This is my (first) entry for the three weekend freewrite (courtesy of Marianne West) that has three prompts. I went back and edited it a bit so that it made some sense. If you want to participate or you are just curious about the instructions, they are here.
The Elephant in the Bedroom
It was the first time Germaine had seen an elephant in real life, other than at the zoo. It didn’t make him happy. This elephant was a gigantic problem.
Instead, he tried to focus on more pleasant objects in the room which weren’t a problem. There was a bunch of yellow daffodils sitting on the bedside table, but they were still closed. Germaine’s wife always bought them that way because she knew that, soon enough, they would open. If they bought them already open, they would just wilt, shrivel and die.
However, he could not ignore the literal elephant in his bedroom.
“What is this? Why did you bring this?” he asked the man standing before him.
The man smiled cryptically, and said, “Oh, Germaine. I think you know.”
This simply made Germaine angry, which, of course, was the man’s intention.
“What am I to do with an elephant?” Germaine said.
The man waved his hands airily and said, “You know, the usual things.”
“Which are?”
“Well, if I were you, I would imagine that I was an elephant. And then, I would think of what I would want if I were that elephant, and then I would know exactly what to do to please the elephant.” The man seemed pleased with himself.
Germaine folded his arms. “Do you even realize how many holes there are in what you just said?”
The man tilted his head, bemused.
“In the first place, I do not want an elephant, and so I do not care if I please an elephant—”
“I must interrupt you,” the man said. “It would not do at all to upset an elephant. Surely, even you can see that.”
“What the hell do you mean even I can see it? Putting that aside, the other problem with what you said is that, even if I really think about it, I have no clue what an elephant might want. That requires knowledge of elephants. I would need to do research.”
The man nodded as though in agreement. “Well, Germaine. I think you have this situation entirely under control. It sounds like you know exactly what to do.”
Germaine was so furious that he could barely speak. The man handed him an envelope. “What is this now?” he asked.
The man shrugged. Germaine tore the envelope open. The paper was a high quality, thick cotton bond. The envelope was beige with nothing written on the front, but it was sealed. Inside, he found a letter and a cheque made out to cash. He saw a lot of zeros before his brain had a chance to process the amount. He began to read the letter. He started to frown. He looked up at the man in surprise.
The man kept his implacable smile. Germaine was starting to think there was more going on than he had suspected. He went back to reading the letter. He simply could not believe what he was reading. Then, just as he finished, he heard a loud noise like a crash followed by a scream and barking.
He let the letter fall and walked over to the origin of the sound.
He opened his bedroom door to find his wife holding Sticky, their golden retriever, in her arms. Sticky was not a huge dog, but he was way too big for Germaine’s wife to handle. “I thought I heard a scream,” he said.
His wife’s eyes widened when she saw the elephant. The dog started whimpering, jumped out of her arms, and ran down the spiral staircase.
When his wife re-gained her voice, she pointed at the elephant, “What? What is that?”
The man, still standing in the room smiling, said, “It’s an elephant.”
Germaine turned on him, “Clearly, she can see it is an elephant.”
“Okay. Well, she did ask, after all. My mistake.”
Germaine’s wife said, “Why is there an elephant in our bedroom?”
Germaine handed her the letter. And the cheque. She started reading and looked up at him. “Is this real?”
“I think so,” he said.
“I didn’t know you had relatives over there, but would they really just ship this elephant to you without any preamble?”
“Ask him,” Germaine said, pointing at the man.
The man smiled and stepped to the side, as if this gave him the ability to evade the issue. “I just brought your inheritance. I don’t really know much about it.”
Germaine glared at him. “We both know that is not true,” he said in a level voice.
The man laughed. “Well,” he said.
Germaine’s wife said to the man, “Why would you bring the elephant to our
bedroom of all places?”
Before the man could answer, the elephant walked over to the nightside table in a way that was quite delicate for an elephant. The room was quite grand and even an elephant could walk a few paces with ease. Germaine watched as the elephant delicately sniffed at the daffodils with the end of his long trunk.
With surprise, he noticed that the daffodils had opened at some point. Before anyone could say anything, the elephant wrapped its trunk around the daffodils and carefully deposited them in its large mouth before chewing them and swallowing them down. Then it drew up the water from the vase to drink, a small sip for an elephant. The elephant seemed pleased, and Germaine hoped that daffodils were not poisonous to elephants.
While they were watching the elephant’s antics, Germaine and his wife failed to notice that the man quietly slipped out. One thing was certain. Their lives would never be the same.
