End of Season 1.

Pause Monkey is now on hiatus! Season 2 will be something different. But simliar.
See you soonish and thanks for reading!

Now go play, monkies!

072. The yawning blue

The Captain coughed up another gulp of sea water, slapped himself fully awake and re-asserted his grip on the wooden statue that kept him afloat. He chanced a look around but there was nothing but water and sky surrounding him. His crew, his ship and the cargo they carried had been brutalized by the wind and the waves some nights ago but the sea had swallowed the evidence. He and the statue, an artist crude rendition of Maria Magdalena that The Captain straddled in heretic shame, was the only two things that remained above the yawning blue.

The Captain wondered how many days had truly passed. He wondered when the sharks would come. 

There were moments when it felt as if the sharks had already come and devoured him. Moments when he was sure he'd already drifted below from exhaustion, died and awoken in purgatory.  

The endless horizon made sanity slippery but The Captain was lonely enough to let it slide. He sighed and hugged the Maria Magdalena close. The sun made her warm and she smelled of wet wood. Splinters caught The Captains beard and hands.

"Be real", he whispered to her.

071. Your fears are keeping me awake

Aaliyah lived next to the River of Fear. Her flat was small and mouldy, but the rest was cheap and the view had been pretty, at least until the legend got around town. They said, mostly in hushed voices, that if you held one of the smooth riverstones in both hands, whispered your deepest fear into it and threw it in the river, the currents would carry your worries away.

So every night, Aaliyah would lie awake and listen to the most terrible things the townsfolk could imagine.

I’m afraid of cockroaches, one whispered. And about what will happen once I graduate. I’m worried I won’t be the son that a father would dream about.

And then there was a thud as the stone hit the surface and the river sucked the rock under.

I’m scared that I have lost part of myself again, a lady said, hurling a larger stone into the water. And that looking for it again will mean I lose everything, even the person I love the most.

I don’t want to die, someone whispered. Plop. Suck. Silence.

I hurt the people I love. Plop. Over and over. Plop. And I’m scared they will leave me.

Aaliyah lay and stared at her ceiling and tried not to listen. She imagined shapes in the shadows over her bed. On nights when the river was busy, the shadows seemed more threatening.

I’m scared that I won’t remember the things my mum taught me, someone said. Or that one day, I won’t be able to imagine her anymore.

Plop.

I’m frightened of being alone.

Suck.

I don’t think anyone will love me.

Silence.

People always said they felt lighter after they’d been to the river. Like they could breathe and sleep and dream again. Somehow, they said, it had forgiven them their fears.

But Aaliyah had a fear of her own.

She couldn’t say why, but when she looked in the river, it seemed dark. Like it wasn’t absorbing the burden of the fears, it was feeding on them. One day, when too many fear-stones piled up on its floor, it would rise and flood her flat. If the fears got bad enough, it might even drown her.

070. Dump your fears

Little T kept an eye out for civilians while Big T popped the trunk and, with a grunt, dragged a rolled-up carpet out of the black Escalade. It hit the ground of the old bridge with a kick-drum thud and Little T winced.

"Careful, T", he said, "too many curious Jack and Jill's in these here parts. A scuffle will make the Boss-Man most upset". 

"I think he's upset to the brim, already, T", Big T said, out of breath and overweight. In his prime Big Terror had been an ox of a man. The impenetrable steel gate to the Boss-Man's Criminal Enterprise. But years and cheeseburgers had caught up with and now stuck to him like a bad marriage and his lungs suffered in the black smog of The City. He didn't like getting old and he knew he could probably steal a few extra years if he moved to the country side. But there was no fear to mine out there, no respect for past violent deeds. No need for Terror. Just sheep upon vertigo-inducing rolling hills. And civilians. Norms.

Big T crouched down, grabbed the rolled-up carpet and started rolling it towards the railing of the bridge. Little T eyed him while playing with his knife. His weasel eyes narrowed when Big T rolled the carpet into the harsh spotlight of one of the bridge's ornate gas lamps.

"Boss-man be running out of textile if he rolls up his problems in an Axminster rug." he said and licked his lips. Opportunity had a salty taste.

"Not worth your life", Big T gasped and pushed the rug out of the light, his heart pounding at the effort. The rug was impossibly heavy, they'd been getting larger and heavier the last few months. The Boss-Man's rivals really were sending the big guns after him. The rug stuck on something and when Big T gave it an extra push the whole thing unfolded, rolled out like the king was coming to visit.

What had lain wrapped in the rug wasn't human. It had a hard black shell, slick with green go. Puncture holes revealed a maroon inside, horns grew from the creatures forehead and the eyes were big and multifaceted like an insect. It was a beetle, of sorts. But, disregarding the size, not like any beetle Big T had ever seen.

The T's knew horror. After all, if you worked for the Boss Man you earned the name Terror through combat and mischief. It was bestowed upon you like knighthood. And yet, the nightmarish corpse struck them backhanded with fear and awe and for a moment neither of them said anything.

True to form, Little Terror was the first to break the silence. 

"Well shit", he assessed the situation. 

Big T could only grunt in agreement. This explained a lot actually. No wonder the Boss Man looked shaggy these days. He was up fighting nightmares in the early hours. He'd traded rivaling gangsters for actual monsters. Big T poked the beetle creature with the tip of his gun. Then he wrapped it in the rug once more and heaved it into the river. He made a silent note to himself to never let Timmy bath at South Bank ever again.

Maybe the country side wasn't such a bad place after all.

069. Free tumble dry with every soul washed

“Niko. NIKO. What do you call THIS?”

Niko looked up, through the steam and suds, to see his father’s anger. “You call this clean? It’s filthy. Mr Hartsuyker is coming back for it at three.”

He brandished the grubby soul. There was a tear down one side of it, and a black streak across the middle. They couldn’t give it back like that.

“I’ve washed it twice, Dad,” Niko said. “And it’s been soaking since Tuesday.”

Niko’s Dad scratched at the stain with his waterlogged fingers.  “Did you try chlorine?”

Niko nodded.

“And bleach. Did you bleach it?”

Niko nodded again.

“Well we’ll have to use an acid bath, I spose.”

Niko shook his head. “I already tried, Dad. The stain won’t budge.”

The two men started at each other. In the ten years since they’d started the “Bare Your Soul” Laundromat, there’d never been a stain they couldn’t remove, not until now. Whatever Mr Hartsuyker had done, it was bad.

But when he arrived to collect it at 3pm, Mr Hartsuyker looked Niko in the eyes and asked him how his day had been. He smiled gently as Mrs Parkins from the retirement village pushed in front of him, and then helped her carry her clean soul and her dry cleaning to the car. And when he went to pay, a picture of two snuggle-toothed blonde toddlers fell out of his wallet. He was nice.

So, while his Dad was serving another customer, Niko threw the soiled soul into the scrap-soul basket and gave Mr Hartsuyker another one from the lost property room. Of course, it was against the rules – people were supposed to keep their souls for the rest of their lives – but so was jaywalking and putting your recycling in the rubbish bin. It wasn’t doing it that was the problem. It was getting caught.

068. It's OK, I've got a soul now!

"No, no, waitwaitwait, hold up, it's okay, it's okay, I've got a soul now, it's okay."

Angie showed her palms, bowed her head, crouched a little and tried her best to show Beth that she wasn't going to hurt her. Beth's big eyes and frozen posture indicated that she wasn't 100 percent successful but at least she hadn't slammed the door in her face.

"Baby, I'm not..." Angie dropped her hands to her sides and took one stop closer to Beth. Fear flooded her orange aura in waves of black ink and Angie felt her heart plummet. Gravity followed it down and she had to sit to not fall on the gravel outside Beth's house.

"I'm not dangerous anymore", she muttered, "I won't hurt you. Won't try to eat you. I've got soul now and I've been using it every day since you left".

She kicked at the pebbles by her feet and wondered if Beth could tell that she was lying. She probably could. Beth's radar was too attuned to her bullshit but she didn't say anything and so Angie didn't dare look at her. Silence mixed cement, piled bricks and built a wall between them. Finally Angie sighed just to break it. Souls are like candy, she thought. They taste so good you'll stuff yourself into a sugary high until you're light headed and nauseous.

"OK, fine!", she admitted, "I've haven't been using it every day. It's heavy and it smells funny and I don't feel pretty wearing it".

She crossed her arms and sulked. Coming here, laying everything bare before Beth seemed more like a fools errand now. She made an effort to stand up and go but her heart still lay somewhere around her feet and she couldn't get her bearings straight. Angie felt heavy. Souls by themselves didn't weigh much but the things that clung to them might as well be planets.

067. You might want to double bag your sadness

Jim smelt weird. It wasn’t something you could put your finger on – maybe a mixture of damp towels and sneezes and heated-up takeaway – but it was hardly surprising. You couldn’t spend all day picking up bags of people’s sadness without it rubbing off on you.

The Council collected sadness Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Mayor had won the election by campaigning for a city where “families don’t have to keep piles of unwanted despondency in their basements”. Nobody asked where it went – most people assumed that the authorities packed it up and sent it to sea. Like maybe there were islands of sadness, floating in the currents of the remote Pacific.

But not all the sadness made it back to the Council depot. Sometimes, when no-one was looking, Jim would rub his beard nervously. Then, he’d tear open up bags or cardboard boxes, and look in at people’s grief and loneliness.

Sometimes, it was beautiful – tear-washed and smooth – and sometimes it was wrathful. There were days the thrown-out sadness looked like art, and days it seemed to wash the whole sky grey. Some days he found pieces of sadness, so perfect and artful and raw, he snuck fragments of it into his pockets and took them home.

Jim didn’t consider himself a bright man. He’d never been to college, and he couldn’t spell right.  There were things he just didn’t understand.

Bagging your sadness up and hiding it was one thing, and putting it out on the kerb was easy enough. But, he wondered, as he hauled bags and bags of sadness off the kerb each day, what did all those people do when they went inside, empty-handed? How did they look at each other? When the emptiness that made us reach for love and flesh and comfort had been disposed of – what was left to hold people together?

066. The Z-axle

Brandon desperately wanted a girlfriend. Someone who'd play Mario Cart with him until the wee hours and then waste a Saturday on brunch. Just seeing an extra tooth brush take up space in his bathroom would lower the sum total of sadness in the world by a small, immeasurably significant amount.

He stared at his phone and then on his screen. No texts. No notifications. It was autumn and all his friends had retreated into their relationship caves and were too busy to drink beer and listen to him moan. A banner popped-up on his screen and, out of habit, he jerked his right hand to dismiss it. But before he could click the x he found himself halted by the copy. 

"Lonely?" the pop-up asked in a bold, sans-serif font before animating to "Print your soul mate today!". 

Brandon reeled at the idea.

You could print pretty much anything these days but humans? Brandon wasn't a science geek but he read Wired on a semi-regular basis and to the best of his knowledge you couldn't yet print a human. The problem with 3d-printers is that what want out of it you must also put in. It's the Law of Equal Mass. It's fine to pour two kilos of textiles, some plastic, some glue and some paint and print yourself a pair of size 9 Nike Air Max. Brandon shopped and printed stuff almost every day. The immediacy of it was intoxicating. Click. Print. Click. Print. But with a human being you need tissue and bone. Blood and guts and bile. 

Last year Brandon's sister had ordered a printable cat for her birthday and their parents had to order bio mass separately. A delivery-drone landed on their lawn the next day with a cardboard box. In it was the building blocks of a cat, square pieces that looked like they were cut out of a raw steak. 

It should take awhile before you know the color of someone's guts. 

And then there's the soul. How do they make the soul? Nancy's printed cat had its soul delivered in a little glass jar with a glowing liquid inside. Impatient and excited for her new pet, Nancy had wasted half the bottle on their living room floor and so her cat came out of the printer a mean little bastard. He hated Brandon and took every chance he could to scratch and bite him. The only time he let anyone but Nancy pet him was when he rested on that living room floor, midday when the sun made the linoleum cozy and hot, his belly flat on where Nancy's chubby five year old-fingers had spilt half of his soul.

Brandon lingered a little bit more before clicking on the banner. He knew it was probably spam, one letter removed from scam, but what if it wasn't?

065. The beer has a message for you

“Maxine,” Katie sighed. “You know Maxine. You’ve met her four or five time.”

Tom smiled weakly.

“She looks like Reese Weatherspoon,” Katie added.

Tom perked up – finally a description he could relate to.  

“Oh, that Maxine,” he smiled, trying to find a place to put his hands. “I remember her.”

In his effort to appear natural, his armed jerked around in front of him, sending his beer flying. Warm amber spread, foaming, across the table.

When she was a kid, Katie had spent hours looking up at the clouds, watching them morph from bunnies into ferris wheels or tennis balls, horse-drawn carriages rolling through the sky.

But tonight, she watched the beer take on the shape of an axe. It spread, cool and sticky, between them on the table. Without saying anything, they stared and let their respective hearts sink. Somehow, they knew it was over.

064. Barry pretends to listen

"And what do you see in this picture, Barry?".

Mr Cummerbund holds up the fourth piece of paper with an inky blob and for the fourth time I swallow the urge, by now an urge the size of a mountain, an Everest Urge threatening to topple over me unless I tell him it's another stupid inky blob, and tell him I see a rabbit on a field and Mr Cummerbund nods like that means something and makes another note in his papers.

Mr Cummerbund tells me that we're making great progress and I nod and keep a solemn face and call him Sir. When it's over I go out into the bright sun like a rodent that lives in the earth, blinking and rubbing my eyes. It's a beautiful day and, no longer dulled by the words of grown-ups, my head is itching for activity. I can't wait to fuck some shit up.

063. The jerks get all the good eye transplants

Since the eye transplant, people had been treating Liz differently.

The first time she noticed it, she was buying groceries.  “Is that all, hun? the cashier asked, meeting her gaze. “We’ve got a special on Easter eggs if you’re interested.”

No-one had ever called Liz ‘hun’ before – her flinty face and pressed suits usually discouraged it. But the girl seemed warm and at ease as she said it, and Liz was so shocked she agreed to buy two of the Easter eggs.

On the subway, an old man called her ‘love’ as he offered her his seat, and in her favourite clothes boutique, the sales assistant patted her gently on the shoulder as she ushered her into a changing room.  It was weird.

She was still the same sharp-tongued, mean-spirited bitch she’d always been. But when people met her eyes they looked down into the soul of an animal-loving, pie-baking, organ-donating Samaritan and, instead of cutting her off in traffic or spiking her coffee with decaf, they smiled.