The Wager
by Michael A.
Kechula
When the Queen
of Zamboozia awarded Charlie Burns a jeweled
trophy for winning the Faux Shakespeare Sonnet
Writing Contest, I bet him ten million Euros I
could do better.
He thought I
was nuts.
“I’ll
even do it a year sooner. It’ll be so good,
Shakespeare will think HE wrote it. But instead
of putting fifty blindfolded, lobotomized people
on typewriters like you did, I’ll use fifty
blindfolded monkeys.”
Burns accepted
the bet. The Queen agreed to be the judge and
offered Knighthood to the winner.
I went to the
Congo. Posted 785,235 recruiting posters in the
jungle. 9,827 monkeys responded. After giving
them personality and IQ tests, I selected fifty.
Transporting them to London, I fed, clothed,
housed them. Plus, I gave them weekly paychecks.
Soon, my
blindfolded monkeys mounted typewriters and
danced on the keys to hip-hop.
After three
years of scrutinizing results, they seemed a
million miles from producing a new Shakespearean
sonnet. However, by cutting and pasting, I pieced
together a poem Keats might’ve written in
the third grade. It took first prize in Short
Humour’s Poetry Contest.
As the
deadline approached, I became anxious and drove
the monkeys harder. For the thousandth time, I
explained the stakes. Unfortunately, a labor
organizer convinced them to go on strike for
shorter hours and company provided chocolate-covered
bananas during smoke breaks.
We resolved
the banana issue, but nothing else.
I explained
management’s position on BBC. After that
news segment flashed around the world, amazing
things happened. Thousands of sympathetic monkeys
found blindfolds and typewriters. They pounded
them 24/7. I was flooded with tons of genuine,
monkey-typed pages. But none were sonnets.
On the final
day of the bet, I spotted something in the mail
that sunned me: a sonnet typed by a chimp from
Kong Island. It was fantastic!
The Queen
declared me winner, handed me Burns’ check
for ten million, and knighted me.
While throngs
of Zamboozians applauded, she whispered,
“You were lucky, Sir Michael. You
couldn’t do that again in a million years.”
“Your
Highness, I can do even better. I’ll bet my
monkeys can create a Harry Potter-like, 120-page
novella within five years.”
“I’ll
bet you can’t,” she said, removing her
crown.
“You’re
on, Ma’am,” I replied, writing a check
to match the crown’s value.
I won the
crown. And the novella became a best seller.
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