Flash Fiction / Gorilla Memory
P.O.E.T.S. Day was an end-of-the-week joke that allegedly originated in the Urology department. From there it spread like a disease to the other levels of the hospital, eventually coloring our conversations even in the hallowed surgical units on the seventh floor.It meant Friday, the day when everyone’s attitude seemed to be, ”Piss on everything, tomorrow’s Saturday!”
That particular P.O.E.T.S. Day the surgery schedule had been the bare bones of what it usually was, with no real flesh and blood work to be done. We actually had to think of ways to stay busy. By the time the second shift began arriving, most of us had long since traveled like metastasis to the lounge and gone into remission.
Beau and I were sitting at the table near the window where we always sat, pretending to drink coffee that tasted like it had been brewed in an urinal. Hardly anyone else would touch the stuff—they would sooner lick the inside of a steaming autoclave.
I was an orderly staring holes into the clock on the wall and doodling on my styrofoam cup. It was something to do and I was famous for it.
Beau was an O.R. tech shaking his head and flipping through the National Enquirer. Every now and then he would yawn and glance at the clock to see what it was doing. Then he would go back to shaking his head and flipping through the National Enquirer.
Beau was continually shaking his head. Sometimes I imagined there was a little motor in his neck that automatically made his head swivel that way whenever it was not being used for anything important. Strange, barely audible sounds emanated from his throat like the drone of a metallic insect: kachink…kachink…kachink…
I was watching his head go back and forth like a crazy lightning typewriter, when all at once, he stopped and rolled his eyes at the ceiling as if he had accidentally swallowed some coffee—and like a startled surgeon with a ballpoint scalpel, I stabbed my coffee cup. The cup began to bleed all over the table.
“Too bad.” said Beau, looking halfway normal again. “That was your best one so far. I kind of liked those spiral things around the top.”
“Nevermind that,” I told him, reaching for a napkin. “Why are you making faces?”
He showed me a photograph of two chimpanzees in the National Enquirer. The chimpanzees were grinning as if they had just been informed they were being shipped back to Africa. The caption below the picture said something about them being cute and adorable.
“They always have a picture of monkeys in these rags,” said Beau.
“Monkeys,” I murmured.
“Monkeys,” said Beau. He pointed to the picture: Proof positive, exhibit A. “I just don’t see what the big deal is about monkeys. I saw some gorillas in San Diego once and they were really spooky berries.”
“Spooky berries?”
“Weird. They’d shit right in their hands and throw it at you.”
“Monkeys,” I said.
“You never see that in the National Enquirer,” Beau laughed.
“Monkeys,” I said. What else could I say?
“There was this one,” Beau went on, “who only threw peanuts. People would throw peanuts for him to eat and he’d catch them with one hand and hold them in the other until he had a whole handful. Then he’d fling them back.”
Beau turned into a weird gorilla throwing remembered peanuts at an innocent R.N., and the head nurse from Recovery looked up from Cosmopolitan Magazine to give him a funny look.
“He wouldn’t throw any shit like the others,” Beau told her. “Just peanuts.”
“Maybe he was constipated,” she suggested, frowning.
Beau grinned just as threeo’clocktimetogohomethankGodit’sFriday finally happened. I visualized thousands of chimpanzees, ripping and tearing their way out of the National Enquirer to thunder out of the lounge toward freedom with the rest of us, like a herd of stampeding P.O.E.T.S.
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I loved the dialogue, and some of the descriptions were fantastic. I would look over it for grammatical errors, just running it through spell check and reading it out loud should solve that, easily. Also, I wasn’t sure what P.O.E.T.S. meant, I would make it more clear. Try rephrasing like this, possibly: “P.O.E.T.S. meant Friday”, as opposed to “It meant Friday”.
I also wasn’t sure what was meant by this: “I was an orderly staring holes into the clock”.
Overall, there was some fantastic character development going on in this short piece, and I really enjoyed it. Great work!
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