Listen to the author reading this story:
This party blows. I fold my arms into an elephant’s trunk. I trample through the apartment, bumping people’s drinks, answering each, “Watch it, buddy,” with a full-lipped trumpet. She sees me. Puts down the Franzia. I know her ivory skin. We touch trunks (twine wrists) and know our feelings through animal magnetism. That’s our signal. ‘The elephant.’ The signal to leave. Only for mid-size events. Talking makes me nauseous. We go together.
Big events get ‘big cats’ and at the wedding she hunts me through the taiga forest of groomsmen and stepmoms. I know because each of her steps are deliberate. She avoids stepping on cousins or branches. Her eyes are snow leopard blue, dress like pelt white. She’s trailcam beautiful. I am the only creature who understands that predator in the rented VFW1 hall and her needs, her signal. She wants to leave.
For one-on-one situations you need subtle signals. She doesn’t like the nurse. Or what’s said. She sticks out her tongue, retracts it, at the nurse, at the doctor, at the receptionist, at the bald woman next to me in the waiting room—‘the frog,’ I know—and I carry her home. Our bodies flatten onto the kitchen tile. We rest under an Arizona full moon. We crawl, alone in company. And croak. She stares unmoving beneath kitchen window glass and, as we live through the sleeplessness, I wonder why the Harvard Museum of Natural History can preserve beetles, dinosaurs, safari fodder, birds of every color, glass flowers brittle as life is long, but not frogs. Taxidermy doesn’t prevent extinction but at least it’d keep her frozen in some stance I would understand, some wordless silhouette that gives meaning through symbol. I stick out my tongue. Retract it. She croaks.
Funerals are big events again but I mumble through each conversation with a kitten’s uncertainty. I imagine every photo of us repainted by Susan Herbert. People expect me to cry but I just put my paws atop the coffin, wedding band biscuiting. Nobody knows the signal. The embalming stench, I can no longer pretend is Kamchatka breath. I stare at the hearse driver’s windshield like I’ve found a camera in the wild. The reflection shows I am no longer the king of the jungle. Without a signal, I don’t know what I am.
I am critically endangered to myself and others. I guzzle another Tom Collins. It’s been long enough for the elephant to begin forgetting everything he desperately wants to remember. The TouchTunes plays Adrian Gurvitz’s “The Way I Feel”. I trumpet mourning. Last of my kind. But I refuse to be exhibited, to be stitched and positioned next to an animal that isn’t her, in a stance easily translated. Shirtless, I frenzied charge across the dancefloor. I may be acknowledged but I will never be understood. And for the final time my trunk reaches from the singles night tar pit trap and I sink.
Marco Visciolaccio is an author in Asheville, North Carolina. He edits Flash Fiction for French Broads Lit, a publication focused on celebrating authors in Southern Appalachia. He yearns for the unsolicited email.
Website: visciolaccio.com
Veterans of Foreign Wars.