MonkeyFish

MonkeyFish

© Chris Boyd 2009

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Raven stole the onion. He carried it high over the fields before dropping it down an old stone well. He didn’t have the slightest idea why he took it, and he never learned what happened afterwards, but his prank provoked MonkeyFish and allowed her story to begin. Everything is connected to everything else.

MonkeyFish lived in the well. The water was deep, but even so, she was terrified when something—she didn’t know what onions were; there were a great many things she didn’t know—came splashing down on top of her. “Agggh!” cried MonkeyFish. “That wasn’t a bucket! Someone’s throwing rocks at me!”

When MonkeyFish calmed down she swam over and investigated. The thing looked like a brown rock with grass growing from one end, and roots from the other. Perhaps it was good to eat. MonkeyFish tried some. The grass burned her mouth in a good way, and she nibbled it down to the rock. Then she ate the roots—which were less satisfying—and finally unwrapped the brown paper to see what was inside: a white globe. MonkeyFish was feeling full, so she washed down her meal with three snails and a drink of cold water. By then it was almost dark, so she went to sleep. The onion could wait.

The next morning the onion glowed like a white pearl in the center of MonkeyFish’s world. “Time for breakfast!” She swam out of her mossy bed for another nibble. Every day she ate a layer of the onion, but as it became smaller and smaller, her daily portions slowly diminished. On the longest day of summer MonkeyFish ate the onion’s slender core, and it was done.

MonkeyFish liked to eat, but there weren’t many things she could eat, and the onion had been a wonderful surprise. On the bottom of the well were snails, worms, larva and moss, and on the surface she found flies, moths, and the occasional spider. All things considered, new foods were scarce in the well. MonkeyFish tried to imagine where the onion had come from. Her parents (deceased) had taught her the correct attitudes and behaviors for every situation, and had considered curiosity to be not only irrelevant, but a positive mistake. But MonkeyFish was curious, and once again she realized there were many things she didn’t know. 

As MonkeyFish swam laps she wondered why the well-stones were arranged in circles. Sometimes a beam of light shined into the well, and then MonkeyFish could see the bottom clearly. She saw leaves, sticks, and old rusty cans, but she didn’t know what these things were, or where they came from. She didn’t even know what the light was, or why it always went away. When it was dark, MonkeyFish sometimes saw twinkling spots high above the water, but she didn’t know how far away they were, or what they knew. When drops of water splashed over her head in the dark, MonkeyFish liked to fall asleep to the beautiful sound. But awake or asleep, she always wondered.

One shivering evening, when ragged leaves floated on the well water like a patchwork blanket, MonkeyFish had a dream. She dreamed wings and flew. At first, she spun in circles under the dark water, faster and faster. Then she rose up through the wet leaves, higher and higher. Finally, she spiraled up the whole well and exploded into a starry night.

First, she looked down. She saw her well, which looked like a dot. “So this is where onions come from,” she thought. Then she looked up. The air was dry and clear, and she saw every star at once. MonkeyFish was awestruck and stopped flapping. Finally, she began to fall. “No!” She flapped hard and managed to stay aloft.

         MonkeyFish watched the sun rise from the sticky branches of a pine tree. By this time she was exhausted, dehydrated and discouraged. She realized that exploring the world was difficult work, and that she might miss breakfast. Perhaps she should have stayed at home.

         A Red-tailed Hawk sailed past in the morning light, and MonkeyFish admired its grace and agility. She wished to be such a bird, and suddenly, she was. MonkeyFish was delighted. She circled high over the trees and looked around, amazed by her razor-sharp vision and superb aerodynamics. For a long time she soared, dived, and spun in corkscrew patterns, intoxicated by freedom. Then she felt hungry.

         Since there were no onions floating in the sky that morning, MonkeyFish picked a direction and flew, scanning the ground for food. When she passed over a town she noticed a group of birds having breakfast together in a park. A woman on a bench was scattering bread, and although MonkeyFish didn’t understand the ritual, she decided to join them.

         MonkeyFish was so hungry she went into a power dive—her new favorite maneuver—aiming directly at the pigeons. As she was about to land the birds went crazy, flying off in all directions. The woman screamed when MonkeyFish landed in front of her, and MonkeyFish screeched back a reply. When she gobbled a few pieces of bread, however, she knew right away it wasn’t her proper food, so she decided to look elsewhere. MonkeyFish trimmed her wings and walked along an asphalt path that led towards a statue of a man riding a horse. Everywhere she went, squirrels and songbirds panicked and dispersed shrieking. MonkeyFish didn’t understand their behavior, but she enjoyed the notoriety. When she reached the statue she saw a pigeon perched on the horse’s rump.

         All at once MonkeyFish realized what her proper food was. Her Hawk eyes zoomed to the succulent pigeon, scrutinizing its plump form with epicurean delight. In three seconds she had a plan: she would burst into flight, grab the pigeon’s back with her left foot and its neck with her right, and carry it to the top of the nearest church steeple. Then she would rip its head off, slide her beak into its belly, and rip out its guts—at which point she could dine at her leisure. The plan itself was a thing of beauty. 

         She concentrated her whole mind on the pigeon…waiting, waiting…waiting for the perfect moment. She identified with the other bird so intently that she felt herself merging with it; fusing…

“Oh, no!”

MonkeyFish became the pigeon for real, and was forced to flap away feeling fat and foolish. After a few minutes bumbling in the branches she learned to fly the new bird. What it lacked in vision and maneuverability was compensated by an uncanny sense of direction. When she remembered the bread lady, she navigated to the spot directly.

MonkeyFish gobbled the leftover crumbs. As she tried out her first “Coo-oo, co-ooo,” something she hadn’t noticed leapt off the bench and tried to scratch her feathers off. As quick as instinct, MonkeyFish boomed skyward. She turned in the air and saw Cat, who hissed ferociously. MonkeyFish imagined retaliating, and as Hawk, she did.

She grabbed Cat by the scruff of the neck and carried her aloft. After three turns around the church steeple, MonkeyFish took her passenger on a scenic tour of the district. When she became tired she released her burden.

Cat fell seventeen-hundred and eighty-six feet—howling all the way down—and landed in a lake where a pack of water spaniels was learning to retrieve dead ducks. One of the dogs mistook Cat for a duck and dragged her to shore (accidentally saving her life), but Cat remained sullen until the following spring, and she never stalked pigeons again.

         MonkeyFish flew on until she saw a comfortable-looking apple orchard on the side of a hill. It was blossom time, and she spiraled down for a closer look. “These trees are magnificent!” said MonkeyFish, “I wonder what it feels like to be a tree?”

         One of the trees approached, embowering her until she was the tree. MonkeyFish felt her roots extending deep into the earth and her leafy limbs embracing the sky. A thousand things happened at once, and she was astonished by her tree’s vitality.

MonkeyFish felt some fungus growing on her trunk, near a place where a deer had once chewed the bark. She concentrated her mind on the fungus until she became the fungus. She felt herself eating the dead wood; absorbing moisture; making spores; and being scorched by the sun. She realized that even as the tree was growing and living, it was also being attacked and dying. She became aware of some aphids chewing holes in her leaves. She became an aphid, feeling a gnawing thirst to suck leaf-juice, and a blind lust to create more juice-sucking aphids.

         “A tree is not a single thing,” thought MonkeyFish. “It never ends! The soil where it grows is deep and vast; the wind that shakes its leaves may have traveled hundreds of miles; the sunlight that is its energy comes from farther away than birds can fly; and the bees, deer, aphids and people that eat from it carry away a part of the tree with them. The tree never ends because it’s connected to everything else. The whole world seems to come together to make a single tree, and so I imagine that what happens to the tree also affects everything else.” MonkeyFish was pleased to have become such an important tree. “But if the tree is the whole world, what is the flower?” she asked. 

And so she became a single apple blossom. She bloomed from a wrinkled little spur near the bottom of the trunk, and her pink-white petals fluttered in the gentle breeze. Her stamens were ripe with pollen, and her ovary dreamed of apples. She felt her molecules rearranging themselves into aromatic chemicals. Excreting them, she perfumed the wind. When her pollen’s destiny became a burden, she prayed for a bee to find her.

         The bee landed on her outer petals with a buzzing bump before scurrying to the center to taste her nectar. As the bee sipped her juices, its feet and legs rubbed against the tip of her stigma, transferring fragments of pollen from all the other flowers it had visited that day. MonkeyFish was feeling promiscuous.

         “Now I want to be the bee,” she said, and without even asking the bee’s permission, she swapped identities with it. I never found out if the bee was happy as an apple blossom, but MonkeyFish thoroughly enjoyed being a bee. She had beautiful rows of yellow and black hairs, buzzing wings, six legs, and antennas that could smell as well as a hawk can see. However, the best part was her eyes; eyes that could see even more colors than people could. With her ultraviolet vision the flowers looked like targets, and their fragrance excited her like a fever. Sipping the blossoms’ nectar through her proboscis was intoxicating, and she managed to gather so much pollen—storing it on her thighs—that she was barely able to fly home with the other bees at quitting time. When she arrived at the hive, she felt a sudden compulsion to buzz madly and dance in circles. 

         MonkeyFish lived with the bees for the rest of the summer, changing identities with some of them so she could experience the whole life of the hive. She fanned the Queen, carried eggs, cleaned up after a beekeeper collected the honeycombs, and excreted wax to build perfect, honey-filled hexagons. Once, when a stray wasp wandered into the hive, MonkeyFish and hundreds of her coworkers swarmed over it, trapping the intruder inside a hot, buzzing ball of bees.

         Like the notes in a song or the letters on this page, the individual bees worked together to make something more complex and meaningful than the sum of their parts, existing as a kind of collective organism. MonkeyFish imagined that all the things in the world—and the whole Earth—must be like this too.

         When the nights became cooler, MonkeyFish decided to move on. She was especially fond of honey now, and she decided she would like to become honey. But as soon as she had the intention to be ‘honey,’ she began to slip out of space-time, and the vast cosmos came billowing and crashing over her, submerging poor MonkeyFish under more information than she could possibly process or understand.  The dark light was upon her, and experiences of fantastic complexity flashed in her mind—BANG!—BOOM!—BAM!—to the point where a misplaced semicolon in the cosmic code, as it were, meant the difference between the extinction of a species, or a man receiving a pina colada when he really ordered a frozen margarita.

When she adapted her awareness to the idea of honey, there it all was—all the honey in the world—in blinding detail. MonkeyFish would obviously have to be more specific. So, to preserve her sanity, she followed a random tangent and deposited herself into a jar of Blackstar Unfiltered Tupelo Honey that was gathering dust in a health food store in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania. How sweet she tasted!

         MonkeyFish’s tenure in Lancaster County was harshly prosaic. Finally, in the last week of September, she was selected by a muscular young man in a hot-pink-and-black bicycling costume. He put her in a green tote bag next to a jar of fig jelly and a packet of sencha tea. On the bumpy ride home MonkeyFish reconsidered the advisability of being eaten by this particular human.

At home the man put MonkeyFish into a large backpack and zipped it shut. The next few weeks were a whirl of bumps and bangs, zippings and unzippings, airports, railway stations, ceiling fans and geckos. MonkeyFish was occasionally tempted to become a stewardess or a rickshaw driver—she liked the flight attendant’s bindi, and the cabby’s turban—but she had gone to a lot of trouble to become honey, so she lay low and enjoyed the subdued blare of Hindi music.

One afternoon the young man took MonkeyFish out of his pack and placed her on the ground. She looked around. She saw high mountains, and terraced slopes of tea bushes stretching mile upon mile down to a misty valley. The man lay sprawled on some grass making an almond butter sandwich. After a few minutes he unscrewed MonkeyFish, sniffed her, and furrowed his brow. Then he frowned and screwed her lid back on.

MonkeyFish was livid.

She left the honey and rose strait up in the air as an invisible spirit with an attitude. She glided higher and higher, past the biggest mountains in the world, all covered in snow. Swooping down, she saw a man squatting on a rock above a blue river. The man wore rags, and he was very skinny. He sat with his legs folded under him, and gazed at the river as if it wasn’t there. MonkeyFish thought he was altogether too serious, and decided to frighten him. She pounced right in front of him as a tiger.

“Roar! Roar! Roar!” said MonkeyFish.

But the man didn’t budge.

MonkeyFish couldn’t believe it. Everyone was afraid of tigers, except this weirdo. She thought and thought, and finally decided that the man was probably starving. So MonkeyFish changed herself into a fat red hen.

“Cluck, cluck, cluck,” said MonkeyFish.

But the man didn’t budge.

MonkeyFish couldn’t believe it. Everyone became hungry, except this weirdo. She thought and thought, and finally decided that the man must be a holy man. So MonkeyFish changed herself into a goddess with two legs, four heads, eight breasts, sixteen arms and thirty-two piercings.

“I salute you!” said MonkeyFish. “I am She of the Well, and the tiger and chicken were mere illusions, which I am happy to say did not disturb you. I am pleased that you are truly a holy man, and so I will grant you your dearest wish. What do you desire?”

But the man didn’t budge.

MonkeyFish became annoyed, turned invisible again, and flew away down the river. “What is it with these people?” she said.

Soon she spied some fishermen. They were dressed in musty old felt, and were almost as skinny as the strange man on the rock. “These people really are hungry,” said MonkeyFish, “and I don’t want to play games anymore.” She thought and thought, and finally decided they might actually like to eat her. So MonkeyFish dreamed a salmon, and splashed into the cold blue river. She swam around until she found their hook, and bit hard. She felt the point go into her mouth, and thrashed around until one of the fishermen pulled her out. Then she changed her mind. The man was squeezing too hard, and the hook burned like fire. She couldn’t breath! 

MonkeyFish was flying away very fast in the dark.  First, she looked up. Millions of stars were passing by. Then she looked down. Stars were racing past underneath her too, but they were moving in the opposite direction, and she couldn’t tell if she was coming or going. She stilled herself and closed her eyes. When she opened them the stars had vanished, and all she could see was blackness. But the darkness seemed to be full of something, maybe full of everything. “So this is where onions come from,” she thought.

MonkeyFish knew something important was going to happen, but she didn’t know what. It was like getting a birthday present when it wasn’t her birthday, and she couldn’t possibly guess what was inside the elaborate box. MonkeyFish was sure she had stopped dreaming. She had never been so awake in her life, and the wrapping paper was starting to attack her. Rip it! Shred it! Layer after layer—it was like unpeeling a cosmic onion—she realized she could go on waking up forever. The possibilities were exhilarating, and she knew she was free to choose any destiny she wanted.

Then MonkeyFish understood something she hadn’t before. She realized she was perfect the way she was, and that even her imperfections were perfect for her. The onion was whole again, wrapped in plain brown paper.

And so MonkeyFish went back to sleep and dreamed the rest of her life in the well. She never forgot that the whole world was in that little pool, and that everything that happened there affected the entire universe. And for the rest of her days, the outside of the onion tasted as sweet as the core.

“After all,” she used to say, “the outside of the onion is the part that grows.”