Dial M for Monkey by Adam Maxwell

identified as ‘a woman from Finch Avenue’.
    I didn’t even need to check. I knew it was Lynne, I knew her address by heart.
    Within the hour I was at the hospital, at her bedside. She was conscious, coherent but slightly groggy and didn’t recognise me. I couldn’t risk her behaviour any longer, I had to make sure that she didn’t do anything else to what was very nearly my property. After all, you wouldn’t buy a second hand car if you knew it didn’t start so why should I buy a soul that wasn’t properly looked after. It was time to grant her wish.
    I stood for a second looking at her looking at me and then told her I was the one who owned her soul.
    ‘No, please!’ she shouted.  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
    ‘Shhhh Lynne, it’s alright.’ I said, smiling.  ‘I’m here to grant your wish.’

The Things We Said Today
    T here were many things waltzing through Becky’s mind as she wandered alone through the woods beside her house but the main one was Sheila’s statement from ten minutes ago:
    ‘So we were at it and then it hit me, this gorgeous buttery orgasm.’
    Becky had stared at Sheila in much the same way as she currently gazed at the way the trees gently undulated in front of her. It’s not so much of a walk as it is a swim through a thick gelatinous mass, Becky grasping her way through each step, the pressure almost, but not quite, too much.
    It wasn’t that she was jealous. Becky had experienced some of the best sex that she imagined anyone would be able to experience. Most of it with Mark but some of it with Vince. Good sex with toe-blasting orgasms that she felt no need to share with Sheila. Sheila obviously did not share this and rarely took more than one glass of wine before she was waxing lyrical about Bob’s predilection for this, her fondness for that or their shared passion for the other.
    Until now she had managed through the judicious consumption of copious amounts of red wine to blank out anything too bad but this – the buttery orgasm – this was revealed over brunch.
    It was far too early to start drinking.
    Wasn’t it?
    ‘And oral sex – how can you ever really be sure he’s enjoying it?’
    The words reverberated around her as if Sheila was following.
    She stumbled forward on a fallen branch and stepped in a patch of mud, her white trainer sinking in so that she had to pull it out with an awful sucking feeling that reminded her too much of the conversation she had just walked away from.
    ‘I’m never sure so I always keep my foot on his yoo-hoo. Just to make sure it’s still – you know… standing tall.’
    Sheila still sat, she assumed, in Becky’s house, at Becky’s table with that odd confused look she sometimes got. Becky could picture it; Sheila would be staring at the door, nibbling lightly on a shortbread biscuit, waiting for Becky’s return to complete the story.
    Becky turned around, facing the path home. She knew she had no choice and that she would have to tell her mother once and for all that she could not cope with stories of her parents screwing.

Noise Abatement
    I t was inevitable this would happen. It is, after all why I’m at the window isn’t it? Of course it is.
    I wonder if they will ask the postman? Well, I suppose they will eventually. It’s interesting, like watching an Agatha Christie play unfold.
    The gate creaks as it always does, I’ve asked the neighbours time and time again to oil it but they never listened, just agreed that it’s loud and something should definitely be done. It never was.
    The noise jolts the postman but not nearly as much as what he sees as he looks up: Mr No. 49 lying face down in his conservatory.
    Not that that in itself is out of the ordinary. Quite the opposite. I’ve seen Mr No. 49 drunk and asleep in that very place on an all too regular basis. Probably banished there by Mrs No. 49. The one thing that is out of the ordinary is that the conservatory is broken.
    Into a million pieces.
    And with one