Don’t Kill Another Elephant. Don’t!
by Paul Beckman
We owned nothing of value. If a thief broke into our project apartment he would look around and leave.
I had a Brownie Hawkeye camera with a shutter button on the right and another button on the left to lift and get time exposures, I kept it hidden because it was my most prized possession.
My older brother had a slide rule that he kept in his shirt pocket and whipped out to figure costs or percentages, and how much longer I’d have to live. He used it daily and slept with it hidden away in his pillowcase.
Our kid sister had a collection of different color hair bows and alternated with her Betsy Wetsy doll. She didn’t hide any of her treasures but kept them displayed on her three-legged dresser propped up by two books from a twenty-year-old set from the encyclopedia.
Our mother had two things she valued over us kids. The first was a Ouija Board that she used nightly with some of the letters rubbed off and the other was a gray ceramic elephant she kept on the bookcase. It was three inches high, and she had won it at a carnival when she was in high school. We would watch her dust it daily and set it on the kitchen table with her smokes and Ouija Board or solitaire cards, Then her sister Lizzy went on a cruise and brought my mother back another elephant. Soon she had a collection from the vacations her sister took. There was something about elephants that fascinated my mother.
My older brother and I fought constantly, mostly verbal, but occasionally shoving and hitting. I pushed him because he had bad breath and was standing in front of me only inches away. Mom’s elephants tumbled over and one landed and cracked a leg off, we were both scared of the beating we were expecting and worked together with Elmer’s Glue and a band-aid to put it back together. We put them back on the bookshelf and each grabbed an issue of the encyclopedia and sat reading waiting for mom to come home from a job interview.
She had one foot in the living room when she saw the elephants out of order, and she spotted the band-aid and walked over and picked it up and cradled it against her chest and we could see the tears forming. She didn’t speak to us kids but went to her bedroom and changed into a housedress and when she came back, all red-eyed, she took out our dishes and told our sister to set the table while she opened the can of ravioli and ripped up lettuce and sliced a cuke and a radish. She then mixed the salad with mayonnaise and Oysterettes.
The next morning mom still was not speaking to me or my brother but had our lunch bags ready for school with a pb&j sandwich cut on a diagonal and one cookie each from her Friday baking.
My brother told her that he was innocent, and it was all my fault. I was listening in from the hallway and heard her say she suspected as much. “That’s why we can’t have nice things around the house.”
The following week we picked up our sister from kindergarten and walked her home jabbering nastily at each other all the way, There was a note on the door telling us to get the housekey from the lady next door and in large all capital printing. DON’T KILL ANOTHER ELEPHANT. DON’T!
Paul Beckman’s latest flash collection, Kiss Kiss (Truth Serum Press) was a finalist for the 2019Indie Book Awards. Some of his stories appeared in Spelk, Connotation Press, Necessary Fiction, Litro, Pank, Playboy, WINK, Jellyfish Review, The Wax Paper, Monkey, and The Lost Balloon. He had a story selected for the 2020 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology Lineup and was shortlisted in the Strands International Flash Fiction Competition. He was nominated for 2021 Best of the Web. Paul earned his MFA from Bennington College and is a retired air traffic controller.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Don’t Kill Another Elephant. Don’t!”? Three brothers, ages 4, 9, and 10 had moved from their apartment to the projects after the father abandoned their mother and them and they were only a couple of weeks away from having their furniture, as it was, put out on the curb when the mother got a letter saying there was an opening for their family in the Projects. They moved in with the help of family and the mother spent her next few weeks crying, smoking, and disciplining her sons; especially the middle one who looked, sounded and acted like her ex-husband. The oldest was her first and only wanted to please. The youngest was cute and wanted to make people laugh. The middle child was a poster boy for middle children everywhere. The 9 and 10-year-old fought every day and the 4-year-old looked at picture books. The mother’s sister and best friend went on vacation and brought her sister back a ceramic elephant and a view master for the boys. The 9 and ten-year-olds fought over the view master, and how they looked at each other or stood too close or too far away and on their mother’s birthday her seven sisters threw her a party, and each one bought something elephant. This was the mother’s surprise party. The elephants were lined, tail to trunk, atop a rickety homemade bookshelf, and the mother dusted them weekly and was pleased to have her first collection. This is the story of what ensued when the mother got home from her factory job in time to make dinner but immediately sensed a problem.
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