by Kondor, Luke
Donald sneezed. Liz smiled and went to continue but Donald sneezed again.
“Sorry,” he said. “Just felt a bit weird for a second.”
“Perhaps someone is walking on your grave, Dr Thompson,” the colonel said, no hint of a smile.
“Perhaps, sir,” Donald said.
“Sir, shall I continue?”
“No, no, forget it, I’ll cut to the chase. Given that this mission is as important as it is, the choice has been made clear. Dr Thompson. We know about the incident with Ham. We will be sending Miss Sam on the PR-2 mission. Merry Christmas Liz, sorry, Dr Cooper, but it looks like you won this one. Your monkey’s going to lead the way for the rest of us. Congratulations.”
“But sir, I have to say I honestly don’t think that this hiccup should fail Ham from—”
“Enough Dr Thompson. It’s not your fault. It’s not the damn monkey’s fault, but it is what it is. The path has been laid. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
With that, the colonel reached over and shook Liz’s hand. A firm grip that almost made her wince. She held strong, refusing to show weakness. She squeezed back as hard as she could. The colonel then shook Donald’s too, but the outrage was clear. Donald wasn’t hiding it well.
As Liz and Donald walked out of the office stairway, down and outside into the cold morning air, with mist so thick you could taste it, they didn’t say a word to each other.
“I’m sorry, Donald,” Liz said as he walked away. He didn’t turn around. Didn’t do anything. He just disappeared into the mist like a hollow spectre. “Okay,” Liz said to herself. “We’re fine. We’re okay. It’s fine.”
She took a deep breath but then jumped when she heard shouting in the distance. The damn airforce. Men and their testosterone. She shook her head, wiped her eyes, and walked through the mist and towards the animal house. The chimps screamed as she entered. She grabbed a handful of banana pellets as she walked through, past the failures, and walked towards Miss Sam’s enclosure.
“Hey girl,” she said. The enclosure wasn’t much bigger than the back of a van. On the floor a bowl of half-chewed pieces of fruit. Miss Sam was out of sight. Hiding in the back. “Happy Christmas,” she said as she brandished one of the banana pellets towards her. “Guess who’s going—”
Liz stopped in her tracks, dropping the pellets to the floor where they clanged against the metal. Miss Sam wasn’t there.
“Miss Sam!” Liz shouted from the spot. “Shit … shit shit shit.”
Luna Gajos
“Are you feeling okay?” Luna said as they stopped at the traffic lights. The morning sun bathed the streets of London with a warm glow. The mist in the air, or smog as some would call it, looked glorious. The Shard building was a beautiful silhouette as the sun crept upwards from behind. A beautiful day. A beautiful day ind—
“Fucking move it, yer tosspot!” a driver from behind shouted. A black cab. Slamming his fist on the horn.
“Light is green,” Gary said. “Tall One can go forward now.”
“Yes, I know,” Luna said, reddening. She looked down at the empty fast-food cola next to her handbrake and sighed. She was thirsty. She was also tired. The day before had been a pretty epic one. Aliens, talking cats, serial killers, and a big space parasite. She thought about The Thinker. She could tell Gary hadn’t stopped thinking about him since they left the farm.
“I suppose, if you’re going to stay with me, we’re going to need to get you a litter tray and some cat food and a scratch post.”
“Nonsense,” Gary said. “Gary will scratch what Gary feels should be scratched.”
“Well, you shouldn’t just go around scratching whatever you want.”
“Gary will do what Gary feels is right.”
“And the litter tray?” Luna said.
“Same.”
Luna drove past a large number of flat buildings, past a particularly angry-looking postman in his orange hi-vis jacket, and then pulled her car up outside of her flat. She looked back at the postman. New guy. She’d never seen him before. Strange postman too. He wore jeans rolled up to show off the bottoms of his calves. Boat shoes. A denim shirt with a canvas bow-tie. An orange hi-vis jacket over the shirt. His grey hair tied up in a bun on the back of his head. A grey beard down to his chest, and he didn’t look to be doing any posting of letters. Maybe it was all emails now.
She got out the car, let Gary out, and then locked it, all the while keeping her eyes on the old man leaning against the post-box. She didn’t have time for creeps. She had to get an hour’s sleep in before going to work.
As they passed him to walk into the courtyard of her apartment, the old man noticed her. He smiled. Waved. Definitely a creep.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t you remember me?”
Luna and Gary both turned around to look at him.
“The Thinker,” Gary said.
***
Luna handed Moomamu coffee and grabbed her own. She sat down on the sofa. The cushions were scratch-free. Gary sat on the floor and never took his eyes off Moomamu. He kept his damaged paw elevated and never stopped purring. The TV was on. Some news channel. Some Indian woman interviewing someone. Extremely white teeth.
For a while they sat there in silence. Moomamu tried a few times to start talking but stopped himself just as quickly. It was ten minutes before he managed to spit it out.
“I …” Moomamu squinted his eyes. He looked to the roof. His eyes reddened. “Wow, okay wasn’t expecting this to be hard. I ended up on a moon for a while, with some cats. Then made my way to Earth in the future, which was, at the time, being eaten by a massive alien force, and then I went back in time, I can do that by the way, and eventually found myself living in a commune with a chimpanzee and a lot of people who wanted to have sex with everyone and smoke a lot and do tabs of acid. That really was a strange time to be a human. The seventies. And then I made my way to London, went to work finally, kind of waited for a while until today. You know, I thought I might not come.”
“Why not?” Luna said.
“The Earth years take it out of you. It’s been a long time … for me, at least.”
“But you never went home.”
“Home …” The sentence hung in the air, unfinished. Moomamu looked down to Gary and finished his coffee. He placed it on the kitchen side and smiled. “I’ve got to go to work.”
Moomamu The Thinker
“CALLING AT OXFORD CIRCUS. MIND THE GAP.”
Moomamu opened his eyes. He looked down to his right to see an old man resting his head on his shoulder. His eyes crusty. A sliver of drool connecting his face to Moomamu’s hi-vis jacket.
He pressed his hand against the old human’s head and pushed it away from him. He stood up and gently laid the man’s head down until it held there, suspended in the air and supported by the limitations of his neck bend.
Moomamu walked out of the snake-thing … wait, the train. That was it. Train. He laughed before walking onwards.
Oxford Circus was the busiest station he’d ever been to. He hated it. As he queued for the escalator the hundreds of tourists, commuters, students, all pushed up against him. He held his breath as long as he could before finding his spot on the escalator. Too slow for him, though, he began to walk up the left-hand side, even asking a young Asian boy to “shift” when he was stood on the wrong side.
He bleeped his travel card through the machine with nothing but muscle memory and then made his way outside into the fresh(ish) air. He inhaled. Deep. Before shoving past a group of teenage girl shoppers with giant bags of off-the-rack clothing.
“Do yer mind, yer dick?” one of them said, but he ignored them and crossed the road.
He made his way out of the retail madness of Oxford Street and into a Starbucks for his usual — Pumpkin Spiced Latté. He was still a fan of cappuccino, but he liked to mix it up once a year or so. He watched as the European barista steamed the milk. He did an okay job. Before Moomamu left, he asked how long he’d been a baris
ta and the guy said he wasn’t. “I’m a philosophy major”.
Moomamu said “Sure” and left, slurping on his coffee.
He made his way past a wine bar called The Old Rope Inn. It was painted in white and black. So old it looked like a safety hazard. He continued further on up a set of stairs to a giant modern office building. The glass along the outside reflecting a fluffy white cloud in the sky.
Several people in suits left the building, briefcases in hand. And then another group of people in flannel shirts with beards and skinny jeans. It was half an hour before she exited. She smiled and waved at the receptionist as she left the building. With only a memory he was worried that he’d forget her face, but just then it felt like less than a minute had passed since he jumped. Big, bleached white teeth that looked ever whiter against her coffee-brown skin. A pink shirt under a dark grey suit. She walked right past Moomamu. Or went to.
“Miss Bhatia,” Moomamu said.
She turned to look at him and smiled.
“Hello? Do I know you? Sorry. Are you a fan of the show?” she said
“I don’t watch TV,” Moomamu said. “Content’s all on the internet now. I just spend my time on there.”
“Okay.” Nisha was confused. Her smile dimmed. “Look, I gotta go and meet someone.”
“It’s okay, Miss Bhatia,” he said. “You don’t need to drink.”
“What did you say?” she said, taking a step towards him. She was still trying to smile but the facade of happiness had gone. Her eye contact moved away for a second before looking back up.
“It’s okay, Miss Bhatia. It’s okay.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are? Why would you say that to me?” she said, her voice rising in pitch. For the first time, Moomamu felt like he’d made a mistake. Too late, though. He’d caught the bus. He wasn’t driving it. He was a passenger.
“I know how you feel. You told me how you feel. But I don’t think you need to drink. You should just throw it away.”
“Throw what away?”
“That bottle of vodka you’ve got hiding away in your pocket. You should just throw it away.”
Nisha welled up. She tried to say something but no words came out. Just a strange hacking sound. She placed her hands against her eyes. Moomamu didn’t know what to do so he sipped his coffee. The slurping sound made Nisha look up.
“I … don’t understand,” she said wiping the tears from her eyes.
Moomamu then placed the coffee on the floor and took a step forward. He looked into her dark brown eyes and smiled. He lifted his hand and, unsure what to do, he patted Nisha’s head with a pat-pat.
“Don’t worry about it too much. Just crack on with life and all that. You humans don’t get too long. Make the most of it.”
“Okay,” Nisha said, squinting her eyes as if trying to work Moomamu out.
“Also, you might have crazy psychic powers but I’m not too sure if I changed all that when I went back in time, so, I dunno, just … be careful.”
Nisha smiled. She even chuckled. Not a genuine chuckle. It was a good-one-but-I-don’t-get-it laugh.
“Thanks, I guess,” she said. “You want me to buy you another coffee?”
“No no, I’ve got to go to work.”
“Where do you work?”
“Shoreditch,” Moomamu said. “Not too far from my flat.”
***
The Shoreditch Grind was at its usual lunchtime hustle. Warm outside and even warmer in the kitchen.
“Can you believe the new guy didn’t show up?” Lucas said as he handed Moomamu a handful of ceramic coffee mugs to place in the cupboard. They rattled as he moved them to beneath the espresso machine. “Just rude. You know what I mean?”
“Don’t worry too much,” Moomamu said. “I’m sure he’ll show up at some point.”
“Excuse me,” said a customer at the till. Blonde hair tied into a ponytail, tweed dress and an old Gameboy-come-necklace resting on her chest. “Do you guys have any sort of organic kale snacks around here?”
“Sorry,” Moomamu said. “We don’t have anything like that.”
“Ugh, what do I have to do to get a healthy organic snack around here? I’m peckish, dammit,” she said, shrugging her shoulders, and then leaving the café.
“We should start doing some of that kale stuff,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, we should,” Moomamu said as he looked out of the busy café. The afternoon sun bouncing through the windows. Humans everywhere. Drinking cow lactation. Chatting away. Worrying about their mostly meaningless lives. Bloody humans.
He smiled.
A Thinker’s Philosophy
Taken from Moomamu’s diaries.
19/01/1976
Dear Paper,
I’ve seen humans do this a lot, but it’s my first time. Journaling. Putting an inky pen to flattened tree innards. It feels a little wrong. Why save the world if humans are just going to kill anyway and use the plants as their communication tool?
But …
This world is a strange one.
It was about fifteen years ago that I spent time with that stupid monkey. I still think about her to this day. Our time wandering the Earth, living in communes, trying to find our understanding of Earth life. I think we were just as confused as each other.
Some things I’ve noticed since then:
Humans shouldn’t be allowed to talk unless spoken to. Ever.
For every animal killed to be eaten by a human, a human must be sacrificed and fed to an animal. (I can’t see them going with this one.)
Humans should stop drinking so much alcohol or smoking marijuana or doing any form of drugs. They’re stupid enough as it is. They don’t need help.
Humans should be allowed to colonise one other planet. They get one main planet and a backup in case anything happens to this one. Anything more than that is just greedy.
Marriage is not sacred but after speaking to a couple of human law-mongers it does sound very practical.
Humans all come from the same genetic cesspool. Yet they constantly complain about people with other colours of skin tone. I think humans should wear black form-fitting uniforms that cover their faces at all times so they all look the same. Except for David Bowie. I really dig his originality.
Humans should meditate and practice mental quiet as much as possible. Every day. I feel like I deserve a break from their so-called “thinking”.
E=MC2. Apparently.
Lastly, I’ve noticed that you never see a happy bald man. I mean, they smile but, underneath you can see the sadness.
Humans can become very bonded to other beings. The monkey is proof of that. As I write this my eyes are watering. I still remember the day she died like it was yesterday. She was old, they said. She had to go now, they said.
Attachment to other beings makes me sad, but … I still feel like it's a good thing for some reason. Must be some faulty neural pathways or something.
And then there was the whole issue with The Light. He kept to his promise. He never took me home, but still, he took me. A story for another time.
Anyway, thank you tree, for sacrificing yourself for me to write down my thoughts,
Moomamu The Thinker
It’s Not Over
Picture this.
Night-time. The smell of marijuana smoke is thick in the air. The central fire pit has been extinguished completely by the rain yet it still smolders. Only hours before and the idiots were singing songs about peace and free love, dancing around it.
A man. A different one. In a much worse condition. A weathered cloak covering most of his face and his body. His hair is so matted it's difficult to see the separation between the locks. They tumble stiffly around his shoulder in grey and black and converge with his grey beard.
His skin is broken and forever-sore. A vessel long since dead. The blood barely pumping around his system at all.
His name is …
Well, he’s picked up a few.
Dear Lord.
Praise be our Father.
The man walks in bare feet across the soggy grass and steps over the wet ash and charcoal and walks past a row of cabins and tents. Each with their own idiotic sinful human inside.
It is not their fault, my Lord.
He steps past them and comes to the furthest one along. The cabin on the end, hiding half beneath a tree. With a thought he disappears and reappears inside the cabin.
They did not know they were soiling the very grounds of Eden.
The Thinker and the chimpanzee are asleep. The Thinker’s chest moves slowly up and down, as does Miss Sam’s.
“You didn’t follow my orders,” he whispers to the sleeping duo. They don’t stir. It’s late. They’re tired. They are out cold.
I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to help them sin no more, for I am The Light of God.
“And now I’m going to rip your fucking heart out.”
Amen.
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