The Monkey

Twin brothers Hal and Bill find a wind-up toy monkey in a box of their absent father's possessions — dressed in a tuxedo, holding a pair of cymbals. When the cymbals strike, someone nearby dies. Not the person holding it. Someone else. A family friend, then their mother. The deaths are strange and accidental-looking: a fall, a malfunction, a thing that could be explained away. Hal understands immediately what the monkey is and what it does. He gets rid of it.

He builds his adult life around distance — from his brother, from his own son, from anyone the monkey might find if it came back. Bill builds a different relationship with it: the belief that the deaths are fated rather than caused, that the monkey reveals destiny rather than creates it. When the monkey surfaces in a thrift store years later, Bill takes it home. His son is killed shortly after.

The deaths resume, arbitrary and inventive, affecting the periphery of wherever the monkey is rather than its handler. Hal and his estranged son are pulled back together by the accumulating catastrophe. They get the monkey to a lake and sink it. The deaths stop. Something like a normal life reassembles around Hal.

Somewhere else, a hand pulls the monkey from the shallows of an unfamiliar lake. The cymbals are still in working order.