I’ve heard stories about elephants that go crazy. I look at Marysue and wonder if she’s got it in her. I take the broom I use to guide her back to her cage and poke it hard under her ribs. She lets out a puff and then a groan and I know it hurt. She turns and gives me a look with her eye. I rub my hand up and down her back leg to make up and she lets loose a pile of shit, her tail lifting slightly to one side.

Joseph starts picking up the hoses with his arm, coiling them around his shoulder and holding them in place with the stump he has left. He says I think too much. He says, Why don’t you work somewhere else. Then he looks sorry and says he’s not trying to get rid of me. I wonder then if he knows, but he goes home the same time as usual and leaves me to do the final cleanup. I muck out the stall and spread down fresh hay for the night.

When I’m done I take off my shoes, lay my body on the floor of Marysue’s cage, touch her under the knee like Joseph, and put my head under her foot. She lets the bottom rest on my ear, the cement chilling my cheek, the smell like the damp fertility of dirt under rocks. She shifts her weight and my head rolls gently back and forth. I can hear her breathing. It echoes off the walls and sounds piped in, a recording of an elephant still living in the wild. I close my eyes, imagine banyan trees, and feel a heaviness lift.

Home Sweet Home

home sweet home

Pat and Clyde were murdered on pot roast night. The doorbell rang just as Pat was setting the butter and margarine (Clyde was watching his cholesterol) on the table. She was thinking about James Dean. Pat had loved him desperately as a teenager, seen his movies dozens of times, written his name across her notebooks, carefully taped pictures of him to the inside of her locker so that she would have the pleasure of seeing his tortured, sullen face from East of Eden as she exchanged her French and English textbooks for science and math. When she graduated from high school, she took down the photos and pasted them to the inside cover of her yearbook, which she perused longingly several times over the summer and brought with her to the University of Massachusetts, where it sat, unopened, alongside her thesaurus and abridged collegiate dictionary until she met Clyde, received her M.R.S. degree, and packed her things to move into their two-bedroom ranch house on Bridge Street.