Deja Vu

Deja vu... To see something happen over again. What does it mean? If one believes in the Old Testament God, maybe a chance of salvation.

That is the question of time. To see the Bible change - they call it the Mandela Effect. However, my monkeys are pretty, and here they only fly, fly, fly... Making this a surreal game of who is real and what is happening.

In a closed time-curved loop - people could change. And yet? If I am from the future, this is the past. And? Nothing changed. Just a time traveler ranting: do not use thermonuclear weapons.

From Guest Contributor Clinton Siegle

My Forest Camp

At my forest camp, he collapses on to the mattress in my tent, and is asleep in moments. I pack my travel bag, leave him a note saying he can have the tent and everything in it, light some incense and put it at my tiny shrine to Lord Ganesh, say a prayer for him and the other strugglers around here, feed peanuts to the local monkeys, my friends for the last few months, and walk back along the path into the village and across the bridge over the River Ganges towards Rishikesh, to get a bus back to Delhi.

From Guest Contributor Stephen House

Abracadabra Universe

I got to tell you, what a computer thinks a man looks like, adversarially evolved hallucinations, is the kind of shit that wears me out. But, apparently, it isn’t the kind of shit that wears most other people out. Their focus is just too taken up with acquiring the essentials – liquor, guns, toilet paper, travel bottles of hand sanitizer – for them to ever notice the heart lying in rags at their feet, or the African monkeys rafting across the Atlantic, or the shrill, jangly sound in the background that can be variously translated as “hello” or “goodbye” or even “peace.”

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Robot Monkeys

“Daddy, why are there bars on the robot monkeys’ windows?”

Roger picked a bit of cotton candy off his son’s nose. “Danny, it’s a zoo.”

“But Daddy, they aren’t wild animals like the others. We don’t keep our robots in cages.”

Roger laughed and tousled Danny’s hair. “Well, Buddy, our robots have Gen IX brains. These little guys are first generation. Nobody wants them and they could never survive on their own.”

“But why keep them then? Why aren’t they just recycled?”

“Daniel. We’re not barbarians. We gave them life. We can’t just throw them away. Besides, aren’t they cute?”

From Guest Contributor Simon Hole

Beautiful George

It's hard to believe, but there was a time in the early 21st century when serious art had fallen out of fashion. Everything was pop culture and reality TV and Banksy.

Then Jurgen Mather changed everything.

To say that his painting, Beautiful George, was popular would be like calling the Pope fat. Everyone loved it, including the critics. Single-handedly, it created an artistic revival that continues today.

Of course, in order to be considered art now, a piece must include at least one monkey, but like Earnest Hemingway used to say, monkey art is better than no art at all.

Endeavor

Chet sat his desk daily in four-hour shifts from 6am to 7pm, with fifteen-minute breaks in between. The working conditions weren’t the worst he’d encountered. At least they had a ceiling fan.

Chet’s job was to type the word “endeavor.” When he was first hired, sixteen years ago, his word had been “the,” but then Peterson had died and so he got promoted.

Every fifteen seconds, a new page was handed to him, and he typed his word. Then the page was taken away, and a new page came. They were distributed randomly, going from station to station, until they had 120 pages. Mostly the scripts were incoherent gibberish, but every once in a while, they’d have a blockbuster.

Though Chet didn’t think it was a very efficient system, Hollywood found it cheaper than training monkeys to use a typewriter. Chet certainly wasn’t going to complain. It beat crunching numbers.

Today's story is exactly 150 words, but you get it for the same low price as always!

The Family

PB came from a peculiar family. His siblings included an elephant, an owl, an orca, a duck, two monkeys, a chicken, a snake, a dinosaur, and a snowman. They sometimes went on strange adventures, though mostly they lazed around telling funny stories to each other. He often suspected they were figments of his imagination, but he heard their voices even as he pretended to ignore them.

He decided he wanted to understand how he came to be part of such a family so PB hired a private detective.

He was unsurprised when the detective informed him that he was adopted.

They Won't Make A Monkey Out Of Him

Even in childhood, William George dreamed of traveling in space. Rather than play outside, he would read science magazines. Instead of trips to the zoo, he built telescopes.

During adolescence, there were few friends, and no girls. Though he disliked sports, he ran cross-country in order to meet the physical requirements. He received his doctorate in Mathematics before he had turned twenty-five.

NASA immediately accepted him into the astronaut program.

Thirty years later, he still has never been to the zoo. How could he go to the primate house knowing that chimpanzees have been to outer space, but not him?