MONKEY BUSINESS

I gave each grandchild a sentence and challenged them to write a story using that sentence and not revealing what their sentence was. The others would try to guess the sentence. Each starting sentence is highlighted in bold in each story.

MONKEY BUSINESS by Dillon, age 14

It was cold outside when I got the call. The winter wind was biting at everyone’s ankles, and most everybody was in a terrible mood. I was handling it the difficult way. Six empty bottles were lined up carefully on the edge of my desk. I knew I needed to lay off the wine coolers, but it just wasn’t happening today. The plaque on my door will tell you that I’m Kevin O’Flannigan, Private Eye. People tell me that I’m the best in town, and this is the story of the night that nobody would soon forget.
The phone started to ring at midnight. It didn’t stop until I picked it up two minutes later. “Mr. O’Flannigan?” I heard from the other end. I sighed and told them it was me. What came next was unexpected. “We need you at 61st and Oak, we’ve got a case of body misidentification.” I slowly raised my head from my desk and set the phone back in its cradle. I’d only covered body misidentification once before. It was terrible.
I quickly grabbed my coat and keys and ran down the hall to my car. When I turned the keys in the ignition my car started right up. This was a shock to me because it had never happened before. I pushed down hard on the gas and sped out of the parking lot. As I turned onto the main roads I gunned the accelerator and was suddenly going forty over the speed limit.
Then came the unthinkable. The night began its downward spiral when the front page of the local paper flew into my windshield. This caused my to lose control of my car, but before I crashed into the oddly placed street sign, the image of the bold headline emblazoned across the front of that newspaper was burned into my mind forever. “MONKEY ESCAPES FROM ZOO!!!”.
I climbed slowly from the wreckage that was my car. The front corner had lightly tapped the front of the pole. There was no way I was driving away in that car. Lucky for me the crash had occurred at the scene of the crime. As I walked out to the eerily quiet parking lot I saw a lone man standing over a body. I walked over to the man who turned out to be the chief of police, and as I looked down at the dead body, I had no idea what it was. It sort of reminded me of my cousin chip, but I knew it wasn’t him.
I began to speak with the chief of police, but when I opened my mouth a small cockroach jumped from the ground right into my gaping mouth. I gagged for a few seconds before I was hit hard in the back by the man standing next to me. The cockroach flew out of my mouth, but as it did my entire life flashed quickly before my eyes. One moment in particular stuck out. Suddenly I looked once more at the body. It appeared to be the body of a monkey. I went and picked up the newspaper which had caused my crash, and sure enough the body was the same as the monkey escapee. I pulled out my cinco phone and called the zoo to inform them of their loss.
Now it is three years later, and the monkey is finally having a funeral. I’m in my new car, driving out to the zoo. It’s something I really don’t want to do, but I am anyway. As I’m driving I see something odd on the side of the road, and as I approach it I realize something. It appears to be the body of a monkey. The next thing I know there is a high pitched sound and my car explodes. That’s when I woke up. The funeral was just too boring.