The Write Idea: A Community Writing Experiment

When the Apes Took Over

It was never a question, the muddy hands in the air. They never asked questions, only pointed and gaped their chimpanzee grins until their eyes became yet another wrinkle. Night in, night out, he would stroll up and down, in front of the desks, discussing the relations between God and the dinosaurs; how velociraptors were a good insurance policy if the world ended, so that you could then point and laugh at your friend who wasted years being celibate and not enjoying wheat products. They just laughed. Education was not what it used to be.

Carl B. Blanket found his night classes the hardest to deal with. Crocodiles on a Monday morning had a firm grasp on string theory and were coming to terms with the concept of buffet eating tariffs. Egrets, although a little unsure of typewriters, made fine ballet and jazz dancers. Cows could understand that cheese was made from milk and had all ready started experimenting on how to coagulate it in the their stomachs, to produce instant cheese. Blanket went to tell them there were cans for that, but they were generating promising results.

But monkeys were far too narrow minded. Religion was so integrated into their thinking, any suggestion that God wasn’t the reason for the rain, delicious snacks on trees or why crabs made good safe crackers, provoked a bombardment of paper, clipboards, rubbers and manure, followed by bouts of laughter.

His walks home from the Ark were always introspective. He reminisced about the days before Noah, when it was all about money and squandering it. Those were good times, simple times, when it was just a 9-5 automotive system, with the weekends off occasionally.

Now, there was the possibility of 18 hour shifts, sporadic night classes due to animal feeding times, all followed by the reproduction quota that had to be filled each day. 30 hours of intercourse from each male a week, just to replenish the human race again. Sometimes, Blanket thought it was far too much to handle, especially the copious amounts of monkey shit he had to wash out of suits every week.

Submitted by blackteethwhitestripes

Outnumbered by the Numbness

She had found a swing at the very end that stood somewhat crooked but laid still, so she decided to rest there so she could collect the fight her parents just had in her mind. It was a drastic fight. They had begun getting worse since she was three years old, a year that seemed inpenetratable to her slowly hardening ego. Now at 17, their fights were silent. The bubbling anger was so pent up it could no longer be spewed at each other. When visiting the home, the rage travelled through the wooden corridors into each of the rooms. The girl thought that perhaps they were not in love, but only loved each other.

            The way their eyes met had friendship, but they were not the happiest they had been. When dancing in the park was enough for love to conquer all and it had been just the two of them, it was different. After viewing her parents fighting for 14 years, the thought had occurred that they were only together for the sake of the children. The sake of the children is what they had missed.

            She had found solace in a teenage boy’s hand. Loving her like a prized possession, he grazed his finger on her cheek and told her not to drop a tear. Torn homes they had shared, with a secret passiveness bleeding on the inside. Escaping through the pores and shedding on their friends, their jokes ran deep within the souls they crushed and the joy they longed for. For the rum solved her problems like the last answer to a crossword puzzle, she fought and died for the pain she once tried to escape from. Its wrath laid its creamy fingers around her freckled neck and her silver necklace she had received as a young girl snapped and fell in the well. If only this were the lullaby she had sunk her teeth into when she could still breathe the words “I Love You.” The drug of choice could follow you home, step inside, and live beneath the cellar door, ready to pull your skinny, knobby ankles at any given moment. The fear was nearly worse than the overload itself.

            One day, she woke up without a single doubt strewn across her bored mind. Stimulation was necessary to her dynamic success. She had laid in her lumpy bed, swollen lip and bruised head from stumbling home after getting drunk another night at Alvester’s spittoon and snacks. This was the final time she told herself, for she always wanted to be that magazine cutout of a happy, successful family barbecuing lean steaks. It was that morning she prepared herself for the utmost grace and prosperity, ready to overrule whatever tasks the devil had in store for her. For now, good had replaced that piece of her brain, with deeds and equipped failure ready to take force. She willed herself to be who she was before she got possessed by a woman who didn’t like the mirror and spiked her morning coffee. If only, if only, her old friends had known.