shop. He could not eat the momos the fat lady gave him as leftovers from her previous day’s supply.
He sat there, his thin legs crossed as usual, but he did not sing for the light-skinned tourists. He did not pray, or nap, or even wave at the smiling faces of the children who looked down at him through the wooden slats in the guesthouse, or who skipped home from school, singing songs from the old country.
He scanned faces instead, looking for the kind old woman’s and not finding it.
He even wished for the garlicky, vinegary smell of those pickles which he did not like.
The next day, when the sun had risen high in the sky and he still did not see her, Tugli did something he very rarely did...he climbed out of his metal box on the side of the road.
Sliding his thin, bony legs over to the edge, he hopped off the metal rim, struggling for balance when he first found his feet. Gripping the sides of the metal box, he fumbled his toes into his leather sandals before he turned around and fastened together the doors of the metal box with a padlock his friend the butcher had bought him the last time Tugli left his box.
That time, he had gone to visit his brother when their mother had died in the old country.
He used to leave the box every weekend back then.
He would climb the hill and walk the long path around the mountain and reach his brother’s house, where he would stay with his brother and his brother’s wife and their four children.
That last time had been different.
Tugli spent a whole week that time, in that nice home in the mountains with the two horses and four cows and the seven goats and the many books and the wooden furniture painted bright colors. He ate meals larger than any he had eaten in several dozen years, and told stories about the happenings on his narrow street to the wide-eyed children. He laughed when they told him jokes and stories and news from their small town, and he patted his brother’s back when he cried and told him that they would never go back home.
Then his brother had dropped the news.
He and his family were moving to the city, to New Delhi to work.
They were selling the little farmhouse, and the cows and goats and horses and the painted wooden furniture. The books and the nieces and nephews and his brother’s wife were going with him, which made Tugli very sad. But he understood, too.
That had been six years ago.
Tugli had not left his box since.
Well, other than to go to the bathroom, but that was private, and he never had to lock his door to do that. One of his neighbors would simply watch the place for him.
This time, every vendor in the street stared at Tugli when he straightened from his customary crouch, holding the side of the metal box as if to brace himself for what he was about to do. He was about to try and smile, to reassure all of his friends that all was well, when a small, hard object hit Tugli in the side of his head, making him cry out.
Blinking in pain and a bit of confusion, Tugli slowly and cautiously turned his head in the direction from which the missile originated.
Sitting there, on the top of the metal box, was a very irate-looking yellow monkey.
Tugli just blinked at him for a moment, a single tear squeezing out of one eye from that sharp, angry rock that had been thrown at his head. Or that’s what Tugli assumed had been thrown at him, given how much it had hurt.
He and the monkey just looked at one another for a moment.
Then the monkey bared his teeth.
“Where are they?” he demanded, in his little monkey voice.
Tugli looked around at his friends, the vendors on the street, a little worried now.
Was he maybe the crazy man in the metal box that some of them supposed? He cleared his throat, looking first at his friend, the butcher’s wife, who sold shawls right across from his metal box. When he caught her watching him, her hands on her hips, her mouth puckered in a worried frown as she took in his face, he nearly whispered his question to her, despite the loudness of the honking cars and the vendors on either side, hawking their wares to passing customers.
“Do you see him?” he mouthed at her. “The monkey?”
Her puckered mouth twisted into a frown.
“Of course, I see him,” she said, in a loud voice. She waved at the creature behind Tugli’s head, her eyes brightening in anger.
“Shoo! Dirty thing! Leave our Tugli alone!”
But Tugli looked only at her.
“Did you hear him?” he mouthed at her then, still not looking at the yellow bundle of fur behind him, sure it was still glowering at him from the anger he could feel boring into the place between his shoulder blades on his back.
For the monkey had spoken to him, had it not?
“I heard him,” his friend said, frowning again. “He screeched at you...dirty monkey! Right after he threw that old poo of his at your head!”
At this, Tugli felt his shoulders straighten.
A little incredulous, he whirled on the bundle of yellow anger, its hair standing on end, its teeth bared as it glared at him with amber-colored eyes.
“Did you really throw your poo at me?” Tugli asked, more than a little affronted.
The monkey hissed. “I did! Balding ape! Inconsequential box man!”
“What did I ever do to you?”
“Where ARE THEY?” the monkey demanded again.
“Where are what?” Tugli said, bewildered again.
“THE PICKLES!”
“Ah,” Tugli said. He smiled a little, suddenly understanding. And more than a little relieved. “You are the mysterious fan of the pickles of my good friend.” He held out a hand in a friendly way, to shake the paw of his small, yellow assailant. The monkey did not deign to return the friendly gesture, and Tugli was eventually forced to lower his own hand.
“...It is very nice to meet you, little brother!” he said, acting as though the monkey had not just snubbed him. “I am so glad you have enjoyed the cooking of my friend...for I could not bear to hurt her feelings, but could not stand the smell otherwise. The stupa by now would likely be swimming in garlicky, vinegary--”
“THE PICKLES! WHERE ARE YOU HIDING THEM? WHY HAVE YOU TAKEN THEM, YOU UGLY, DIRTY-MOUTHED RIVER APE!??”
Tugli raised a hand at the hissing thing with its sharp white teeth, a peace gesture.
“I do not have them,” he said in surprise.
“DO NOT LIE TO ME!! WHERE ARE THEY?”
The monkey’s hair rose on its back; its sharp teeth bared, yellow and pointed. It was maybe the size of a large cat, but the look in its eyes contained pure hatred, the kind of resentment that comes only from a wrong having been done to one...a serious wrong.
One that is personal.