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“Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll wash while I’m waiting for Lucinda-Lucretia-Louise to fix a problem with that crapper stimulant.” As he pointed, half a dozen lice dropped from his forearm.

  “Sim-u-la-tion cham-ber,” she sharply corrected. “Take the universal translator out of your metal cup, wear it as a necklace, so there’s no electromagnetic interference. Why don’t you get out of here now while I can still breathe?” she said, furiously digging at her warp and weft with her mitts. “Where’s the anti-lousing spray?”

  He padded his way out of the Saturnalia Laboratory, the soles of his feet skidding as he tried to stay upright on the highly polished, smooth floor.

  Once outside, he soaked up the warmth of the MoxAT-TAxoM afternoon bi-symmetric dual suns and unfastened his suspenders, allowing his pants to fall to the ground. He stretched while the breeze ruffled the white fur on his upper arms. I wonder where I can find new clothes?

  With the soap in one hand, he used his arms for stability as he ambulated toward a five-point symmetric MoxAT-TAxoM tree at the edge of the large pond.

  Blocking the suns’ rays from his eyes, he climbed the tree trunk and yanked off a curl-edged leaf larger in diameter than he was tall. Should make a perfect raft. He tossed the soap into the hollow of the leaf.

  While he hauled his make-shift floating device to the shoreline, he noticed the other four leaves float to the ground. Strange effect of symmetry.

  After launching the leaf, he hopped onto it, leaned over the edge to wet the bar of soap, and fell into the water. The necklace slipped over his head and sank to the bottom of the pond, his limbs flailing.

  “Gevalt! Gevalt! GEVALT!”

  “Gevalt? Is that Yiddish? Does someone need help?” Seyfert snapped his nubby-digited hand to his ear. “Where are you?”

  “Aquí fuera! Aquí fuera!”

  “I don’t understand you. Speak Yiddish. Where are you? Keeping talking.” Seyfert spun on the longest of his three unequal legs trying to locate the voice.

  “No puedo nadir!” Eduardo swallowed a mouthful of water. “Ge-”

  Seyfert galloped in cyclic repetitions of long-short-medium strides, the water barely reaching his knees. “I’m coming.”

  No sooner had Eduardo disappeared from view than Seyfert scooped him up, snagging the universal translator. Cradling the monkey, he carefully strode to the shade of the tree and then laid him on one of the fallen leaves.

  A groundskeeper, with a universal cardiopulmonary resuscitation device on his tail, slithered to Eduardo and precisely positioned it above his chest. “No one dies on my watch.”

  Eduardo vomited water, then looked toward the sky only to see Seyfert leaning over him and placing the translator at his side.

  “Thank you,” Eduardo said, rubbing his widening eyes. “Oi vey. Either you’re particularly ugly and disturbingly asymmetric or I’m in hell.”

  “And, you’re cute, too. I’m Seyfert.”

  “That talking blanket mentioned your name,” Eduardo said, sitting up, leaning against the tree. “I need clothes. I have a date with Lucinda-Lucretia-Louise.”

  “L-3?” Seyfert’s laughed, then stifled himself, ripping off about one-third of a meter of cloth from the bottom of his toga and breaking off a vine for a belt.

  “Girly pink?”

  “On my planet, SeyTTT, pink is worn by the most virile men.”

  Eduardo tentatively thumped his fists on his chest.

  “So, who are you? Where are you fr—” Seyfert suddenly twitched, then frenziedly scratched his left armpit.

  If Only It Were Chicken Feed: Luncinda-Lucretia-Louise Cautiously Re-calculates Calories

  “Oh, no! I forgot to account for Eduardo’s clothes.” L-3 paced on top of Felicia Feinseam.

  “You’re snagging my weft.”

  “Sorry. I’m upset. I was short 386.03752 grams.”

  “Unfortunately, you’re accurate in your calculations. Five Terran hours have elapsed, leaving the tiniest time window to conserve mass and energy, so Earth’s history is left unchanged.”

  “I did some research.” L-3 tossed dozens of kernels into the air and opened her beak. “Tasty.”

  “You’re eating?”

  “These were invented in Chicago on Valentine’s Day in 1898, exactly when I found Eduardo in Brooklyn. Close enough.”

  “Excellent!”

  L-3 pitched candy corn into her time travel machine.

  Suited for Romance

  “If you want to win over L-3, you’ll need to stop gaping. Your teeth aren’t one of your better features.” Susannah Svetlana Sebastianne flapped her wings and encircled Eduardo just above his shoulders, occasionally scraping a talon on the floor. “Not bad, not bad at all for a Terran primate.”

  “Cebus capucinus.” Eduardo snarled, then curled his lips into a smile as he fixated on the 3-D virtual image of himself facing him from the open door of a simulation room. “Dashing. The thin vertical white stripes make me look tall. This suit is perfect for wooing.” He puffed out his chest and steadied himself by holding onto the back of a chair.

  “It’s called a ‘zoot suit.’” She pointed to a computer monitor. “1940s, Harlem, Jazz Age.”

  “Jazz Age? I’ll read about this later.” Eduardo handled a gold watch chain that dangled from his belt to below his knee, then back to a side pants pocket. “What’s this?”

  “Check your pocket. It’s a Terran-style gold watch, but its ‘workings’ as you call them are a computer plus universal translator.”

  “I need a boutonnière.” Eduardo stuck his thumb through a finished hole in the lapel.

  “A what?”

  “A flower. One that’s fuchsia. Make that two fuchsia flowers.”

  Annie flew out the window and returned with two flowers in her beak. “Here. These are L-3’s favorites.”

  Eduardo placed one flower in his lapel and the other on the chair seat, re-settled the coat’s wide-padded shoulders, and rubbed the back of his fingers on his wide lapel. “Very nice material.”

  She gently landed on the floor, then pitter-pattered back-and-forth in arcs, while using her beak to press on the keys of her wing-mounted computer.

  Eduardo intently watched as stitches moved by millimeters to change the fit. “How did you do this, Susannah Svetlana Sebastianne? We’re in the Saturnalia Laboratory, not in your seamstress shop?”

  “I asked you to call me Annie. The technology is very simple and transportable, so I can work anyplace. Stay here on MoxAT-TAxoM and I’ll teach you how to be a tailor.”

  “I’d like that, thank you. I need to earn my keep.” Trying to stay upright, but rubbing his coat over his stomach, Eduardo said, “I’m hungry. Spätzle with banana sauce, please.”

  “Yes, of course. I forgot.” Annie turned away from Eduardo, then spun back to face him. “Shoes.”

  “Oy vey. I can’t stand up on my own and you’re expecting me to wear shoes with these yellow things to cover my instep and ankles?” He rubbed his stomach again. “Where’s my food?”

  “I thought you requested banana-colored spats. I gave you an Italian pair circa 1910. Aren’t you in a hurry to see L-3?”

  “No, I’m hungry.” As Eduardo picked up the shoes and spats, he caught a glimpse of Toski, a slug-like graduate student who was leaving his cubicle. He tossed the footwear into the time travel machine, nodded when they instantaneously vanished, and noted that the machine was still set for Brooklyn, February 14, 1898. Turning his attention to the slug, he snickered, grabbed several computer styluses from Toski’s work station, then smacked his lips. “Skewers.”

  “Skewers? Did I hear you correctly?” Toski exited the main laboratory room post-haste, leaving a continuous trail of his signature silver slime.

  Eduardo laughed uncontrollably and fell to the floor. “Pishen. I have to pishen!” His coat was unbuttoned, but his high-waisted pants were zipped shut. Although he possessed opposable thumbs, he repeatedly fumbled and failed to open the zipper. “It’s s
tuck.”

  As he rolled around on his back, Annie giggled so hard that she shed several dozen torso feathers and awkwardly hopped trying not to step on them, but attempting to pick them up.

  Toski returned dragging a hook on a string. “I don’t know who or what you are, but it’s intolerable to me if a creature can’t void when he needs to do so.” He balanced on his chin, twirled his foot, and launched the hook in the direction of Eduardo’s pants and successfully opened the zipper.

  “Thank you. At least my suit is dry,” Eduardo said to Toski who offered a smirk from underneath his Terran-style umbrella.

  L-3 entered the room, saw Eduardo kicking his feet in the air, and headed toward him full-tilt on her talons. “Are you all ri—” She slid on the dry floor, lost her balance, and fell, her tush landing in Eduardo’s puddle and her ankles slowed to a stop in Toski’s slime. Stunned, her half dozen eyes swiveling out-of-sync, she sobbed. “I don’t believe this. Look at my favorite frilly frock.”

  “It was an accident. Let me help you clean up.” Annie dropped her jettisoned feathers into the slot marked for recycling and whispered into L-3’s ear. “You’re lucky. He’s quite some fellow.”

  “Quite some fellow, indeed.” L-3 wiped her eyes with a pink cloth that was Eduardo’s makeshift toga, then said, “I meticulously equilibrated the mass and energy exchange to the thousandth decimal piece, so that he could stay here without changing Earth’s history. But, look at him.”

  Annie said, “Looks aren’t everything. He’s unusually smart. You need to give him a chance.”

  Eduardo grabbed the string, skittering Toski across the floor, pulled on the hook to zip up his pants, and paused. “Conservation of mass and energy? 1898 is too early. Uh oh.”

  ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

  Julie Mark Cohen, PhD, PE, SECB, (Unabashedly, Eduardo.) is a consulting structural and forensic engineer. She has selectively published four dozen flash fiction and short stories. “Unabashedly, Eduardo.” is one of 85 stories in her recently-completed SciFi novel, Asymmetrically, Seyfert. Two flash fiction pieces, “A Temblor of a Different Magnitude” and “Manmade Hazards,” were published online and in print by the Grey Sparrow Journal, the former nominated for the 2010 PEN/O. Henry prize. She is the author of two dramatic, suspenseful, nearly-completed novels, Shear Folly and The Fourth Alarm, each with unusual, engaging protagonists: structural engineers. Julie is seeking a literary agent and can be reached at [email protected].

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  MONKEY HOUSE

  by Mike Bogart

  Baldy the Chimp was not in his cage. It was well before sunrise and Ian Brixey, the night watchman, stood among his simian charges in mute anguish. He was at that time the sole human occupant of the Monkey House: it was his duty to patrol the place from sundown to sunup; to prevent anyone from coming in, and, though he’d never really thought of it this way, to prevent anything from leaving.

  His bony fingers clutched at the iron bars of Baldy’s enclosure. Inside were an artificial plaster-cast tree, an old tractor tire worn to fringes, a mirror smeared with fingerprints, a pair of frayed ropes hanging from the ceiling, piles of straw that reeked of chimp urine. Ian peered into the moonlit gloom of the cage, scanning for a patch of fur. A trail of peanut shells. Anything. He knew Baldy to have become increasingly prone to intense bouts of anxiety in recent months, but he’d never just up and disappeared.

  Finally Ian spied Susie, Baldy’s partner, crouching in a corner, blinking sleepy-eyed at him.

  “Susie, come over here,” he whispered, curling a finger in the air. She sighed almost imperceptibly and knuckled toward the bars.

  Ian dug his hand into his pocket and came out holding a few pieces of lint-covered candy corn which had melted slightly against the heat of his leg. They were Susie’s favorite. He held his palm just outside of her reach. “Where’s Baldy?” he asked.

  Susie glanced up at him knowingly when she heard her friend’s name.

  “Give it up, girl,” he said, kneeling and removing his bifocals to meet Susie face-to-face. Her black eyes stared back at him, each of them motionless for a few seconds, locked in a battle of wills. Susie’s palm was still stubbornly outstretched in anticipation of the sweets, so Ian played the only advantage he had: he popped one of the candy corns into his mouth and rubbed his belly. “This is so delicious,” he said, chewing loudly and moaning.

  Susie furrowed her brow and reached her arm farther outside the cage, her leathery palm open flat against the air. She ooked a little, and stuck her bottom lip out.

  “Not unless you show me where he went,” Ian said. He popped another piece into his mouth.

  The chimp plopped her rear onto the concrete and scratched her head a moment, gazing upward. The stars above pooled in her eyes through the glass ceiling. She appeared, to Ian, to be weighing his ultimatum with great care. Ultimately, tragically powerless against the allure of candy corn, she lowered her head in shame and pointed a single finger at the trap door that led to the chimps’ outside enclosure. Of course, Ian thought, relieved. He’s just gone out for some fresh air.

  Ian dumped the rest of the candy corn into Susie’s hand, patted her on the head, and for the first time ever, he abandoned his post in the Monkey House.

  The Bronx Zoological Gardens’ most prized chimp, Baldy was aptly named: there was a small, circular patch bereft of fur at the crown of his head. It had started to thin in only his tenth year so that, by his fifteenth birthday, he was the world’s only officially balding chimp. As the years went on, he’d pick at the spot incessantly, beholding his countenance in the mirror that had been installed in his enclosure with a look of nearly human shame.

  Keeper Engelholm had taught Baldy through much unfortunate trial and error to shake people’s hands without crushing them (“Baldy is exceptionally strong,” the Keeper explained). This ability, combined with his aptitude for stacking and unstacking colored blocks, a task that in his estimation demeaned his intelligence, had made him one of the zoo’s most popular attractions.

  The attention had also made him, as Ian had come to notice, a nervous wreck. Whenever he wasn’t putting on a show for a crowd of hungry gawkers, Baldy was pacing back and forth in front of the mirror, fingering the bald patch atop his head. As he became more popular, he grew more irritable and was easily agitated—he even began to lash out at Susie, baring his canines at her slightest infraction in his presence.

  And just as Ian’s luck would have it, President William Howard Taft, the very President of the United States himself, was scheduled to shake Baldy’s hand at eleven that morning.

  Along with Senator Bacon, Major Butt, and a few other political heavyweights, President Taft would be visiting the zoo in a rare attempt at a public appearance. For a man of such imposing stature and genuine geniality of spirit, he skirted the public eye like a bashful field mouse.

  He was, respectfully, not natural in front of a crowd the way that Roosevelt had been—a fact of which the President was acutely aware. During his last public appearance, as he was orating determinedly and without regard for either punctuation or his audience, a little girl, a long-haired sprite wearing a dress and a bow in her hair, had broken free from her mother and ran at him, grasping against one of his thick, meaty legs beside the lectern.

  Taft, understandably flustered, halted in the middle of a sentence and looked about in panic for a number of agonizing moments. When no one rose immediately to claim the child, and realizing that he’d lost his chance to crack a timely joke, he knelt down to her in an attempt to make the best of the situation.

  “Are you a little boy, or a little girl?” was the best he could come up with.

  Roosevelt, damn him, would have scooped her up, thrown her onto his shoulders, and given her a ride around the stage. And instead he’d brought the poor little girl’s gender into question. The two, Taft and Roosevelt, that is, had once been great friends; Taft had even served in Teddy’s Cabin
et. Lately, though, differences of opinion over the former’s less-than-Progressive policies had made them, in private, bitter adversaries.

  But, in Taft’s innermost thoughts, his own most egregious deficit as a President was found neither in his policy-making nor in his ideology. It resided instead in the fact that while Teddy had relished the spotlight, Taft himself was taciturn and shy about putting himself on display, which made him awkward and clammy-handed in public.

  Despite all this, Taft’s appearance was to be the most significant moment in the Zoo’s brief ten years. Nothing was more important than presenting to the President of these United States a crisp, clean zoo filled with happy, healthy animals, preferably inside their cages.

  Madison Grant, the chair of the New York Zoological Society, had taken great pains to personally belabor this point to each and every employee, even the night watchmen. The handshake between Taft and Baldy was to be the day’s crowning moment—the ultimate picture for the papers.

  There was to be an election in the following year. Roosevelt was, privately, considering running for a third term. This picture, insignificant as it may have seemed, was what Taft believed he needed most—demonstrable proof of his likable, easygoing nature. Something he could point to and say, “See? I, too, enjoy leisure.” Anything else could go wrong, so long as that handshake went right. After all, who wouldn’t cast a vote for the affable man who’d shaken the hand of Baldy the Chimp?

  As he circled around to the outdoor portion of the chimp habitat, Ian stroked his long, manicured fingernails through his hair. He had broken into such a sweat that his glasses slid right back down the bridge of his nose each time he pushed them up again.

  He suffered from a general fear of darkness, which up until this moment he hadn’t considered a disqualifier for employment as a night watchman, so long as said night watchman remained at all times indoors, among familiar surroundings. Thoroughly engulfed in his fear by now, he focused the dim beam of his new Eveready in front of his feet rather than into the enclosure in search of Baldy. Not that he could have seen much even with the flashlight and his glasses—the dark beads of his eyes, sunken a little too deep into his skull, were barely serviceable even in daylight. But, he thought, frightened and nervous as he was, at least the noise of his heels clicking against the pavement granted him some thin veneer of authority.