This is where I’ll be jamming the short stories that I’ve submitted to various publications for them to do with as they see fit - publish, completely disregard, set on fire, what have you. I’ll keep an eye on the differences between this and ammohammer proper to assess whether or not storyhole is entirely superfluous or merely redundant; what I will do about it either way is unclear.

On another note, so to speak, buy Notes Magazine here - sure, you can read Pork Monkey below, but if you buy the magazine you can read it on the shitter! Plus, it's way better on your eyes. And if you lick the page it tastes like fun!



The joie de vivre had dropped out of our relationship with a thud. Our love had slipped and fallen in the mud like the loose footing of an aged Sherpa surprised by a flash-flood. We grasped desperately for tree-branch anchors and protruding-rock footholds but we were mountain climbers traversing molehills, my wife and I, and our arguments did nothing but reflect that cramped and constricting truth.

When the urge struck me to announce that I was lost without her, she would snort, wordlessly click on Mapquest and leave the room. 'You’re my everything,' she would say in a fit of emotion, and I would snigger, condescendingly gesturing towards her monthly foster-parent donation receipt and ask, 'Everything?' Melancholic and miles from sober, I would declare myself willing to die for her and she would fill a pot with cooking oil, turn on the burner, and just stand there, looking at me. Occasionally, she would show her impatience with the stove, glancing at her watch and tapping a groove into the counter with her frenetic fingernails.

'Oil,' she’d say, 'actually takes, like, a really long time to boil, huh?'

'Who’d’ve thought,' I’d respond, my sarcastic playfulness tightening in my throat with the incremental realization of what she had planned. 'Dying for you, by the by, doesn’t directly translate into scalded and disfigured with a cauldron of oil, regardless of what your mother tells you.'

'You can’t be sure that you won’t die,' she would say, affecting her mother’s purposeful posture and grisly determination. 'I mean, who really knows what will happen here, right? I’m of the mind that we should be strong enough, courageous enough, to shrug off convention and just, you know, give it a shot.'

Oh, how we laughed when cooler heads prevailed... after I wrestled her away from the stove.

Sometimes, in the lighter moments, she would ask if I felt like some macaroni and cheese, and I would nod and call her 'my little macaroni'. She would playfully suggest that if she were the 'macaroni', then I most certainly was the 'cheese'. I would laughingly shoot back that she was a dirty bitch who slept with my cousin, and that I spend most nights lying awake and imagining that every breath I hear her take is her last. She would jokingly retort that I had a dick the size of a thumbtack, and that she'd fantasized herself to orgasm over the image of slitting my throat and dancing in the arterial spray. Again, we would laugh. Mirthless, hateful laughs, but laughs nonetheless.

Then, one evening, after another typical workday spent practicing my wife's handwriting so as to better prepare her 'suicide-note', I happened into a bodega that seemed to specialize in frozen meats and spectacularly-ornamental implements of death. While I absentmindedly gazed over the decadently bejeweled butterfly-knives and Korean murder-swords so filthy with gemstones that one might mistake their very existence as a none too subtle nod to irony, a gentlemanly clerk swept into view and asked, 'Girl trouble?'

I was amazed at his insight, truly taken aback. Reading my astonished silence as an affirmation, he wheeled around and popped open a freezer door hidden behind the counter, rustling through bricks of individually wrapped ground meat as the chill visibly swept into the storefront. Finally, he spun back around holding what looked to be a full-sized vacuum-sealed monkey. It didn't, at first peek, look like something one could realistically use to bludgeon one's wife to death with, so I was skeptical.

'I’ll be honest,' I said, pausing long enough to make it seem as though I was unfamiliar with the notion. 'Unless that thing comes equipped with side pocket tommyguns or, better yet, some kind of clandestine yet easily accessible piano wire, I don’t see the point in...'

'Bup!' he interrupted, like a drill-sergeant using the element of surprise and the barest of syllables to shoot me down.

'Well,' I continued slowly, eyeing him with suspicion, 'at least tell me that it shoots poison darts or someth—'

But the clerk interrupted me again with something that sounded like abbit! and the abruptness of his interjection was so jarring that I found myself becoming lightheaded. Still, ever stubborn, I sped up my articulation in a futile attempt to slip a question past his whiplash gibberish:

'Grenade?'

'Dat!'

'Anthra—'

'Blip!'

'Christ, would you—'

'Grupetat, byat!'

I slapped both palms on the countertop, staring hard into the clerk’s wrinkled and, despite our harried back and forth, surprisingly docile visage, and sighed.

'Mouse Trap?' I asked, wearily.

His disappointed eyes tore at me as only an elderly Asian man’s can, and he shook his head solemnly.

'Pork Monkey,' he said.

Huh, I thought. Pork Monkey. It hadn't even crossed my mind. Of course, since I hadn't the foggiest idea what a Pork Monkey was, my inability to conjure such a thing as a solution to my problems wasn't all that surprising. The clerk enthusiastically pushed the frozen atrocity at me, smiling and raising his eyebrows suggestively as though I hadn't noticed that the monkey looked to have been turned inside-out before it was sealed in plastic.

'Pass,' I said, shooing the Pork Monkey away as indignantly as possible.

'You don't pass on the Pork Monkey!' said the clerk, his face pink with umbrage. 'You humbly pay full price and solve each and all of your worldly troubles!'

'I do have worldly troubles that need solving,' I said, scratching my chin. 'But how can I be sure that your Pork Monkey is the solution for me?'

'Life,' began the clerk, 'though a series of riddles, is exceptionally clear when it comes to matters of the heart.'

'Of course,' I said, wearing what I considered to be a fairly convincing look of utter comprehension.

'This is twenty-five pounds of boneless pork, seasoned with the herbs of romance and doused in the marinade of marital bliss.'

'I see.'

'Shaped into a monkey.'

'Right.'

'As with life,' the clerk continued, gesturing whimsically and at great length, 'the instructions are on the back.'

In the blink of an eye, or the unhinging of a frown, I was once again standing outside the now shuttered bodega. Although my wallet was sixty dollars lighter and I was holding a rapidly melting Pork Monkey in my grip, I was struck, for the first time that I could remember, with a thought that didn't involve me suffocating my wife with a garbage bag. I found myself hoping that she was hungry.

* * *

Clearly stated on the back of the monkey-package was the disclaimer: Do not be alarmed by the noises your Pork Monkey makes as it cooks. Then, in much smaller print: Pork Monkey does not scream, yell, or moan. Pork Monkey only sighs contentedly. My wife and I looked at one another, resisted the urge to strangle the life from each other's eyes, and went about opening the package. The already detestable looking Pork Monkey was an even more revolting sight once pulled from its wrapping, though my wife was as astounded by its enchanting aroma as I was by its gelatin-like solidity. It was, without a doubt, the thickest conglomeration of pork I had ever been in the company of, and that, in and of itself, was worth celebrating.

Three hours, six glasses of straight, no nonsense bourbon, and a vigorous bout of name-calling and hair-pulling later, we were interrupted by the wondrous splendor of a walking, talking, golden-crusted Pork Monkey waddling down our hallway, beckoning us into the kitchen with a couple of crispy waves of its delectably-tender arm.

'Eat me while I'm hot, folks!' Pork Monkey said in a high-pitched, children's-cartoon-character voice. 'I'm scrumptious!'

Astonished, yet extraordinarily hungry, we both snickered at each other’s twisted, incredulous expressions and the improbability of our dinner being so eager to be dined upon, as we followed our shuffling guide into the kitchen. Pork Monkey had already set himself down on the table by the time we arrived, graciously handing us our utensils and clamoring for us to dig in before he got cold. I hesitated briefly before sawing off a delightfully juicy chunk of leg, but was soon fully indulging in the explosion of flavor that burst in my mouth after every prolonged chew. If my wife had meant to wait for my reaction before helping herself, the heavenly scent of exquisitely cooked pork positively murdered her patience, and she too pampered herself with a steaming bite of pure Pork Monkey.

'Now that we've got a couple of decent bites of greasy meat into your bellies,' the Pork Monkey said as it reached out an arm and tenderly stroked my wife's hair. 'Well, how's about you tell ol' Pork Monkey what the problem seems to be.'

So we did. We ate and we laughed and we laid it all out on the table for ol' Pork Monkey, our mouths stuffed with glorious succulence, bit by bit succumbing to the heady liquor-clouds of overindulgence as we chewed and chatted and chortled...

He’d eat a potato chip off a sewer grate, but I can’t even get a ‘thanks’ for making a casserole? Come on.

She whines about dust— you want to see dust? Check the zipper on my pants.

Complaining about another’s faults is like making a Pork Monkey out of squirrels: off-putting, distasteful and gamey.

Why am I keeping my elbows off the table if she’s drinking milk straight from the carton? You hear what I’m saying?

Is he hairy? It’s like living with a bad-tempered rug, except rugs can at least look good if you put enough effort into it.

All you can do is appreciate good company and live each day as though you’re going to be eaten the next.

It was hours later when I offered Pork Monkey a toast after another particularly adroit piece of advice, grabbing blindly for an itty-bitty glass with which he could partake, but I was told with a giggle that he was already marinated.

'Besides,' Pork Monkey said with a grin, 'there's no place for it to go—you've already eaten my stomach.'

I had indeed eaten his stomach, savored every inch of that rotund, perfectly inflated balloon of flawlessness... but it was during that belly-eating that I wondered how long we could keep up this discourse. What kind of etiquette is required before lopping off the top of your dinner's head, especially if said dinner is in the middle of a sentence? Would Pork Monkey continue talking as I ate his mouth? Among the many things he was (including, of course, delicious), Pork Monkey was intuitive; he knew we were struggling with our dinner guest and our dinner being one and the same, just as he knew that, without a doubt, he had changed our lives forever. Pork Monkey might have known how much he meant to both our well-being and our appetite, but that didn't stop me from telling him.

'Pork Monkey,' I started, an unexpected tear welling up in my eye.

'Oh, hush,' he said, smiling serenely. 'I understand. Just remember what I told you, and, as a special favor to me, make sure you enjoy eating my mouth as much as I've enjoyed talking through it.'

As a final gesture to our departing friend, my wife and I clinked forks together, placed them neatly on either side of Pork Monkey's grease-stain, and each took an end of the mouth. We chewed from opposing sides until we came together with a slippery, deep-fried kiss.

'Mmm,' said my wife, grinding through the last of her meal and leaning her palpitating cheek against my shoulder. 'You cook a good Pork Monkey.'

I stared blankly into the tines of my fork as a reply, focusing finally on the lubricious triplicate-reflection of my face and its curious tranquility, for though I was never certain, not even now, I’m almost sure I could feel Pork Monkey half-smile as he slid down my esophagus.