How August Monkey Appeared and June and July Got Sprung
A story from Just The Fur Of Us:
Tales From the Thousand and One Monkeying Nights
Two days later, June received a package from the pope.
In it was a letter stating his enormous admiration for her
contribution to the Church and politely reminding her of his
request that she speak with the bonobos. As she opened the
package, she munched a bit on the yellow tissue-paper inside,
wondering whether it contained any banana; since it didn't,
she spat out the paper. Inside the paper was an enormous straw
hat with many different kinds of plastic fruit on the brim and
crown: cherries, strawberries, kiwis, raspberries, grapes,
miniature apples and bananas. June was delighted. She tried on
the hat, looking at herself in the mirror of her water bowl, and
bent over slightly, which caused one of the plastic apples on the
crown to swing slightly on its nylon thread. June took off the
hat, contemplated the plastic apple now lying flat on the straw,
put her teeth around the apple, and started biting it gingerly and
sucking on it. After several fruitless efforts, she said to herself,
"Hm, this must be some sort of exotic Italian fruit. I've never had
fruit like this before. But I'll give another try." This time, she
bit off the nylon thread; put the entire plastic apple in her mouth;
explored it briefly with her tongue, teeth, and saliva; and spat it
out. "I think I'll try the strawberries," thought June. She nibbled
at one of the plastic strawberries, but it made her teeth hurt, so she
immediately ripped it off the hat and spat that out, too. "I don't
think this fruit is for me," she decided. Noticing the empty spaces
from the plucked apple and the strawberry, and being an artist, she
observed that the hat was no longer proportioned. Therefore, she
decided to pluck some more fruit out. She plucked one out...and then
another...and another...and plucked out all the fruit.
"This is no good," she thought, and threw the hat in the corner of
the cage she shared with July. July barely noticed it as he swung on
the monkey bars, and June began to occupy herself with her crayons and
oils. Later that day, however, July looked at the hat more
attentively. "Hm," he grunted to himself; an idea was beginning to
form in his deeply intelligent chimpanzee brain, but without the human
language to express it, it remained only a vague stirring.
"Something to show," thought July to himself but could go no further--
though he stared at the hat some more, while June, who had finished her
work for the day, looked longingly outside the bars, thinking of the
kind, balding man in the funny hat and the delicious fruit he had given
her in his big house.
It was soon after that, in fact, that June and July began to appear
increasingly moody. They had both gotten quite a charge from June's
repeated telling of her visit to Vatican City, but the electricity
was beginning to lose its vibrancy. Both spent more and more time
staring outside the bars and ignoring their ladders and swings. June
was even neglecting her art.