THE MONKEY WHO DISCOVERED LOVE

The last story in a connected group

How has it come to this, thought Chimpwig to himself whilst crouching on a thorn that he hadn’t noticed when he’d selected that spot as a repository for his faeces, how has it come to be that I’m that most miserable member of my tribe and yet don’t want to eat the b***h now that she’s dead?

Scarly had been a gift from the squint eyed tribe to him and from the moment he had set eyes on her he had experienced something brand new. He didn’t have a word for it, of course, but in later millennia it was going to be called love. And from that first moment all he’d ever wanted to do was protect her.

He wiped himself with a half-dead leaf and returned to the nest he shared with the deceased.

That wasn’t exactly a new thing, the idea that b*****s needed protection because they sometimes did. And it would have gone against every instinct for a male to stand aside whilst the mother of his nippers was being savaged by another. He would have to protect her, else who would feed those nippers, especially the tiny one who still suckled on his mother’s teat?

But latterly he’d wanted to protect her all the time even when there was no challenge to her flesh or right to live. It had made him into a bit of a laughing stock amongst the other males, but what the heck? That didn’t matter because he knew somewhere in the shallow recesses of his monkey mind that he was right.

But now she had died. Like that, out of the blue and with very little warning. One day she had been her usual lovely self, and that’s what he called it, a lovely self, and the next she was weak, feeble and almost incoherent when she grumbled and clicked and squeaked her way through explaining just how awful she felt, and then, one more day of her life later, she was dead.

He looked at her with more passion than was ever seen ln the face and in the heart of his tribe of monkeys. Scarly was no more! And what's more, he was hungry, it was a poor season for hunting and scavenging in the briars and far into the forest, but even being hungry the last thing he could do was eat her.

He sat in one corner of the nest they shared, under the shelter of an old tree, and found himself weeping when he looked at her.

To our eyes, yours and mine, reader, she was hardly a beauty though some might find pleasure in the scarlet of her hair, the colour of which had hardly faded as she had grown older. But overall she was a dead monkey, and that would have to be that.

Yet it wasn’t.

Chimpwig couldn’t face the reality, that she was dead and already giving off the faint aroma of death. Some, when they died, if they were important enough, were taken up to the high place where their ancestor Chimpo had been laid to rest, but they were few and far between, especially in a season when hunger was more likely than a full belly.

And as thoughts like these went through his mind he recalled things that were grunted in the guttural language of his tribe, about the renowned Chimpo, a monkey whose name still lived on despite the age that had elapsed since his death.

Then parts of the old stories returned in odd fragments into his mind.

Chimpo had been a gazer at the stars. He had been the first one to see his gods in those odd twinkling lights that were the essence of old stories when the skies were clear. He knew them by what they did, the gods of the trees and the mountains and the streams, the gods of the rains and the storms, the gods of the bright sunlight.

Those gods, thought Chimpwig, were like spirits in the night. Maybe they had once been what Chimpo had named them as. Maybe that bright one, the reddish one that wandered freely across the skies, independent of the other stars, had really been a free-spirited warrior, defending his people, maybe even the red headed folk that Scarly had been with as well, against wild beasts that would destroy and kill if he weren’t there primed and ready for a starry fight.

Yes, thought Chimpwig, that must be what it had been once, when it had been a living, breathing monkey somewhere in the vastness of the forest, and like Scarly, it had died to be raised to the heavens as a star.

All life dies, doesn’t it? He shuddered at the thought because he was well aware that some of his tribe who he had seen as tiny nippers had grown to old age, not particularly ripe of age, but old enough to die … and they had died. And they had lived all their lives, from start to finish, whilst he had been living his.

It made sense that it must be his turn soon.

He had already lived for too long. Longer than Scarly, and that was terrible.

And suddenly he knew what he must do. It was down to him, and him alone.

He must take Scarly up to the high place where the dead were sometimes lain, and watch as the gods took her spirit to the skies. She deserved the easiest of transitions, from the world of monkeys to the world of the stars.

She was no light weight, but he could lift her. He could manage to hold her in his arms and stagger with her the tortuous route to the high place where the gods, Chimpo’s gods, would be waiting for her.

The night was star-lit, which made his last journey possible. There were obstacles on the way, things he might trip or stumble over, but the starlight helped him avoid the worst.

He was breathless when he finally stood on the flat surface where the dead were occasionally laid, breathless and weary as he gently rested the still and increasingly aromatic last remains of his Scarly down on cold green turves, to wait for the stars to take her.

Then he did the impossible, or if not impossible unknown.

He placed his living lips momentarily on her dead lips and felt the coldness of them.

Then he laid himself down next to her. He had one more thing to do before he returned to the nest he had shared with Scarly, and that was to say a final goodbye when her spirit, or whatever it was, became one with the night sky and another star in the heavens.

He lay there still and silent.

An eagle chanced that way, a gigantic bird of prey who had found little to prey on in that hungry season.

And it spied Scarly and Chimpwig lying side by side, and it detected that one was fresher meat than the other, and it preferred fresh meat.

With a sudden flurry of huge wings it landed on the fresh meat and went for the eyes first, claws gripping with the force of a hungry avian giant as it dragged the blood-red meat and the life from one who stopped mourning the moment his old monkey heart was stilled before he could even look to see the stars that took his love.

And then, replete, it flew to the stars, momentarily blotting them out as it passed the cold red headed body of a dead b***h and the torn remnants of the monkey who discovered love.

© Peter Rogerson 09.11.19