The bedside clock said 2:00 a.m. Ellen stood up and lighted a cigarette. Smoking again had been a means to distract her from the pain. Up to a pack a day, and it still hadn’t worked. She reached the window and looked through the slats. The curtains, billowing out like sails in the wind, wrapped around her. She’d go mad and end up in a straight jacket. Maybe this disease was just a preliminary bout to the main event. Something horrible, long and painful, ending in death.
Looking through the window blinds, she sucked in her breath and gasped. Quickly rolling them up, she leaned closer to the glass. There, silhouetted against the moonlight, a Rhesus monkey, sitting on its rump with its front paws raised as if in prayer. She blinked and looked again. Just the half dead apple tree with a broken limb, the same tree she had seen outside her apartment window for three years. A hurricane had changed the shape of the tree, but the sharp jagged splinters, which had looked like church spires, no longer shot up into the sky. The edges were softer, rounder. Strange, but she hadn't noticed how the broken limb had changed shape over the years.
What would a monkey pray for if it could pray? A banana? Some peanuts? Forgiveness for being a bad monkey, for cheating, for not playing by the rules? The guilt rose up like bile, as bitter now as three years ago. Years of excuses and rationalizations hadn’t kept it down.
The cord on the window blinds slipped quickly from her hands. The clatter made her think of old bones rattling - hers. Only 45, but she felt ancient. In the last month another 20 years had appeared in her face and posture. She hadn’t helped any by forgetting her makeup and letting her hair go grey.
"What's happened to you?" Jim had asked the day before. "You look terrible.”
"It's shingles," Ellen had said. "Not serious, but painful. It began a month ago. That's why I couldn't see the girls the last two weekends. I was too sick, but I feel better today."
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Just try not to worry the girls.”
She held onto her right side as she slowly sat on the edge of the bed, pressing against the pain, as if she could squeeze it out. She didn't think Jim had believed her about the shingles. He probably thought she was drinking again. Her daughters probably didn’t believe her either.
When she saw them she had glossed over the symptoms. She didn't want their pity. What she wanted from her daughters was forgiveness and understanding.
"Isn't that an old person's disease?" Diana, her 16 year old daughter had asked, looking at Ellen with disbelief. "You're not that old."
"It's not a communicable disease, is it?" Jeannie, the 13 year old, asked, wrinkling her face. "We're learning in school about different kinds of diseases, which ones are communicable and which are not. Like AIDS and TB and Ebola. And diseases you get from insects, like Lyme disease and other stuff."
And other stuff, like shingles, Ellen had explained, caused by the same virus that causes chicken pox, attacking the nerve endings causing pain and itching. Three weeks maybe or three months, her doctor had said. And no, she wasn't too young. “It happens, sometimes. Nothing to worry about." She skipped some details, like anyone who had chicken pox can get shingles later on in life. But then, her girls hadn’t had chicken pox. Did they? Some parts of her married life were fuzzy.

* * *

Two nights later, at three a.m., the monkey was still outside her bedroom window, its arms in supplication to some unknown monkey deity. The air, heavy with the threat of a storm, clung to Ellen’s her skin. The monkey’s paws were moving. Nonsense.
She took a sleeping pill, but the pain fought through the medication, refusing to surrender, forcing up memories. Her daughters’ disbelief. Then anger and tears. Finally rejection and silence. Her daughters drifted in and out of her thoughts, as did the monkey, it's folded hands raised in prayer, pleading. Suddenly, it turned and leapt from the tree toward the window ledge. She screamed and sat up in bed, her heart thumping. The monkey trying to get in. She cautiously went to the window. Nothing outside, just the apple tree with a broken limb in a monkey shape. Nothing was moving or leaping. A nightmare. An all too real nightmare.

* * *

"Don't you see a monkey?" Ellen asked Mr. Sweig, the old man who lived directly below her.
Mr. Sweig wiped his glasses before turning his eyes up toward the tree. "No. Can't say I do. You got a real imagination if you see anything in that broken tree limb."
He was right, of course. Simply night shadows. That’s what it was. The moon and dark clouds had fueled her imagination. In broad daylight the tree limb looked normal and innocuous. Firewood waiting to be cut down.

* * *