The Monkey King is the king of the monkeys. He rules over seventeen monkeys. The monkeys are real fast. Walk into their kingdom and they will steal your valuables before you realize there’s even a monkey. They will steal your valuables and bring them to the Monkey King.
The kingdom is made up of sticks and tar and iron and old VHS players. The Monkey King turns all the stolen valuables into Freedom of Spirit. The Monkey King and his underlings divvy up and eat the Freedom of Spirit. They all get equal shares except the Monkey King gets a little bit more because otherwise he wouldn’t be the Monkey King.
The Monkey King has been around for thousands of years. He used to have eighteen subordinates, but now he has seventeen. The monkeys own two VHS tapes that they sometimes play on the old VHS players. One tape is Balto. The other is Babe: Pig in the City. The monkeys don’t watch movies linearly, they pause and rewind and skip around. So, for example, Babe: Pig in the City might be a movie about a pig running away from a pitbull for four hours three minutes one time, while another time it might be a movie about a woman training to be a bicycle champion as she navigates multiple prison stints, while another time it might be a movie about a pig that leaves his hardened life in the big city to go kill a farmer in a well.
A biologist in 1883 heard a rumor about the Monkey King and went to go visit him. The biologist was named George L. Shelperdin. Idiot, this biologist. He would follow around the Monkey King and take notes. He would write stuff in his journal like “moderate- to medium-large pre-frontal snout.” He fell down a cliffside and cracked his skull open and his skin and tissue decomposed and he became just bones.
All the monkeys, including the Monkey King, are male. They jerk off constantly and have sex with each other. Sometimes they stand on the coast of their monkey kingdom and try to throw pieces of tar-coated iron at ships passing some thirty kilometers away and sometimes they hit them and sometimes the ships sink. The monkeys shit with their asses facing the sky.
The Monkey King and his underlings only eat Freedom of Spirit, but they drink water, coconut juice, rocks, and wine. They like to get drunk. They like to throw up. They like to throw up in the ocean. They are great swimmers and they like to throw up in the ocean and fuck fish in the mouth and sharks in the gills. They like to replace starfish with stars and vice-versa.
(One time a monkey held a yellowtail snapper’s mouth flush around his penis and pissed until the fish blew up like a balloon and exploded, and now the monkeys sometimes do that and call it “brackbooing,” by the way.) (Also, their puke has an electric-blue tinge on account of the Freedom of Spirit, by the way.)
The Monkey Kingdom has no holidays and no workdays and no weekends. Sometimes it’s sunny at midnight and sometimes it’s pitch black in the afternoon. There are no rules in the Monkey Kingdom besides that there is a Monkey King and he has seventeen subordinates.
Tonight the moon is red and full and the Monkey King says it’s time they do The Ritual. They haven’t done The Ritual in 837 years, but the Monkey King says now is the time. One of the monkeys is wearing half of George L. Shelperdin’s skull as a hat and another is gnawing on his left femur, and the Monkey King says take that off and put that down, it’s time to be serious.
The Monkey King runs into the middle of the island and returns with a young woman. The woman washed up from a shipwreck two and a half weeks ago and has been kept in a box. Usually the Monkey King lets shipwrecks wander and die of their own accord, but this one he put in a box made of sharp sticks. The woman has been given one spoonful of tar a day. Her cheekbones are about to pierce her skin and her legs are trembling. She is wearing jean shorts with a cloth belt pulled as tight as it will go and a pale yellow tank which drapes her body. Her wrists and ankles are clasped together with twisted iron. The monkeys grab her, three on each limb, remove the restraints, and replace them with rope. They tie the ends of each rope to two poles of iron, so her arms and legs are splayed out and pulled taught and she hangs frozen, suspended five feet in the air. The Monkey King jumps up and down and chants some sounds, and the other monkeys chant completely different sounds after him. The Monkey King tells the woman that the last time they did this ritual they chanted a few times and then let the woman go and built her a boat and piled it with coconuts and sent her on her way. The Monkey King says that this time, though, he is going to maul her face. The Monkey King mauls the woman’s face. The Monkey King unties the woman with no skin on her face and she runs around and falls and gets up and runs again. One of her eyeballs is half an eyeball. The other one is missing entirely. The woman runs down a cliffside—not the same cliffside idiot Shelperdin fell down, but extremely similar in all its pertinent characteristics—and the woman tumbles down and breaks both of her legs and several vertebrae in her spine. The Monkey King says, good Ritual.
Then the Monkey King says it’s time they do The Ritual. They did The Ritual 13 seconds ago, but the Monkey King says now is the time. The Monkey King says the monkeys will have to engage him in a battle of wits. Whoever beats him becomes the next Monkey King. Then he laughs. Nah, I’m just foolin’, he says. I’m the Monkey King and we’re doing something else.
He directs the monkeys to make a mound of sticks, and the monkeys stack up sticks until the pile is about the size of an adult elephant, and he says stop. The Monkey King rubs one stick into another for three-quarters of a second and the mound ignites. The fire is massive and orange and hot.
The Monkey King looks at the fire and leans back and then projectile vomits a stream of chunky bile into its flames. The fire crackles. Claps as loud as gunshots ring out. The whole thing takes on a cyan hue. Smoke dances above the flames, twisting into shapes and figures and then intricate, sharply-defined images. The smoke is a deep blue-gray and twice the size of the fire itself. The Monkey King and the monkeys look into the smoke and the images multiply within each other, each a potential future, a potential path, followed by all possible branches from that path, and so on; the paths are infinite but somehow contained in the finite space of the smoke and the finite time of their viewing, they shouldn’t be infinite but they are, and so each monkey peers into the boundless possibilities of their life and every action they can take or not take, every step they can shorten or lengthen or kill a bug directly before or after or join a modestly successful dentist’s private practice or brackboo a hippo or track quasars through the cosmos. The smoke whirls and the moon is red. The moon is quaint. The moon is the outline of a dungaree tiger.
The monkeys dance and chant and scream and in the background is the faint hum of the woman’s moans and the monkeys crow and neigh and hiss and bite the air and the Monkey King is the loudest of them all.
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Tyler Plofker is a fan of words. Some of his favorites include the following: porridge, guts, the, and, salt.
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image: Beverly Monaco is a writer and photographer born and raised in Los Angeles. She has been published in Fuzz Magazine, as well as some campus magazines and newspapers.
Rejection Letters 