Pictures on this page courtesy Carl at GotMedieval.com, and whoever let him use their pictures!
Not much was the same after man left. That much should be clear from the rabbits and dogs. It took the dust a little while to settle, but once they got right down to brass tacks, the monkeys were the ones who looked the most like men, and they were a little rambunctious and not very mature, but that didn’t mean much when they already had hands and faces and walking upright going for them. Monkeys, in their own way, can even be kind. They’ve been known to share food and drink with cats, and they make friends with cats easier than humans. Mutually beneficial relationships, instead of lord-liege relationships as with the humans and the dogs. Cats, the monkeys found, were simply better for hunting.
The monkey’s name was Trevor. It was a good, human name, and he hoped to keep it for quite some time. Trevor was born on a Monday, after his father stole an egg from the monkey egg-layer three weeks previous. Twas a dangerous mission, but Trevor’s father and mother desperately wanted a monkey child so that they could feel like a full monkey family. He snuck up to the monkey egg-layer while it was speaking to a money-priest (the monkey vocabulary was simply not altogether inventive; monkeys add “monkey-” to everything and call it a functional word. God only knows why they didn't just use the old names. But then God likely doesn't care, or he would have taken the monkeys to monkey-heaven. Or real heaven. The monkeys were not clear about whether there was a difference. It was, after all, religion, monkey religion or otherwise.) The great egg-layer never noticed Trevor’s father, too distracted by the monkey-priest, and the monkey-priest knew than the great monkey egg-layer hated to be interrupted, especially in the middle of particularly interesting tangents, so he allowed Trevor’s father to escape, and did not worry about the loss of the egg. Trevor’s father returned home with the monkey-egg, and so they were two of the first monkeys with a family unit.
Trevor began to grow up, as any monkey grows up, and as any boy grows up. As he grew older, he started hearing more and more about the “great issues of the time”. The monkeys knew they were supposed to have philosophers and theologians, and the sole focus of those, in those times, was to properly understand A. How monkeys should be different from humans, B. How monkeys should be the same as humans, and C. Why neither God nor Stan had wanted monkeys. Monkey-philosophers and monkey-priests, each fairly confused about the difference between their professions, picked up the robes and staffs from previous priests both of the kind who had gone with Christ and the kind who had not, and began thinking very hard about why the celestial conflict did not concern them. Eventually they came up with the idea that it just didn’t, and that was what the humans called “taking something on faith.” It was apparently very important.
Among other jobs that they took were seamstresses, farmers, and what was, as near as they could figure out from pictures (it seems no monkey had witnessed the event,) the trade of destroying statues with a mallet and a chisel, which was wildly successful until everyone realized that everyone else wanted to do it. Fortunately, once they realized that it was altogether easy to have 1/5 of the people watching the farms and the rest playing games, they were able to expand greatly on monkey-culture.
Trevor had been busy. Originally he had been interested in becoming a smasher, for his father held the job of smasher, and the humans seemed to think hereditary professions were a good idea. Shortly after, the philosophers decided that breaking was not an acceptable profession, and the priests decided that everyone only had to work one day a week (or perhaps I’ve gotten those backwards.) Trevor joined the monkey-baseball team. Everyone on the team was a monkey, so they hit the balls very far when they made contact, being physically superior to the humans, except in coordination and muscle movement theories.
Trevor met one of his best friends on the team. Once, when Trevor hit the ball very far, his friend Nyles picked it up and threw it further. Nyles was out, but Trevor scored a run, and none of the other monkeys knew a rule against it, so it became the new style of play, and baseball became much more rough than National League Baseball (to say nothing of our friends in the American League.) Nyles was always coming up with new rules for games like that, and thought usually he was fun, occasionally he got the two of them in trouble.
Trevor’s mother saw a picture in a book of a human mother forcing her child to learn music, so when he was 15 in monkey years, Trevor was forced to learn the organ. It proved a very mellow instrument for a monkey, but a few of the lady monkeys who were going through melodramatic phases were attracted to organ music, and before long, Trevor was very pleased with his mother. He taught her how to play, for the two of them were very close. Society had evolved to the point where they thought smashing as a job was barbaric and backwards, so the family was not very proud of Trevor’s father. Smashing should be only for recreation, the monkeys had decided, and anyone who still did it as a job was merely being greedy.
Trevor’s first girlfriend Curnarf, had not had the blessing of parents who understood English Human names, but he didn’t care. For their first date they smashed one of the few remaining statues and ate bananas. It was a fairly typical first date, and they were both exceedingly pleased with one another. At the end of the night, after much figuring, they exchanged a kiss, which by their reckoning was crass by humans standards, but human standards were going out of fashion.
Before long they were spending all their time together, living a very happy life of monkey-baseball and bananas and smashing and each other. One day, Trevor and Curnarf were playing monkey-baseball with Nyles and some other friends (Sally, Nyles’ girlfriend, was there, but did not like monkey-baseball. Usually they could get her to play if Curnarf would play though.) They played a very close game, won by a hand-double (what happens when the runner on second throws the ball over the fence,) and everyone was excited and happy to have played. That night, Trevor asked Curnarf to marry him, and she accepted. For some reason they had lost human marriage rituals, and the monkey rituals that had developed involved touching right feet while saying vows.
Curnarf and Trevor were great lovers for many years, and one day, he stole an egg for her, shot at butterflies for her while she fished (monkeys hate butterflies, especially fisher-monkeys like Curnarf,) and did various other things that were developing as distinct parts of monkey-culture. For the most part, the monkeys were happy. The monkey-priests had decided that Christ was coming a third time (he wasn’t.) and the monkey-philosophers had decided that monkeys should be hedonists, which monkeys are meant to be.They had food, they had games, and they had love. The egg Trevor stole turned out to be an ostrich, but they loved it and raised it as their own. Unfortunately, Trevor never did shoot down a butterfly, but he was the kind of monkey that tried, and that was good enough for Curnarf.
"What Monkeys Did When Men Left" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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