Monkeyshine
by Hugh Fox
"Come in, come in, come in," said Alexander's step-grandmother Azariah, midget-monkeyish, pequeñÃsima. "It's so good to have you here for the Fourth of July. All the way from Boston!"
"Cambridge, s'il vous plaît," Alexander corrected his step-grandmother. "Cambridge isn't Boston, just like earthworms aren't Sir Galahad." Black shoes, knee-high black socks, black shorts, long-sleeved blue shirt—with a tie no less—his mother Charlotte always preaching, "The child's image is the adult's reality. You want him to be General Patton, you dress him in khaki, you want him to be a cockatoo, you dress him in feathers...."
"Only you're looking and sounding too serious, pal. You look like a maudit lawyer-doctor," groaned Grandpa Ryan, Mr. Irisher-Chicago. "Kids oughta be kids, there's time enough to be old, bald, bold, bowled-over."
"You look like you've been bowled over," answered Alexander, five—just three days after his fifth birthday—running over to Grandpa and punching him in the stomach as in come Mama Charlotte and Alexander's older sister Pocahontas, eight.
"Really, dad, you always dressed me like Madame Sérieuse when I was a kid. Remember Spain and the Azores and Lisbon, Campeche, everyone would call me 'Señora' and 'Madame'...half-joking but half-serious...."
"And look at you now, married to a Parisian, teaching German philosophy at the University of Harvard." Ryan loving the complexity of his daughters' and sons' lives, his own life—complexity, complexity, complexity, like a giant electronic interstellar chess game—staring as serious as he can at Alexander. "So do you play the bagpipes, my friend? And where's your kilts and Scotch beret?"
...
"Listen, the way that monkey talks. I mean his vocabulary, even the delivery style, he's more like an octogenarian than a five-year-old...." whines Grandpa, marveling at how his super-brain daughter still remains an all-star beauty, with all her dimples and her vampire-black eyes, and a body like a combination of cow and salamander.
...
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"Monkeyshine" is roughly 1850 words.
Hugh Fox is a seventy-five-year-old writer, originally from Chicago, but after marrying a Peruvian and later a Brazilian and spending years in Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Chile, etc., he has become totally Latinized. A hundred books published, poetry, novels, criticism, archaeology, history, memoirs. Check out Hugh Fox on Internet Search. Especially look for "Way, Way Off the Road", a literary memoir.
While I found the cover off-putting for a handful of reasons, once inside I was caught in the flow of the narrative. Roberts realizes her players well, showing multiple sides to mythic characters, and the details she puts into this historical re-imagining of "The Epic of Gilgamesh" really bring the story to life.
