I've been working on this "short" story for a year. Even in the Accra airport, I began to write this down in notebooks, along with the almost overwhelming amount of emotional and physical information I had taken in over the two weeks.
I can't share everything with you here. But I did want to give you a little taste.
Just for context, here's the blurb:
Somewhere between rekindling a trans-atlantic romance and calling it quits for good, a couple tries a new locale on holiday in Ghana’s Cape Coast. At an isolated nature reserve, an eccentric Dutch couple reveals more than anyone bargained for about our biological evolution when we choose to stay together.
And here is the text! A nice non-emotional, yet meatier middle chunk of
MONKEY SANCTUARY.
Forty-five minutes later, they were still in the car on the way to the monkey reserve that was “right up the road.”
Casey had underestimated how big Ghana was. Almost everything they said was "close" ended up being an hour drive at least. Maybe it was all the extra police stops you had to make. Every few miles, the police in navy and light blue camo (She couldn’t quite see the point in that particular camo) would pull over every car and inspect. Gordon would warn her each time to hide any electronics. (“They’ll take it. They’ll find a reason to take it.”)
Or maybe everything took so long because-- with the exception of the George W. Bush Expressway, ironically enough, both “The Best Road in All of Africa,” but also simply the best road in all of Africa-- the roads were all so bad.
In LA, the roads always failed at the edges. In Ghana, every road seemed to have huge, craggy chunks pulled up in the middle that had to be sharply swerved around—a kind of alien asphalt phlegm that Ghana kept trying to cough up. The center literally would not hold.
