Wry Whisky Chimp By Mikki Aronoff

A single malt, Sam, I smile at the bartender, always so loose with a liquid tip at day’s end — beats the scrap pay, enough for a half pack of Camels, and I stash the cash in my bra and curl my upper lip like a chimp jonesing for figs and down the Glenmorangie in one gulp, knowing how mother would cluck-cluck-cluck if she found me, me working here, me in this floofy pink pinafore like a trained chimp might choose if they let her loose in the kids’ clothing department and, later, done with her shift at the roadside zoo, having finished her tricycle number zigzagging across the rickety makeshift stage — peanuts, whoops and hollers flying from the bleachers, she’d jump, grunt, hoot and knuckle-run past her wide-eyed keeper into sunshine, shimmy the tallest tree, bundle and pump sinew and bone, and leap, head first, eyes shut, into the nearest cloud.

Mikki Aronoff’s work appears in New World Writing, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Tiny Molecules, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Gone Lawn, Mslexia, The Dribble Drabble Review, 100 word story, The Citron Review, Atlas and Alice, trampset, jmww, and elsewhere. She’s received Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction nominations.