penmage | The 2G Monkey Saga (Reply)

At the beginning of the year, Sara (my roomate) bought liquid soap. Softsoap, the clear kind. The kind that comes with a little animal inside and a green pump. Sara's had a monkey. Debra (my other roomate) had regular old white softsoap.

As the year went by, we used up the soap, and bought replacement soap - orange soap, the only thing they had in the store. Both dispensers were now filled with orange soap. This, of course, made the monkey impossible to be seen.

Right before pesach break, as I came home, Rena (my fourth roomate) left, grinning, and told me that she had hidden something funny somewhere in the room. And with that, she left me to find it. Sara, apparently, had found it herself. Debra was out late. I proceeded to take the room apart in searching while Sara looked on with great glee, refusing to gve me any hints.

Turns out Rena had switched the monkey. In the orange soap, you couldn't hardly see it. The really strange part, though, was that Rena claimed she had just switched the pumps (Sara had found it before Rena left, and had asked her), and the monkey was now on the white pump. We tried taking the monkey off the pump, and couldn't - Rena said she had tried that too, and hadn't been able to. So how did it jump pumps?

We all thought we were haunted - it was very strange. When Debrea came home, she searched all over for the funny, until it finally came out that she had found it earlier and had switched the monkey, by sliding the whole tube off. We cleverly decided not to tell Rena.

What followed was a series of monkey-switches. Someone else would mysteriously switch the monkey each day - you never knew where it would be.

This morning, we woke up to find that one soap bottle was full of soap, while the other was nearly empty - and had the monkey. Rena, Debra and I discovered this after Sara had gone off to class, and, after accusing each other, concluded that Sara had done it.

Sara later confessed. She had been up all night researching a lynching, looking at awful pictures, and then she walked into the bathroom and saw the poor monkey drowning in soap, and had to save it.

Later on tonight...

1am. Rena's sleeping. Debra's sitting on the beanbag in my alcove, sharing my light. I'm at the computer, and Sara's in the bathroom. There's a second door to the bathroom, one that doesn't open - but is right next to my alcove. Debra looks up at me gleenfully, and asks for a pen. It takes me less than a second to figure out what she wants to do. We think for a minute, and then compose the following message:

"We have your monkey. Slip $10,000 in unmarked cookies under the door, and no one gets hurt."

We slipped it under the bathroom door, along with the pen.

A series of frenzied ransom and response notes flew back and forth, amidst muffling giggling. Sara sent back our message with liberal amounts of soap on it. We sent back a note with a picture of a hanging monkey, insisting we meant buisness. This went on until we heard the door open, and Sara went wordlessly to bed.

A few minutes later, Debra decided to go to sleep. She hied off to the bathroom - and called me over. Inside, Sara had taken the monkey out of the soap and perched it on the counter, with a note saying "Fie, monkey kidnappers!"

Debra and I looked at each other and knew exactly what we had to do.

We rigged the monkey up with cut rubber bands. It's now hanging from the bathroom mirror, along with a note saying "We said we meant buisness..."

Poor Rena, who usually wakes up first...

I can hardly wait to see what will happen next.

Edit: I woke up this morning to find the tube, monkeyless, hanging from the bathroom mirror. I scratched my head for a second before finding the monkey in the very full soap dispenser.

And then I switched the tubs again and hung the monkey from the basketball hoop.