[stylist] The Monkey in the Zoo: creative writing prompt

[Barbara Hammel]

Okay, I know this is short, but is this sort of what this is supposed to look like?

  THE MONKEY IN THE ZOO

  by Barbara Hammel



I knew that visiting another country would be interesting, but I never imagined the people would find me so fascinating. Or was it the twin boys? Or the sighted man with a blind woman and a sighted woman and the blind twin boys?



By this time we'd acquired one stroller and my husband was pushing that but I wanted a break from carrying the other in a backpack.



We got into the cage--I mean stopped at a bench--to take a rest. Before we knew it, we were surrounded by silent onlookers who, along with everyone else we met on that trip, kept giving my husband the thumbs-up.  (Was it the two blind boys are the two women or all of us and our purpose that made them do this.)



It took me back to my days at the Braille School when schoolchildren would take tours. (It is the school Mary Ingalls attended, after all.) We would always have to demonstrate how to write their names in Braille so a hundred--or maybe just seven or eight--would gather around the desk and not just stand there, but lean over me and the desk and the Braillewriter.



Now this happened to us everywhere we went in China. (I often wonder if that article the journalist was doing ever got published?)

I guess we were a human interest story since we were adopting boys, a rarity in that country, and I'm blind. I just wonder what they thought about us, and I wonder how they thought each of us fit in the picture.



Never mind, after all. We were just monkeys in the zoo, odd sorts of beings because our eyes don't see and those two sighted people were just our

handlers.



Barbara



Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. -- Carl Sandburg