by Hibah Shabkhez
“Elephants never do homework.”
“Elephants never wear mittens.”
“Elephants never wash their—”
“What’s going on here?” I asked, taking in the gigantic baby-pink elephant freshly taped to the fridge, and the other, even larger one which was being filled in with a concentration and vigour only a six-year-old artist could possess.
“After mermaids, dolphins and seagulls, the kid’s developed a pachyderm obsession,” snorted my friend. “There’s no doing anything with her just now. And her father’s attitude certainly isn’t helping!”
“Well, my dear, if you just left it alone for a little while—”
“See? What did I tell you?”
“I have an idea,” I took out my phone. “What’s her favourite ice cream flavour?”
“Are we going to have ice cream? Like, now? Awesome!”
“We are, but elephants never eat ice cream, remember? They eat grass and tree bark and things.”
“Oh.” She went back to her elephant drawing and picked up a grey colour-pencil instead of the pink one worn almost to a stub.
We looked at each other, my friend and I, and discovered to our surprise that instead of the expected triumph we felt all the sheepish self-loathing of baby-mouse murderers.
But then her face cleared up. “This elephant does eat ice cream,” She announced, putting the grey colour-pencil firmly down. “This one is a new species of elephant, a ‘volved one. It only eats ice cream and pizza and nice things.”
And leaving us to wonder whether to laugh or cry, she went back to colouring the elephant baby-pink.
Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Petrichor, Remembered Arts, Rigorous, Lunate, With Painted Words, The Dawntreader and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.
Blog: https://hibahshabkhezxicc.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @hibahshabkhez
Instagram: @shabkhez_hibah