Chimpanzee

Tim Fitts

A friend of mine from New Orleans, a journalist, had moved back from Seoul. The last I had heard, he had been on an all-meat diet. When I stopped by to visit, I learned that he had started collecting nontraditional animals in the city. He was most proud of the baby chimpanzee – a prize purchase – except the chimpanzee had some sort of disease where all of its hair had fallen out, top to bottom, all of its fingers and everything, and even the outer layer of skin had dissolved, so much so, that the chunks of fat protecting the muscle and fascia were all visible and wet to the touch, and the baby chimp had to be left alone at all times because the nerves were so sensitive, as if the little animal had been completely skinned alive. When the baby chimp slept and rolled over, it left an imprint of its body on the bed. I saw it myself. The entire bed had been covered with areas where the chimp had once slept, but the yellow and clear fluids had now dried. My friend advised me not to go near the baby chimpanzee. Not when it was feeding or about to go in must. You could not even touch the chimp or even breathe on it, even if it were asleep. Yeah, it might be asleep, or it might be just lying there with its eyes closed, thinking about things, like we all do in the morning, when you can hover in that space between sleep and consciousness, the moments when your whole day unfolds before you, and your dreams from the night before are as real as the actions that may or may not occur in the hours that lay ahead.

Tim Fitts is the author of two short story collections, Hypothermia (MadHat Press 2017) and Go Home and Cry for Yourselves (Xavier Review Press 2017) and The Soju Club (Munhakdongne 2016). His stories have appeared in Boulevard, Granta, Shenandoah, The Xavier Review, fugue, The Baltimore Review, among many others. He teaches Creative Writing at The Curtis Institute of Music.