Lost in the Heart of Africa

The heat hit Clive like opening an oven door. One moment he was in the air-conditioned wreckage of a cockpit; the next he was standing in grass up to his belly, squinting at a sun that seemed personally offended by his presence.

Africa. He was in Africa. He knew this because of the elephants, and the acacia trees, and the fact that everything was trying to be yellow at the same time.

The plane sat behind him in the field, looking embarrassed. Passengers were filing out of the emergency exits with the dazed expressions of people who'd just survived something they'd be talking about for the rest of their lives. None of them looked at Clive. He suspected they were trying very hard not to think about the fact that a sheep had just landed their plane.

Clive walked. He didn't know where he was walking, but standing next to a crashed plane seemed like the kind of thing that attracted questions, and Clive was fresh out of answers.

The savanna stretched in every direction — endless, golden, and completely indifferent to his problems. He'd been walking for maybe twenty minutes when the bushes to his left erupted.

Monkeys. A dozen of them, swinging down from branches and popping out of the undergrowth like furry jack-in-the-boxes. They surrounded him in seconds, chattering and pointing and climbing over each other to get a better look.

One of them — a lanky thing with a tuft of fur that stuck straight up like he'd been electrocuted — got right in Clive's face.

"You fell out of the sky," the monkey said. It wasn't a question.

"Technically I landed," Clive said. "Badly. But I landed."

"INCREDIBLE!" The monkey grabbed Clive's hoof and shook it so hard Clive's whole body wobbled. "I'm Bobo. You're the coolest thing that's ever happened to this jungle, and I've seen a hippo sit on a crocodile."

Before Clive could respond, a larger monkey pushed through the crowd. This one wore a necklace made of banana peels and carried himself with the authority of someone who'd never been told no.

"I'm the troop leader," he announced. "And I've decided you're one of us now."

"That's very kind, but I really should—"

"There's one condition."

Clive's stomach dropped. "Why is there always a condition?"

The monkeys parted like a furry curtain, and there, standing in the gap, was a small monkey with enormous eyes and a flower behind her ear. She looked at Clive the way people look at dessert menus.

"You have to marry Lulu," the troop leader said.

Clive looked at Lulu. Lulu looked at Clive. Lulu giggled.

"I'm a sheep," Clive said.

"And she's a monkey," the troop leader replied. "What's your point?"

The wedding happened that evening. Clive wasn't sure how. One minute he was trying to explain interspecies complications, and the next he was standing on a platform of woven leaves while an ancient monkey who might have been a hundred years old mumbled words over him in a language that was mostly grunts.

"Do you, Clive, promise to honour the troop and keep Lulu happy?"

"I don't even know what's happening right now."

"He said yes!" Bobo shouted, and the monkeys threw banana peels in the air like confetti.

Clive was married. To a monkey. In Africa. On the same day he'd crashed a plane.

He sat on his coconut throne afterward, staring at the stars, and thought: This is objectively the weirdest Tuesday of my life.