by Jack Caseros
She tells me she is here to remove obstacles. The nails in the wall, the gaped-mouth hooks, the empty picture frames. The house has had many lives before me. Now they are in the way of her baby elephant painting.
The painting is life-sized. When Shreya drags it inside the screen door flaps against the canvas like an egret trying to shoo an intruder. She has painted this to adorn the wall across from my window overlooking our street.
We reveal swaths of wallpaper preserved by picture frames. Nails leave holes big enough to sink a pinky. At certain angles I can see a flash of insulation, rosy like flesh peeled back for surgery.
The wall becomes nude. On a ladder, Shreya’s gloved hand inspects the space between the canvas and the corner.
“What’s wrong with your wall?” she asks.
I can’t tell if the ceiling is tilting or the floor is sinking. The canvas just doesn’t fit.
Shreya has lived next door for a lot longer than I have lived here. Her house hasn’t sunk. I wonder if realtors had to disclose whether a house was located on a portal to the underworld. Maybe sinkholes were disclosable. But who knows about the other maelstroms that consume us.
“Don’t worry,” Shreya says, moving her ladder to the bay window across the room. “Do you know what elephants do when trees grow too tall for them graze?”
“They move on?”
“No. They knock down the trees.”
Shreya doesn’t stop smiling even though she does most of the heavy lifting to move the canvas across the room. Shreya directs that we won’t spin the canvas. The painting faces out, the baby elephant caged inside the peeling yellow window frame.
We push the canvas until it seals off the window light. I have no lamps left, not even a candle. Shreya tells me it’s no problem. She has spackle and two paddles. This is not her first renovation.
After the wallpaper is peeled, we fill holes, smoothen gouges. Shreya takes a work call, but informs her client she is busy with important work. I don’t know if I am the important part or the work part. I don’t understand why my neighbour even bothers to help me.
“Why does it matter?” Shreya asks. “Does a flame need to know the darkness before chasing it away?”
“Are you trying to chase me away?” I smile. I welcome the familiar, and nothing is closer to me than rejection.
Shreya blows dried spackle that she’s finished sanding. The specks rise into the air and float, glowing in the dim light seeping from unseen windows.
“Maybe for the bird, crashing trees are an apocalypse,” Shreya says. “That’s why we need to help you turn into an elephant. Elephants never desist.”
It’s not that I worry about whether I am a bird or an elephant. I just don’t feel like I have any trees left standing.
Jack Caseros is an Argentine-Canadian writer and environmental scientist whose creative work has appeared in cool places like Every Day Fiction, Syntax & Salt, and Drunk Monkeys. His uncreative work has appeared in drearier places, like boardrooms and government databases. He reads fiction for Pithead Chapel and studies novel writing online at Stanford. You can read more about how exhausted Jack is at www.jackcaseros.wordpress.com.
Artwork by Chris Wrinn, award-winning jewelry designer, commercial illustrator and creative, owner of Gilded Owl Musings. Follow on Twitter.