A Flying Mellotron and A Dead Seafood Monkey

An afternoon of listening to the Seafood Monekys brought me back to my senses, and thus started my capitalizing every first letter of the first word of my sentences.

It made perfect sense, if you think hard about it. Aside from that, it was but proper. For example, can you imagine people selling bottles of bottled water not encased in a bottle?

So in order to show them my appreciation, I chose a perfectly, numerologically lucky day and visited the greatest band in Prison-Lounge music history, where else, but in prison.

As it happened, it was the day of a big riot. As should be made clear, a big riot takes place at a regular basis on the Philippine University and Penology, on which the Seafood Monkeys are based. I wasn’t even into the second level of security inspection when I saw a mellotron literally flying out of a fifth-storey window.

The Seafood Monkeys, it occurred to me at once, for though it could not be denied that the Seafood Monkeys weren’t the only prison band in existence, only the Seafood Monkeys were influential enough to be able to afford such a rare piece of musical equipment.

I watched the mellotron 0.7 seconds afterwards plummet to the ground and crash about 0.5 feet away from a civillian, probably another visitor like myself. The civillian looked up from where the musical instrument had probably fallen from, and from up the same fifth-storey window where I saw the mellotron fly, I saw in person, *******, the Seafood Monkeys’s keyboardist himself, smiling.

At that same, exact moment, something suddenly protruded out of *******’s forehead, something not very much unlike an improvised arrow entering his head from the back. And an improvised arrow it indeed was, for barely a second afterwards, ******* started falling down to the ground himself, after his beloved mellotron.

As I wasn’t particularly used to watching people get shot on the head with improvised arrows, and much more, seeing them fall, dead or otherwise, off fifth-storey windows, I was shocked by this, and expressed it with a monosyllabic, “Oh.”

The jail officer inspecting my things didn’t fail to hear this, and he laughed as he informed me that it was nothing to be alarmed about, big riots took place in his prison at a regular basis. Prior to this, I must mention here, I wasn’t aware of this known fact about the prison.

“Is that so?” I said, a bit relieved.

“Yes.”

I was then made to wait for a couple of hours for the big riot to stop before I was finally allowed to meet my favorite band. But as I sat on the grimy wooden chair the prison officers provided, sipping on my plastic cup of Buko Joe’s Really Fresh Buko Juice, I knew that even if I met the Seafood Monkeys that day, it wouldn’t be the same. Already, I knew that they had lost a keyboardist. They had lost *******.

So I went home and wrote this instead.

© Jay Santos 2003.