We're joining in with the Friday Flash challenge for altered film titles this week. Gaie's playing along too so we've got a double dose of flash for you. We wrote our stories without any consultation, but strangely they both feature a bad harvest and alternative muscle power.
I owe a big nod to Jasper Fforde for my story. But it's also partly the fault of "The Secret Life of Elephants". The story's going out pretty raw.
From Tusk Till Dawn (923 words)
I heard this story once that the green parakeets in London were all descendants of a pair Jimi Hendrix let out to brighten up the place. These days they’re so common that people don’t know they haven’t always been here. So you’d think that we’d’ve learned by now - let life get a toehold in the great outdoors and there’s no shoving it back in its box.
I lived in the city for a while, but my ambition was a sickly, undersized thing, that withered in the light of boardroom politics. I drifted sideways to this half-way house of a satellite town, to my telecommuting job and one bedroom starter home and regulation-sized garden that will keep one diligent person in vegetables.
The early summer light lingers on the horizon, orange under deep blue. I pick up a folding chair, and a torch, and take it out to the strip of front garden. A warm breeze blows by. Sally and Andy, my neighbours, are out there already. Andy has got an air horn from somewhere. Melissa on the other side has her three red-haired kids with saucepans and metal spoons. Should I say something? A man was killed two days ago, further down the route. Yeah, he’d been an idiot, but still. I’ll keep an eye on the kids. People are settling in all along the road. Andy pops a cork on some home-made blackcurrant wine and hands me a glass over the fence, and suddenly it almost feels like a festival.
They made the pygmy ones first, back when I was wearing pink frills and pigtails. But even a pygmy mammoth isn’t all that small, you’re still looking at 900 kilos of animal for a full-grown adult. The oil crisis, the increasing divide between the rural poor and the techno-industry city rich – that was the justification. Take deep-frozen DNA, add a dash of elephant for zest and voilà, an endless supply of biofuel and muscle power adapted for our climate. But really, they did it because they could. Then they made the big ones and expected them to stay where they were put.
When the kids next door thunder up and down the stairs, trailing a stream of Melissa’s “No!”s behind them, my dad’s phrase always pops into my head “like a herd of elephants”. Now I see I’ve been unfair to the mammoths. They appear on soft shuffle feet, swaying gently. This is the very first migration to pass our way and we stare in silence. The matriarch carries curved tusks high, the arc of them like the prow of a viking ship. A tiny calf bumbles beside her with that half-falling over its own feet baby gait. The very last of the light glows in their shaggy copper fur.
I realise I am standing with my mouth open. They are so big, so unreal, against lamposts and garden gates.The matriarch lifts up her trunk and snuffles through it and everyone in the street holds their breath.
Our terraced houses, jammed shoulder to shoulder, shelter tender pea plants, corn and beans behind them. Sullen wet summers and late frosts have had the poorest of us eating plain rice and pickled cabbage for months. And there are alleys that lead round to the backs of the gardens. Nobody wants to be the first to shine lights, make noise. They guy who died swung a baseball bat. I don’t even want to move. We hold our breath in silence as the mammoth sniffs the air.
Clang! Melissa’s smallest kid, Poppy, smacks her saucepan with a spoon. She manages to do it a few more times before Melissa grabs her arm. The matriarch swings her giant head towards the noise. I vault over the wall to stand by Melissa, and we drag the kids behind us.
The middle kid, Ben, falls over in the panic, and while we’re soothing him, Poppy dashes around us, still gripping her spoon and pan. The little calf trots straight up to her, and Poppy bangs the pan again. The matriarch rumbles at the back of her throat and follows, right through Melissa’s low wooden fence and into the tiny front garden. I look up, up into beady eyes. I grab for the back of Poppy’s T-shirt as the matriarch reaches down with her trunk. Fearless Poppy holds out the wooden spoon.
The matriarch wraps her hairy trunk around it, and gently pulls it from Poppy’s grip. She whisks it up into the air, and it brings it down, smack, on the saucepan. She’s done it softly enough that Poppy doesn’t even drop it. Poppy just laughs. “Do it again!”
The matriarch drops the spoon and raises her trunk. The wind is blowing from the oil seed rape fields to the north of the town, and the air is heavy with the pollen. The calf fumbles his trunk around the dropped spoon. I pick it up and hold it out, and for a second his trunk brushes my hand. Then the martriarch rumbles again, turns back into the street and the stately procession moves on. All of our gardens are safe, but I’m sorry to see them go.
Later, I look up the migration path on Google Earth, cutting a swathe through our little plots and boxes of surburbia and up into the wild Scottish Highlands. I picture them there, great dome heads and curved tusks a primal silhouette against the rising sun. I think about them a lot. And I’m hoping they come this way again next year.
RSS Feed