Tough Day for the Army by John Warner

I felt about her, which was a kind of soul ache, a desperate helplessness every time I thought about her. When I would mention things like cohabitation, even marriage, she would laugh, not a mean laugh, necessarily, but her teeth would flash and there would be something in her eyes asking if I was kidding, implying that I was only temporary, that an attempt to move closer would push her further away like two magnets turned to the same poles.
    I had a test of my love for Constance. When she was not there, I would sit on my couch and turn on the cable news and wait for the first report of a tragedy (it usually didn’t take long), a plane crash in Phuket, an overturned trawler in the Bering Sea, brushfires, E. coli, West Nile, car bomb, falling into the polar bear enclosure at the zoo, what have you, and I would imagine it was Constance on that plane or ship, or hospital bed, or hanging from a polar bear’s jaws being dragged, unconscious and limp, into its den, and as I imagined this, her face pained and confused, her body battered, I would search my feelings and feel only devastation. I would literally wish to trade places with her, at the bottom of icy ocean, or in a million bloody pieces spread across a road, or again, what have you, and in those moments I knew for sure that what I felt for Constance had to be love.
    Once, after we had made love, I had turned to Constance and stroked her sweat-matted hair out of her eyes and asked what she would do if I died and she said, “I’m sleepy.”
    * * *
    â€œYou know, of course,” the monkey said, “that you and I share 98 percent of our genetic material.”
    â€œI guess so.”
    â€œNinety-eight percent!” he practically shouted. “That precious dog of yours, 60, 65 percent tops, yet he is treated like royalty. You and me, we’re almost the same, virtually identical, and look what you do to us? You keep us in cages. You rub cosmetics on our skin to see if we break out in welts. You inject us with medicines to see if our hearts explode or our kidneys shrivel or our stomachs ulcer. You enclose us in plexi-glas and give us ropes to swing on and a deflated soccer ball to kick around and you watch and point and giggle as we make sweet monkey love to each other, and yet you wonder why we fling our poop back at you and screech and beat our chests. You strap tiny cymbals on our paws and demand that we clap along with your stupid three songs, all of which are in goddamn waltz time and for that we are fed cat food and sleep in a drawer. Can you imagine the rage? Can you?”
    I could see that the organ-grinder’s monkey was not observing safety protocol and wearing his seatbelt. He was standing excitedly on the hatbox and banging his little fist against the dash to punctuate his words. I eased my foot deeper into the gas pedal and pictured throwing on the brake and watching his body launch through my windshield, a monkey missile that I might or might not drive over as I passed.
    â€œDon’t do it,” the monkey said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhat you’re thinking; don’t do it.”
    â€œI’m not thinking anything.”
    The monkey idly scratched his wrinkled ballsack through the leg of his cutoff shorts. He looked at me intently, batting his long monkey lashes. “Don’t fucking do it,” he said. “Don’t even think it. You need me.”
    He sat back down on the hatbox and for a while we were both silent, until he raised his arm and pointed.
    â€œLook, up there, in the distance,” the monkey said. “Look at how narrow the road is, like a sliver could not slide through, yet, as I approach, it widens, opening itself to me.”
    The monkey gripped my hand as we walked toward our historic downtown. “Look both ways,” he said as we crossed the street. Ours is a good downtown, clean, gentrified but still charming, cobblestone streets and gas lighting mixed with shiny boutiques