I have no idea why I bought the monkey, but I bought it, and now I’m carrying it home in a cage covered with a green towel, and I try to come up with reasons to own a monkey. It was on sale. "House-trained," said the girl who sold it to me, "and it eats leftovers so it’s actually almost economical to have one."

I think that’s what did it, how I bought that last line, how economical it would be to own a monkey.

I can feel the monkey moving in its too-small cage and I have an image of it, the monkey, dining on a carcass of a barbecued chicken, dipping its little hands in fat and cartilage, its old-man face twitching while chewing fast, faster, faster, and I hate this image, and have a thought of lifting the towel and opening the cage door quickly and releasing the monkey into thetraffic.

It’s almost like having a baby, I will say to my wife.

I thought this up, saying this, at the store when I was paying for the monkey with the new card that’s been sent to me unordered. My old card didn’t work because of the lack of the special magnetic chip on it and the pet-store girl lightly and friendlily suggested I look for a different card. Maybe I have one with the chip? In my wallet?

"Yeah, I have one. Those assholes, they sent it to me but I never ever even asked for it, you know, " -- I explained to the girl as I dug out the chip card – "so I refused to use it. It feels like they’re forcing me to do something I don’t want to do, you know?" I said to the girl, and her friendly smile said to me that she thought I was nuts for sure. Of course she must’ve thought I was nuts when I shouted my desire to buy the Capuchin Monkey on Special in the first place, but with the card, with me blathering on about the card, trying to explain how I didn’t want it and her not saying fucking anything – she for sure must’ve thought that I was an insane person.

I wasn’t an insane person, not usually, not ever, god, I kept thinking, I usually really have it together, I'm quite— and I kept thinking how it didn’t matter, how I was acting like an insane person anyway and—

"... leftovers like old bread or even leftover chicken," was the next thing I heard coming out of the pet-store girl’s mouth, once I finally tuned back in to her talking about monkey care as she stapled the sales receipt to the debit card receipt.

Now, with the cage, and in it, the monkey too smart, too house-trained and probably plotting something awful and monkeyish, evil, and rubbing its little hands – or maybe not at all plotting anything, maybe actually dying of a horrible anxiety attack, who knows, from being sold, from going into the unknown – and with the green towel donated by the pet-store girl so generously, and hiding both me and the monkey away from seeing each other’s fear, the chicken carcass image is so strong, I feel like throwing up.

I decide to take a little break and sit down on a bench by the streetcar stop.

I watch one of my streetcars drive away, then another one that would take me home, then one more. But I can’t get up, not yet. I have to think about what to say to my wife other than that monkey-being-almost-a-baby thing because that’s ridiculous, I suddenly realize, to say that it’s like a baby, the monkey. My wife has been wanting a baby for years, not a monkey, and me saying this to her – it’s completely insensitive, insane. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I bought this monkey.

There are renovations going on in my house. My wife has decided to eradicate the wall between the living room and the phantom baby’s room. "It’s like lighting a cigarette while you’re waiting for the bus for too long," she explained when I asked why the renovations exactly. "The moment you light one, the bus shows upon the horizon," she said. So she’s eradicating the walls to Voodoo-cause a fetus to what? To form itself together in her womb, and I’ve just bought a house-trained monkey, and we are so lost, my wife, and I that I no longer know what I want, and I don't even know what I don't want. My bank clearly doesn’t seem to think so.