Everyone just called him Monkey. He wore a red show vest over the smallest black oxford, and the hair at his nape grew in curls out from under his hat. At night he rode a pig in the side ring, a short horse with tusks, and a snout that reminded him of the brass ring on the carousel. It was an easy job for a monkey.

Everyone just called her Monkey. But he called her Birdie, his simian bride in the kid show. Relegated to auguste clowns, whose interest in tiny hats and oversized lapels had left little time for her care, she'd caught pneumonia and died alone in a pile of hay, on a summer night, in the hot caravan about mid way between Elgin and LaPorte. Monkey hadn't been anywhere near her when she died. She believed him when he told her she'd be alright. He did not want to believe she was sick. He'd found her when the men stopped to piss off an embankment, her eyes closed like she was dreaming; her mucus-covered crinoline crumpled around her waist.

The show was cancelled that night for reasons unrelated to Birdie's death, leaving the troupe unoccupied in the Indiana swelter. The Professor split her body down the middle and sewed her ethanol soaked torso to the dried trunk of a king salmon that one of the roustabouts had caught in Trail Creek earlier that week. Monkey watched him stitch under her breast, attaching her just above the spiny dorsal of the still shimmering blue fish. Her arms stretched out behind her head and draped down over the Professor's legs. He had held her like that before, and when he'd stroked her white head she had closed her eyes, just like that.