Apeshit Read online

  APESHIT

  EXTER PRESS

  BILL OLVER Publisher

  BILL BOSLEGO Associate Editor (Editorial)

  PHIL GOOD Associate Editor (Art Direction)

  contact: [email protected]

  Cover illustration by Ken Knudtsen

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  The stories and poems in this magazine are fictitious and any resemblance between the characters in them and any persons living or dead – without satirical intent – is purely coincidental. Reproduction or use of any written or pictorial content without the permission of the publisher or authors is strictly forbidden, with the exception of fair use for review purposes.

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  Also by Bill Olver

  Clones, Fairies & Monsters in the Closet (editor, 2013)

  The Kennedy Curse (editor, 2013)

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  Contents

  SUPERIOR/INFERIOR by James Frederick William Rowe

  THE LAST WINGED MONKEY by Michael D. Turner

  THE COALING STATION by Ian Welke

  UNABASHEDLY, EDUARDO. by Julie Mark Cohen

  MONKEY HOUSE by Mike Bogart

  THE HOUND DOGS IN THE BOUGAINVILLEA by Lon Prater

  CASE OF THE ACCURSED AMULET by Timothy A. Sayell

  EMPIRE STATEMENT by David S. Briggs

  KONG, STILL CONSCIOUS, REFLECTS ON HIS VISIT TO NEW YORK by Jimmy Grist

  MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LAB by John Grey

  HAM’S POEM by John Grey

  AN ODE TO HAM by James Frederick William Rowe

  WONDERLAND BY NIGHT by Sarah Hilary

  MAC AND STEVE by Terry Alexander

  BACK STORY by Beth Ann Spencer

  BIGFOOT TAKES A LOVER by Beth Ann Spencer

  SINGING IN PLACE by Beth Ann Spencer

  THE GREAT GERTIE by Caroline Cormack

  MONKEY BUSINESS by Cecelia Chapman

  STRANGE COMPANIONS AT LONDON ZOO by Carrie Ryman

  DILEMMA by Cheryl Elaine Williams

  IF AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MONKEYS... by Pete McArdle

  GORILLA by Christine Hamm

  MY DARLING, THE GORILLA by Christine Hamm

  GORILLA GIRL by Christine Hamm

  FASCINATION by Mike Berger

  THE MAN WHO BROUGHT THE MONKEYS by Henry Sane

  THE LOST APES by Viktor Kowalski

  THE TASTE OF GOLD by Bernie Mojzes

  MONKEY BUSINESS by Frank Roger

  EVOLUTION HAPPENS by Rebecca McFarland Kyle

  MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO by Frank R. Sjodin

  TEST 17 by Jessica McHugh

  THE GIBBON REMEDY by Kristen McHenry

  NO MONKEYS IN MONKEYTOWN by DeAnna Knippling

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  SUPERIOR/INFERIOR

  by James Frederick William Rowe

  I once saw a monkey…

  Throw his shit at another

  I once saw a monkey…

  Masturbate with the throat of a frog

  I once saw a monkey…

  Piss in its own mouth to quench his thirst

  But I never saw a monkey…

  Watch Keeping up with the Kardashians

  Who then is the superior

  And the other the inferior?

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  James Frederick William Rowe (Superior/Inferior; An Ode to Ham) is a young poet and author out of Brooklyn, New York, with works appearing in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Andromeda Spaceways, Tales of the Talisman, and most notably Big Pulp. When not writing fantasy, science fiction, and horror fiction and poetry, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy, is an adjunct professsor, and works in a variety of freelance positions. The poems featured in this issue are no doubt much to the horror of the poet’s late grandmother, Elizabeth Sundberg (1918-2011) who would be daily tormented by her grandson’s insistence on speaking about disgusting monkeys to get a rise out of her. James’ website can be found at http://jamesfwrowe.wordpress.com.

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  THE LAST WINGED MONKEY

  by Michael D. Turner

  Gobo flexed his brawny shoulders, spread his magnificent wings and frowned at the sun rising over the Deadly Desert. “Oh, for the days a winged monkey could actually be a winged monkey!”

  “What was that, Gobo?” The winged monkey had forgotten he was sitting on top of Elmer, one of the living trees who had, in days long past, served his mistress well. After her melting, they’d both gone west, as far west as you could go in the Land of Oz, though it had taken Elmer years to cross what Gobo had traversed in hours. In the end, they’d both fetched up here, on the edge of the Forest of the Winged Monkeys, where they sat now together on the literal edge of ruin.

  “Just grousing about old times,” Gobo said. “As usual.”

  “Starting a bit early in the day, aren’t you?” Elmer frowned, which twisted his already warped face into a contorted knot. “Normally, you’re asleep until the sun is far out on the desert sands. You moan about how you winged monkeys are no longer allowed to act within your natures until well after breakfast, go on about the faithless Winkies abandoning our mistress and the principles she represented at least until tea-time, and then you grumble about Queen Ozma’s phony manumission of your people right through supper and into the night. If you start this early in the day, whatever will you talk about after supper?”

  Gobo squatted silently for a long moment, scratching his ass and considering Elmer’s question. He also considered pasting the tree in the face with a nice, steaming handful of crap, but decided he just didn’t have the heart to. Elmer was just about the last of the old corps he saw any more. Besides which, it would probably violate the prohibition on getting into trouble, even here in the so-called “Forest of the Winged Monkeys.” Less likely than elsewhere in Oz, maybe, but still…

  “Maybe,” Gobo started, with a wistful look at the horizon, “I’ll talk about leaving.”

  “Leaving? Leaving what? To go where?”

  “Leaving Oz,” said Gobo, “to go where I can be a winged monkey. A real winged monkey.”

  Elmer considered Gobo’s words a moment while his leaves shivered in the gentle morning breeze. “Aren’t you real enough, right here? I don’t think winged monkeys exist outside fairy countries like Oz.”

  “I was, once, maybe. A long, long time ago, now. I could fly where I wanted, do what I wanted. A monkey, winged or not, is meant for trouble. We were made curious, crafty, and clever. Winged monkeys a hundred times more so than others.”

  “That was how you winged monkeys got into trouble in the first place.”

  Gobo stared out over the Deadly Desert, watching as the breeze blew a few of Elmer’s fallen leaves out onto the sand. They dissolved on contact, leaving leaf-shaped images of themselves on the lifeless sand, which blew away almost as fast as the leaves themselves. “It’s true, we got in trouble by following our nature. A bunch of us saw a foppish dandy walking down the road near the old capitol and dumped him in the river. It’s not as if he drowned. How were we to know he was the Queen’s intended, or that he was on his way to their wedding?

  “That little stunt earned my people two-hundred years of servitude to whoever wore the golden cap. All of us, not just the dozen or so who actually dumped that lad in the river. I ask you, where is the justice in that?”

  “Well,” Elmer replied after a moment, “that was hardly the first prank you winged monkeys ever pulled.”

  “No, it wasn’t.” Gobo allowed himself a wistful grin at the memory of those pre-cap days. “I don’t dispute that we winged monkeys had made pests of ourselves. Two-hundred ye
ars of punishment ought to have made good on all of that, though. Even Ozma said as much, when she had her sorceress Glinda ‘free’ us from our servitude. Ha!”

  “I still think it was Glinda who played you monkeys dirty, and not the queen,” Elmer said. “After all, Ozma had no direct experience of your people’s pranking.”

  “Makes no difference.” Gobo rose up and stretched his wings wide. “Ozma has the final say, and she’s let Glinda’s restrictions stand all these years.”

  “‘Stay out of trouble’ is hardly an onerous restriction for most folk.”

  “It is for us!” roared Gobo. “And it’s one I’ve endured for far too long.”

  “You can hardly go petition the queen for the right to commit mischief in her own realm.”

  “No,” admitted Gobo, “I can hardly do that. But Oz is not the only fairy country in the world.”

  “It might as well be. It’s surrounded by the most destructive lands ever known, fairy realms or no.” Elmer shivered his limbs at the thought of the deadly effects of the deserts around Oz. “No one comes or goes across the deserts.”

  “Some have,” Gobo pointed out.

  “Not in the last hundred years,” the tree replied. “Since Glinda and the queen erected the barrier that prevents outsiders from being able to see Oz, no one has crossed the deserts except by teleportation magic.”

  “That’s because most traffic over the desert has been to Oz. At least the ones you hear about. Sure the Wizard flew over in a balloon and Dorothy—” Gobo’s mouth twisted into a scowl at the name, “on a cyclone. But back in those days, lots of birds used to cross over. In both directions.

  “They can’t find their way here, any more. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fly out.”

  “I can’t fly out,” Elmer replied. “Good or bad, my roots are here. I don’t think you can, either. Not all the way across, anyway. You’re not an eagle or an albatross, you know.”

  “I may not be an eagle,” Gobo replied, puffing out his chest and curling his ears back, “but I am a strong flier. The strongest of all my people, I think. When our mistress sent us against the Wizard’s army, I flew right from this forest, on the edge of Oz, all the way to the lands of Emerald. With a shield on one arm and a spear clutched in my other hand!”

  “Huh! That’s not half the distance across the desert.”

  “I fought a battle at the end of that flight!”

  “And you lost, as I recall.” Elmer smiled a nasty smile at his old comrade. “You ended up pulled back with the rest of our Mistress’ army, while we trees held the line and kept the Wizard out of the West.”

  Gobo shook his head sadly. “For all the good it did us, in the end.”

  “My point,” Elmer continued, “is that it’s not enough to just fly the distance across the desert. The deserts around Oz give off poisonous fumes that rise high over the deadly sands. You have to fly very, very high over the desert or those fumes will poison you. You’ll get dizzy, and then weak. Then you fall into the sands and—poof!—you’re finished.”

  Gobo grunted. “Maybe. Across the desert, though, Glinda’s admonition would have no weight. Across the desert, I could live and act as I please. I could snatch pies from a window sill, crap down a chimney, toss laundry into a lake, and snatch the hats from the heads of every townsman whose path I crossed, with no magic to hold me back and make me behave.”

  “Seems like a lot of effort, not to mention an awful risk, just to be able to make a pest of yourself.”

  “Maybe it is.” Gobo stared at the sky over the desert. “Maybe, but I wouldn’t be making myself a pest. I’d just be being the pest I was made, you see.”

  Elmer didn’t see, but didn’t say so, either. If he did not understand his friend after all the long years they’d kept company, he never would. “What if you’re wrong?”

  Gobo snorted. “Why, then I’ll be just another pile of sand.”

  “No, I mean what if you cross the desert and find out you still must behave yourself?”

  The winged monkey didn’t hesitate to reply. “I’d have to cross the desert to find that out.”

  Before his friend could respond, he launched himself from the branch and few off into the forest. Not toward the desert, but down deep under the trees. He knew that Elmer was right. No monkey in the history of Oz had ever flown so high and so far as to cross the Deadly Desert.

  The problem was one that had troubled Gobo’s people since the beginning of forever—there simply wasn’t much space between a winged monkey having an idea and doing it. There never had been, and nearly three-hundred years of punishment and forced good behavior hadn’t changed that. Not one little bit.

  While Gobo might be impulsive, he wasn’t stupid. He knew that to have any chance at all of crossing the desert, he couldn’t start in the middle of the day. The sun’s rays would only make the desert hotter, and its poisonous fumes rise higher. So Gobo lounged in the shade of the forest where he’d been born so long ago, and ate fruit that ripened year-round in Oz, and drank sweet water that flowed in the streams, and waited until the sun began to wane.

  Then, with rested limbs and a full belly, he launched himself skyward. Round and round he flew, higher and higher over the land he’d lived his long, long life in. He flew much higher than he’d ever flown before, so high the forest below was just a smudge of green. He finally flew so high, he passed through the enchantment that shielded Oz from those outside it.

  That was his signal to start. He let loose his bladder and voided his bowels one last time from the sky of his homeland, and then pointed his nose at the setting sun, and soared.

  Far below at the desert’s edge, Elmer watched the sky. He saw a speck he presumed was his friend climb higher and higher in the clear sky of Oz. He saw the speck streak out over the forbidding barrier, saw the last light of the day catch at its wings, still high over the sands as the world plunged into darkness. He wondered if Gobo would make it across the desert, and if he did, would he finally be free.

  Elmer knew he’d never know. “Stupid monkey.”

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  Michael D. Turner (The Last Winged Monkey) is a writer from Colorado Springs, Colorado. His writing has appeared multiple times in Big Pulp, and in Aberrant Dreams, AlienSkin, Between Kisses, Flashing Swords, Every Day Fiction, and Tales of the Talisman.

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  THE COALING STATION

  by Ian Welke

  The morning light realized our worst fears; the smoke we’d seen rising from the island the day before came from the coaling station. As our ship rounded the corner and entered the bay, the destruction became apparent. Chunks of debris were everywhere, floating on the gentle waves and littering the rocks of the peninsula that shielded the bay from the straits. Trees had been leveled around the blast site. The thick black plumes of smoke we’d seen over the forested rocks had gone, leaving smoldering grey wisps rising from the wreckage.

  The ship, running on cut steam, coasted in the waters of the bay. At first. Something collided with the hull at the bow just enough to jostle us in our coasting speed. I regained my footing, and looked over the rails expecting to see wreckage from the tower. Instead, I saw the first of the bodies, floating, waterlogged.

  I alerted the captain while the crew set about fishing the unfortunate man’s corpse from the water.

  “Damned nasty business,” the captain said as he walked the periphery of the ship. He looked ashore and then out to sea through his spyglass. He brought his lower lip up into his mustache. “Well, Johnson. What do you think?”

  “We can make any number of other stations under sail. Continue on. Ahead to Thursday Island. Or we could turn around, Ceylon or even back to the Seychelles. Inform the admiralty.” I swatted at an insect buzzing past my ear.

  “Quite right. We must inform the admiralty. But I believe it would be better if we knew what we were informing them of. Do you think this was accident or the result of
action by Her Majesty’s enemies?”

  Crew members hauled a corpse out of the water over the starboard side, followed by two more. I stared at the captain. “That would depend upon what we discover.”

  We made ready to anchor where we were, not approaching the ruined dock with Her Majesty’s ship, but with the small boats instead.

  Ashore the damage was extensive. What remained of the dock was now submerged, and we had to pull our rowboat onto the beach. I led a shore party consisting of four service men and a naturalist, a member of the Royal Society on board to join a scientific mission operating out of the northern territories of Australia.

  The crane was nowhere to be found and the coaling house was shattered into planks and splinters. The smoldering pyres scattered on the beach and the wet jungle appeared to be all that was left of the fuel it once housed.

  “Lieutenant!” One of the men called from behind a heap of driftwood.

  The man had found another corpse. It smiled up at us, its face froze in an insane grin.

  “Why are they all smiling?” The Warrant Officer’s voice wavered, like he was on the edge of tears.

  “I can’t say. Do you see how he was killed? He wasn’t shot. There’s no sign of damage from shrapnel. Turn the unfortunate man over, if you would.”

  The ensign did as I asked, and it became apparent. The back of the man’s head was matted with blood and hair surrounding a narrow wound.

  “Could be shrapnel?”

  “I don’t believe so,” I said. “It’s more like a stab wound. A bayonet, perhaps.”

  Finding two more bodies disproved the shrapnel notion. The first man’s throat had been cut with a sharp blade. The next had a similar wound to the first man’s, but stabbed in his left side. All of the corpses smiled up at the sky, grinning like lunatics.