Too Many Words...

This one was my attempt to be cryptically insightful about being an ESL teacher after I first started.

In a Nutshell

Louis walked into the bar and stops. After letting his eyes adjust to the dim frosted lights and he blinked and realized that his initial assertion of the situation was correct. There was a small monkey standing on the bar.

No one else seemed to be paying it much mind, so Louis sat down near it for a closer look. He nestled into a red plush stool and fixes a quizzical gaze on the simian. Minutes pass but the monkey does little else but a horrible job of polishing an empty beer stein with a bar rag.

"Why don't you order something?" The bartender asked. He had hitherto gone unnoticed due to his autumn wardrobe and non-monkeyness.

"From him?" Louis said, pointing.

"Yeah."

"Okay," Louis brightened with the novelty of it. He spoke slowly and clearly, "I'll have a beer. Whatever you have on tap is fine."

Not surprisingly but somewhat disappointingly the monkey did not tip his little hat and comply.

Louis waited for a moment but would have felt silly repeating himself. He looked back to the bartender who honestly looked far too bored to be pulling a prank.

"Do you think he understood me?"

The bartender furrowed his brow , "Well of course not, he's a monkey can't you see?"

"Then why did you tell me to order from him?"

"Well he is a bartender isn't he? Lord knows I don't pay him all that money for nuthin," The other man said in that special tone reserved for dull children.

"Why would you hire a bartender that can't serve drinks?" Louis asked with rising exasperation.

"He's a monkey!" the man said, "Isn't that enough?"