John Biscello

Monkeys in a dark room, the darkness reeking of lice and mold, the only light coming from the beaconing cherry glow of the cigarettes sticking out of the monkeys’ humpty-hump mouths, typewriters thrill the silence with cacophonous clacking, each and every monkey is each and every other monkey, that is they are working as hive organism, collective and creative tribe to write Hamlet, or something Hamlet-like, could be Hamnet, could be Hamlet in Oz, could be Ham on Rye, they will keep banging away on their instruments until a tinny bell rings (a jingle of a bell you might find in the opening/closing aria of a door in an old-fashioned diner), when the bell rings the monkeys will stop typing and a man wearing an oversized pinata of a parakeet head and a pearl-gray suit and dark tie will come and collect the pages, take them away to a cloistered space, sift through the material, and try to organize the fragments into Hamlet or something Hamlet-like. The monkeys never leave the room. They smoke incessantly (their supply of cigarettes endless). Their shadows have become them, and they have become other in merging with these shadows, their own and others. Several of the monkeys wear hats, but that’s neither here nor there. They wear hats because it gives them a sense of time, place, fashion, and it goes with the typewriters and cigarettes. These monkeys only exist, it seems, because people keep asking—Did you hear the one about monkeys in a room producing Hamlet on typewriters? Some theoretical speculations, when lasting and repeatable, grow limbs, fur, and theoretical offspring closely resembling their parents blank faces.