« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
March 2, 2021
Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles - "Monkey Parts" by Kyle Hemmings
The Flash Dancers: Ekphrastic Singles series is curated by Meg Pokrass. Authors share an original work of flash fiction inspired by a song.
"Monkey Parts" by Kyle Hemmings
Inspired by the Monkees' "Gonna Buy Me a Dog "
Parent-teacher night. Miss Hathaway with the hooked nose and dress so tight it smothers her breasts, tells Mom that I’m just “average”. “His mind,” she says with clenched teeth because of the dress, “seems to be elsewhere”. My mother comes home and tells me Miss H thinks you lost your mind. And that you’re just average.
Does that mean I will never grow beyond or under?
I can’t read the future, she says, chewing a raw carrot. She’s turning vegetarian so she can look like Goldie Hawn. Mom keeps reminding me that having me was not all her fault. Chomp. Chomp.
On the Monkees TV show, Mickey Dolenz sings how he’s gonna buy himself a dog. I’m gonna buy myself a propeller, attach it to my nose and buzz over the neighborhood’s rooftops. Just to get a different view.
Just to get them to look up.
My sister’s monkey, No Name, (she loves spaghetti westerns), sits in a high chair, holding a reading book upside down. My sister says he’s precocious. She also complains of stomach pains from a period whenever a date tries to go past first base. No Name escapes into Mom’s rose garden and leaves his precious droppings. I tell sis that sometimes I think her brains are made of monkey fertilizer. In my dreams, I am an outcast kid with an average face who must hide his tail in his oversized denim pants.
The summer No Name escapes for the last time into some distant rain jungle where there is no hope of rope bridges or free bananas, the summer my sister confides to me and her glass menagerie that she slept with John Lennon, Mother informs us that Grandpa (on her correct genealogical tree) was taken to the emergency room after complaining to my balding, UFO-obsessed uncle that his lungs felt like concrete. There is a sweet, putrid smell of cigar smoke around him. He denies the existence of rich invisible clouds, ones that you could walk on in your isolated kingdom.
We visit Grandpa in the hospital. The room seems to tilt. He says he wants to get back to his gardening because he always finds rare coins in the soil. The flesh on his arms is papery and deeply bruised. “They give me more needles than after I fought at The Sommes.”
My mother says Grandpa served as an ambulance driver in Italy during the war. When he tells us how he held off a long, jagged line of Germans with a Gatling machine gun, how General Pershing pinned no less than five bronze medals on his chest, the room expands with old testosterone.
Kyle Hemmings has work published in Sonic Boom, Unbroken Journal, INCH, and elsewhere. His work has been featured in Best Micro Anthologies. His latest collection of text and art is Amnesiacs of Summer published by Yavanika Press. He still listens to 60s garage bands who never had a major hit.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
