What You Are Is What You Are and Nothing More by Tara Skurtu
Associate editor Elijah Sparkman on today’s bonus flash: I loved this story all the way through! Tara Skurtu never wastes a line—constantly tinkering with a reader’s sense of experience and expectation. This piece is delicate—somehow balancing out a sly, shy kind of kinship with the absurd. The whole perhaps glows with an aura of satirical bite. And the ending matches the caliber of the rest: I felt shook and sank, but also, oddly, free to fly away, a new and different reader. What a character. What a way of seeing.
What You Are Is What You Are and Nothing More
We should accommodate animals more. I went to monkey camp in Florida the summer I turned thirteen. Our first night, around the campfire, the camp counselor taped our thumbs to our palms so we’d feel more like chimpanzees. Every morning they drove us to Primate Planet, which had just been hit by Hurricane Francis. Sister John the Baptist told us in third grade that Francis was the saint who staged the world’s first living nativity, complete with an ox, a camel, and a donkey. Not only did he accommodate animals, he blessed their soulless bodies with free tickets to Heaven. That was the year I brought my hamster in his hamster ball to the priest for some signs of the cross and holy oil, and that was the year I got away with cross-dressing at our Christmas Eve pageant—the only boy left wanted to be a donkey, so Sister John assigned the third Wise Man to me. I felt like I was committing a holy sin.
Hurricane Francis had freed the primates, so we explored the grounds from inside a caged hall circling the property. We had to pick a primate to study. I chose the spider monkey—I liked how the dad slept upside-down, fingerprinted tail hooking the branch of the mango tree. The only girl who would talk to me chose to study the orangutan, the remaining caged primate at Primate Planet. But all he did all day was stare at her and rock left to right to left. Masturbating! She wanted to pick another monkey but she’d already made up her mind. So all day every day she perfected her charcoal drawing of a gorilla’s single eye. We never saw the gorillas, only heard them howling at dawn.
Feeding trays hung from the ceiling of our caged path. For three bucks you could buy a bag of monkey kibble to send up the chain. A few dominant squirrel monkeys would wait above our heads for feeding time. The gorilla-eye girl and I were lucky enough to be there on a full scholarship, so each afternoon we stood back and watched the girls elbow and step all over each other to empty their little brown bags into the tray as the males above bit the runts and females and pulled up the weighted chain.
On the last day, the counselors gave out awards. I’d been waiting for this, I was serious about monkeys. Most likely to be a primatologist. A veterinarian. Zookeeper. I got: Most likely to be shit on. It was from one of the feeding times. The two of us were standing right underneath a runt, and a kibble of shit hit my right shoulder. I thought, then wished, it had been rain. None of the other girls noticed, they kept shoving each other and emptying their little brown bags. That’s God punishing you, my mother said in my mind. I put my palm on my shoulder and kept it there until we got back to the campsite.
What we are looking for is what is looking, Sister John the Baptist said to us once as we lined up for weekly confession. What you are is what you are and you get what you get. And now, on the last day of monkey camp, the girls circled me, laughing and pointing—even gorilla-eye girl. I decided I liked birds after that. Plenty of people get shit on by birds, but I never have. And besides, if it ever happens, no one cares—you get off easy, you call it luck.
Tara Skurtu is the author of The Amoeba Game and the forthcoming poetry collection Faith Farm. A two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is the founder of International Poetry Circle and a steering committee member of Writers for Democratic Action. Her recent work appears in Salmagundi, The Common, and The Baffler.
