A Monkey in the Hand

by Angela Slatter

In retrospect, dear reader, it was a mistake.

I should have known. Mere days after I finished the mech-monkey, I found it dissecting its real-life counterpart. Pinned it to the table with my set of German-engineered scalpels, and taken it apart. The dirigible from Stepney Marsh was running late, so when I arrived home with a sack of new books, the deed was almost done. I should have disassembled it then, but I thought I saw something in its eyes, something human. A desire to know, to learn, to understand why it was different to the soft, furry mirror that wailed and squealed and gave up life so quickly.

All I could hear was my father’s voice, heavy with disappointment but no real surprise: Oh, Phineas. You’re so careless. Look at the mess you’ve made.

So I tidied up the sticky, stinking corpse and threw it down the chute. I listened as it clanged along the shaft, whirled around the spiral bits, thudded into the sharp bends, then came the faint whomp as the flames gobbled it up.

I was careful to clean all the bevelled and engraved edges of the mech-monkey, and under his glass nails (which I realised were too sharp by half). I checked his insides to make sure the clockwork mechanisms were all working, not misfiring in a way that might cause a psychotic episode. Turning him around, I opened the little hatch in his lower back where, each morning, I scooped three small loads of coal to feed his tiny internal furnace. The emissions came out as small, popping farts and, if I forgot to open a window, my workshop filled up very quickly with a nasty charcoal smoke.

I kept it – it was useful for fetching and carrying, and it opened cans terribly well. Then one Tuesday I found it reading; it saw me and threw the book away, but it was too late by then. I knew.

It probably would have been okay if I hadn’t got the next idea. I had been thinking about making a Galatea, but then I read about some sailors who’d caught themselves a mermaid and tried to bring her back to Portsmouth. They kept her in a barrel of seawater on the deck, but it seems she jumped ship just out of harbour, waved goodbye and ducked under the dark, cold sea.

And I thought ‘What if?’