The Monkeys

Fish for the Moon

 Life was good in the
forest for the monkeys.
 They had plenty of fruits to eat, and they
liked nothing more than to throw them down
from the branches onto other monkeys' heads.
One of the fruits was a coconut that broke in half after it
fell. The monkeys made a bowl from one half of the shell.
He used that bowl
to scoop up more
fruit, sometimes
stealing them from
his little brothers.
 The leader of the
monkeys had a greater
imagination than the
rest. One bright
evening, he looked up
from his games to see
the most beautiful
fruit of all.
Shining white, like the freshest
coconut meat he had ever seen,
this fruit was peeking over a hill
and seemed to be floating
upwards very slowly.
The leader had an idea.
If he and the others got to the
top of the hill on time, they
would be able to grab that fruit
and have the greatest and the
most delicious feast of their
young, monkey lives.
He whooped and cried out for the others to follow him,
and the chase was on. They swung on vines through the
forest, clambered over branches and ran across the
clearings until they reached the foot of the hill.
Then they started
to climb, sometimes
tumbling over each
other in their haste
to get to the top
before that bright,
white fruit floated
away from them. 
Breathing heavily at the
summit, the monkeys
thought the giant white
fruit was in reach .
Somehow, the white fruit was closer to the trees after all.
Then the leader came across with another idea.
He told the others
to stack up on one
another’s shoulders
to try to reach it
from the top of a
tree. 
In order to pull the
big white juicy fruit
down from the sky,
the monkey on the
very top lengthened
his arms as much as
he can to grab it.
Soon, the forest was full of the sound
of monkeys crashing to the ground.
As he rubbed his bottom, one little monkey looked
down into a canyon. At the bottom of the canyon was
a pond, and on the water of that pond, the precious,
white fruit was quietly floating.
"When did it fall down there?", asked the monkeys,
although this sounded like "Ooh ah aah ah?".
The little monkey ’s friend had an idea. If
they used a vine, the monkeys could throw
it down to lasso the fruit and pull it up.
The little monkey agreed
and went to find a good,
thick, sturdy rope.
They found one, sticking
out from under the roots
of a tree, and they
grabbed onto it and pulled.
It hardly moved at all. Little monkeys were
pulling together as a team. "One, two, three,
pull!", they screeched in monkey language.
Suddenly, the vine became very loose indeed.
Actually, it started moving towards
them even when they weren't pulling
and the monkeys soon saw that they
had been pulling on the tail of a snake
- a snake that was now very angry. 
The monkeys
ran for their
lives, and the
leader ended up
hanging from
his tail, above
the pond.
The clever
little monkey
soon saw that
the best way
to grab the
fruit was to
form a chain of
monkeys.
The leader was on a branch overhanging the
pond, the next hung from that monkey's
legs, and the next hung from the second
monkey's legs and so on, until the second-
to-last monkey, who held onto the little
monkey's tail with his foot.
He tried to grab the fruit with both hands, but it kept
slipping away from him and he only got his hands wet. 
Then, he remembered the coconut-shell bowl.
The chain of
monkeys was
formed again,
this time with
them scooping
water from the
pond with the
bowl.
The monkeys looked down and
they saw that they had captured
the fruit in the coconut shell. 
It was time for a
monkey party! They
jumped and flipped and
whooped and laughed.
They danced around the bowl
and lifted it above their heads.
They grabbed at it and struggled over it.
Then, very shortly afterwards, they dropped the bowl,
smashing it into pieces and letting the water run out into the
soil of the forest.
They looked under the bushes to see where the fruit had
rolled, but they couldn't find it anywhere.
Finally, the clever
little monkey looked
up and saw that the
fruit was high up in
the sky, shining
bigger and brighter
than ever.
They had to accept that the delicious white fruit was forever
out of reach, and the monkeys could only ever 'taste' it with
their eyes. 
The End