Monash the Miniature Elephant

There's an elephant in the flower bed. Or, at least, there is according to my sister Flora. I can't tell - the flowerbed is pretty overgrown with grass and piled with rocks and twigs, but it kind of looks like something is moving in there.

"His name is Monash", Flora says. She wants me to capture him. What do we do then? Put him in an aquarium? I shake the bushes to move him out into the open. He's probably scared. There's his call, a high-pitched, twee trumpeting from the tulip forest. And there he is, no bigger than a mouse. A two-inch African elephant.

I feel kind of mean, pushing dirt and rocks with my hand like a bulldozer, to scare him in the corner. But it works - Monash is cornered and I scoop him up in my hands. He sits clamly in my cupped palms, lifting blades of grass to his mouth.

Wall

I step out my back door into the yard. It’s different today. Colleen, my cranky, wrinkled, busybody of a landlady and neighbor, is ordering around a laborer, as she is wont to do.

Colleen owns everything in her view and is the unquestioned master of her realm. She giveth and she taketh away. She benevolently grants small gifts and decorations for you to use while you abide in her presence, but they can be taken back, changed, whenever the mood strikes her or if your use of them somehow displeases her. The table I moved outdoors to put plants on disappeared one day without a word. Perhaps I did not care for it properly. The broom, a gift as well as a “sweep your porch” reminder, similarly vanished when she discovered I already had my own.

The sun beats into my eyes, brighter than before. My yard is naked and exposed and unfriendly.

Colleen and her hired man are rearranging the entire landscape. An unfinished wall is replacing a simple fence. Plants and earth are gone, replaced with stone. The tree I worried would fall on me with every rainstorm is gone. The yard, green and private and friendly before, a sanctuary, is a cell now. Rough slate and concrete on all sides, holding me in, trapping me with the heat of the day.

Crash

Carly is driving, and she never drives. She’s too timid – can’t make a left if there’s another car within 200 yards. I am in the front passenger seat, though I never turn my head to look at her. I see everything through the windshield.

We’re driving at freeway speeds, too fast for this one-way single-lane alley. A grey brick wall on the left blurs by, just feet from Carly’s window. Ahead, a white sports car with a patchy paint job doesn’t see the brake lights. He slams into the little blue hatchback that’s in front of him, and instead of stopping, he seems angered by the collision - he stomps on the gas and keeps pushing the other car. They swerve off to the left and smash into the wall. Somehow Carly avoids the accident, and we continue on our way.

But the mood turns dark. The carnage seems to follow us psychically. We drive on, but we’re tense, scared, cringing. Like someone is going to jump out to stop the car, or the police are going to pull us over and blame us for the crash.

It seems relatively normal when figures start appearing in front of the car – policemen with their badges out – hands up gesturing for us to stop. But they’re not real cops, they’re TV cops. Pembleton. Columbo. Goren. I grip the steering wheel with my left hand and talk Carly calmly through the storm of authority figures streaking past the car. Nothing to worry about, keep going, don’t stop, it’s not real. You always see ghostly, projected images of TV detectives passing through your car when you drive down dark alleyways.

We take a right down an even smaller alley, to try to escape the gloom and the ghosts. I’m still holding the wheel, talking her down, driving with my voice. The alley gets smaller, the walls closing in, until it’s not even an alleyway, but a passage leading to somebody’s back yard, and we have to stop and put the car in reverse before we drive into their den through the sliding glass door.