by Farhana Khalique
Baby Elephant is trying to sit in my lap again.
I groan and uncross my legs and she half rests, watching me. I run my hands over her parchment skin, a palimpsest of grey. Her watermelon head is as hot as desire. I tickle her parachute ears.
We sit like this on the shadowed plains of my room.
She won’t sleep.
Instead, she gets up and trumpets at the moon, threatens thunder, tiny tusks tear pin-pricks in the sky.
But I’m stuck.
She’s the one who pulls me out. She dips her trunk and sprays me with water, nearly drowns me, before she brings me back.
Get on with it! say the whites of her eyes. She ignores my shivers. She stamps her feet, spanks my hands and blows in my ears, until I pick up my pen.
Only then, she retreats to the sofa, her breath cools and her eyelids smoulder.
Even when she dreams, her tail swishes and sweeps the letters across the margins, onto the lines and into words.
I grab her floating ghost and colour her pink, a candy floss paper weight, a sugar-spun rain cloud. The sweet heaviness of her feet rumbles across her airy playpen.
The pages will grow slowly, like her. Moodily, like her. But one day, those legs could be tree trunks, a forest.
For now, her smiles warm the seeds in my brain. And something takes root.
Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in Issue 25 of Popshot Quarterly. Many thanks to the Popshot team for allowing us to publish it here.
Farhana Khalique is a teacher, voiceover artist and writer from south-west London. Her writing has appeared in The Good Journal, sister-hood magazine, and in the Dividing Lines (2017) and Bath Flash Fiction (2018) anthologies. She was shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize 2018, was a City of Stories winner in 2018, and a Word Factory Apprentice Award winner in 2018/19. You can follow her on Twitter @hanakhalique.