The Monkey Who Wanted to be A Boy by Jennifer Green (chromebook ebook reader .TXT) 📕

to be, things got worse. A female put him in a sitting-place and told him to stay there. He stayed for a while, while she made mouth noises, then decided he wanted to go look at something else instead.

She put him back.

He stayed for a while, then decided he was hungry and wanted to see if he could find some food that had been stashed away.

She put him back.

He stayed just long enough to notice a high window near his seat, and as soon as the female’s back was turned, he made a dash for it, intending to leap up to it and escape.

His leap didn’t bring him anywhere near the window. He fell down, and scraped his knee, and she put him back yet again, while the other young people made the laugh-noises at him. He felt awful. Suddenly the laugh-noises didn’t seem so fun.

Then the female called him up to stand at the very front of the cave, where all the people could see him. He wondered if she was going to ask him to make faces or do tricks, but instead she put a white stick in his hand and pointed him towards a big flat green rock. There were incomprehensible scribbles on it, and he gathered that she wanted him to make more scribbles. He stared at the rock for a long time, willing the scribbles to make more sense, but they never did. Finally, as the female got more and more insistent and the young ones behind her made more and more laugh-noises, he began to add his own scribbles – tentatively at first, but then he gained more confidence. He started scribbling in every corner of the board, filling it with interesting scribble-designs. He even incorporated the female’s scribbles into his own, thinking she would like that. Then he stepped back, proud of his work, and looked around at the other people.

He wasn’t sure what their wide-eyed stares meant, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t the same thing as smiling and clapping.

The rest of the day didn’t get much better.

Meanwhile, Cody was discovering that life as a monkey wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Yes, climbing and swinging and hanging by his tail was fun, but to a boy used to comic books and bicycles and soccer practice and video games, it paled after the first several hours. He began to wonder if monkeys ever got do do anything else, and the answer seemed to be no. Also, breakfast this morning was the exact same thing as dinner last night was, and he had a sinking feeling that lunch would be the same. Not that he had anything against fruits and vegetables… but Monday was always pizza and tater tots in the school cafeteria, and he was pretty sure monkeys never got pizza. Or tater tots.

Also, he seemed to have some kind of bugs living in his fur. Gross. He saw other monkeys picking through each other’s fur and pulling out the bugs, and wondered how you got someone to do that. Maybe you had to offer them a banana? He tried, but none of the other monkeys seemed interested. Dejected, and a little itchy, he went back to dangling from his branch.

When the yellow metal thing finally brought the monkey back to his cave, he perked up. Now, maybe he’d finally get to play! Alas, it was not to be. Everything he picked up, the female yelled at him to put down. Every time he tried to climb something, she told him to come back down. He found one toy that looked really interesting – just by pushing some buttons, he could make it make lights, AND colors, AND noises! He could even make the noises louder by pushing more buttons! Excited, the monkey jumped all around the room, hooting and screeching in glee at the strange sights and sounds the toy was creating.

That was when the female put him outside the cave.

Outside, he saw two young ones of about his age. They seemed to be playing some version of the chase game, but they played it on strange metal contraptions with two large wheels. Excited, the monkey looked around to see if he could find one – he knew the chase game! And lo and behold, in the back of the cave was a two-wheeled metal thing too. The monkey jumped onto it happily, started pumping his feet to move himself forward…

…and the metal thing toppled over and dumped him unceremoniously on the ground.

It hurt, and the laugh-noises the other young ones made hurt too. The monkey wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong, but he glared at the contraption and backed away from it, retreating back behind the cave.

There, he found an extra-large tree. He looked up and up, and there, near the very top, was a branch that reminded him very much of his favorite branch back home. Feeling suddenly homesick, he started to climb up to it.

Or at least he tried to. People, apparently, don’t climb as well as monkeys. He got up as far as the lowest branch, and then he just couldn’t seem to get himself any higher. He couldn’t climb! On top of everything else in this rotten day, he couldn’t even climb a simple tree!

The monkey slunk back down to the ground, and he sat down next to the tree, and felt very sorry for himself. After a little while he realized water was coming out of his eyes, and he figured this must be a people thing too, and he didn’t like it either.

Two weeks went by.

Every day, Cody woke up, ate the same fruits and vegetables for breakfast, and climbed despondently up and down the tree. Sometimes he swung on the ropes, just for something else to do. The other monkeys ignored him, because he didn’t know their games. In the afternoons, sometimes he’d cheer up a little and try to entertain the people who came to see the monkeys, but he could never keep it up for long. He missed his friends. He missed his mom. He missed his toys and his video games and his soccer practices. And every night he’d look up at the stars through the wires of the monkey enclosure, and wish that he was a little boy again.

Every day, the monkey woke up, ate food whether he wanted it or not, and trudged off to the yellow metal thing that brought him to the big cave. There, he sat through hour after hour of sitting still and not playing with anything, while the big female made droning mouth-noises and scribbles. Sometimes he got yelled at, and he never understood why. None of the other young ones would play with him, because he didn’t know their games. In the afternoons, he’d try again to climb, but he never got much better at it. The large female in his cave fussed over him, and talked about taking him somewhere so someone could take a look at him, and the fact that he was making her unhappy made him even more miserable. He missed the other monkeys. He missed his favorite branch. He missed the crowds of people who would smile and laugh and throw peanuts and popcorn when he did silly tricks for them. He missed being able to climb and swing, and wondered how he could ever have gotten bored of it. And every night, he’d lay back on the soft thing and look out the window at the stars, and wish that he was a monkey again.

One day, the yellow thing didn’t come to take him away, but the monkey couldn’t get up the energy to even leave the cave. The female hovered over him, asking him if he’d like to do this thing or that thing, trying to get him to respond. Finally she asked him if he’d like to go back to the zoo. At this, the monkey perked up. If he couldn’t be a monkey again, at least he’d like to see them. So he said yes, and they got into the fast metal thing and they went.

And it was fun, he had to admit. He liked the room with all the birds in it, and he liked seeing the alligators – from a distance! And of course he liked the strawberry ice cream. But then they came back to the monkey enclosure, and he just looked up in homesickness. There were all his old monkey friends, having fun without him, climbing and swinging and playing with toys without a care in the world! There was his old branch! And there, on the branch – there was the monkey that used to be him!

He guessed the little boy must be having lots of fun being a monkey. After all, it was much better, he had decided, than being a boy.

So he was surprised when the monkey on the branch reached out a paw towards him, a longing, wistful look in its eyes. But he reached back up towards it, his heart filled with equal longing…

FLASH!

The monkey looked down, and relief washed over him. He was himself! He was a monkey! He’d never felt so overjoyed to see his own branch, his own enclosure. He looked back down, and the boy on the ground had a smile so big, it looked like it would split his face.

The monkey raised a paw, and the boy raised a hand. For just a moment, they waved farewell to each other.

Then Cody tugged on his mother’s hand and asked to go see the tigers, and the monkey scampered off to find someone to play the chase game with. And they both lived happily ever after.

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Publication Date: 08-25-2011

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