A Rug of Velvet Elephants
by Marge Simon
We had this together: firefly light on summer evenings, and a tailless dog that never smiled. You claimed he took his job too seriously. He was mostly mine, would come when I called, greet me at the door with such joy. Things you barely noticed. Once, in a rain of stones to end an argument, you had him put down.
We pass a man with bright velvet rugs from Mexico draped across his van. Let’s buy one, you say. I want to stand on elephants, you say. When we find a place to turn around, the van of velvet elephants is gone.
So many wooden conversations. Did we ever talk about the same thing? You look at me with wine dark eyes. There’s moisture on your upper lip, Inge’s dark haired lady on the lounge in a golden frame. So like you, out of reach like the paintings cordoned off at museums.
I know the way your tongue touches your teeth when you smile. You bring me strawberries in a yellow bowl, telling and showing. Have a margarita, you say. But I know all I’ll taste is the salty rim of an empty glass.
Marge Simon lives in Ocala, Florida and serves on the HWA Board of Trustees. She has been awarded the Bram Stoker Award, Rhysling Award, the Elgin, Dwarf Stars and Strange Horizons Readers’ Award. Marge’s poems and stories have appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Asimov’s, Silver Blade, Bete Noire, New Myths, Daily Science Fiction. Her stories also appear in anthologies such as Tales of the Lake 5, Chiral Mad 4, You, Human and The Beauty of Death, to name a few. She attends the ICFA annually as a guest poet/writer and is on the board of the Speculative Literary Foundation.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “A Rug of Velvet Elephants”? I’m delighted you like my little fiction. It has been sitting in my files for a over a decade as a piece I never felt was finished. It began as a trivial poem after driving by a van with – yes, velvet rugs of elephants and tigers, etc. These were abundantly displayed in Tijuana, back in the 70’s, and I’m sure they are today. Anyway, I always felt my poem was a thought unfinished until recently when I accidentally found it again. This time I fleshed it out into a flash from the p.o.v. of a sad man, stuck in a loveless marriage. His wife epitomizes the shallow, controlling kind of woman a man can’t escape from. At least, we get the feeling he isn’t going anywhere. For some odd reason, I tend to write about people in sad or hopeless situations – perhaps because I was in one myself for 15 years until I remarried the right man for me in 2001.
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