by Kyle SUNDBY

The fuck­er’s eat­ing the whole or­ange — he did­n’t even try peel­ing it. He’ll be hat­ing his im­pa­tience any time now. Lance Cor­po­ral Snow is pinch­ing the re­main­ing to­bac­co from the can while he waits to see what hap­pens next.

He toss­es the emp­ty can in­to the Dump­ster and the re­flec­tion of the sun off the met­al lid draws the mon­key’s at­ten­tion. If the mon­key would have no­ticed the can ear­li­er and con­sid­ered the hole punched in­to the or­ange be­fore he de­voured it, he might have saved him­self some grief and em­bar­rass­ment. But he’s a mon­key and a noisy and stu­pid lit­tle shit of a mon­key at that.

Lance Cor­po­ral Wat­son and PFC Williams come out of the Quon­set hut and join Lance Cor­po­ral Snow to have a smoke and see what’s hap­pen­ing. Some more mon­keys pop out of the jun­gle to get in on the hand­outs, which are few and far be­tween now that their pla­toon has been in the Philip­pines for a cou­ple of weeks. Bas­tards were cute the first cou­ple of days, but now…

Lance Cor­po­ral Snow tells Wat­son and Williams what he de­vised. Laugh­ing and watch­ing, they call out a few more of their bud­dies from the shade of the tem­po­rary struc­ture, erect­ed at least 20 years ago, that serves as their bar­racks. The mon­keys be­come ex­cit­ed by the ap­pear­ance of so many peo­ple and chirp and scream and shake branch­es and demon­strate that it does not take size to make a shit­load of noise. They’re split be­tween jock­ey­ing for po­si­tions close to the Marines and mov­ing to­ward the mon­key fin­ish­ing the fat, juicy, and clev­er­ly juiced orange.

“I’m not wast­ing an­oth­er can on the rest of you cock­suck­ers,” Lance Cor­po­ral Snow tells the mon­keys. Or maybe he’s telling his fel­low en­list­ed men. “You can’t get any good Copen­hagen over here — just that shit in the plas­tic cans.”

The mon­key that swal­lowed the or­ange and with it two days worth of snuff, falls from his perch to the jun­gle floor with­out so much as a gag or wretch. He’s out cold about ten feet back from the tree line. The mon­keys and Marines go apeshit, laugh­ing, swear­ing, chat­ting, whatever.

“Is it dead?” Williams or Wat­son asks.

“Dude, how much chew did you put in that thing?” asks the one who did­n’t just ask.

Lance Cor­po­ral Snow spits a ma­hogany stream to­ward the brush where the wit­less vic­tim of the prank lays. “Fuckin’ monkeys.”

Filed under Fiction on September 14th, 2005

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