Elephant by Micha Colombo
Photo by Elena Saharova from Pexels
A pale green elephant wandered down the escalator, bags hooked over its upturned trunk. Its little bristly hairs at the very tip twitched, smelling the mall’s perfumed sweetness. Twenty-three years it had been treading down the never-ending escalator. Its bags were empty. It had been sprayed green. If you looked closely you could see a circle of soft greyness around each wrinkled knee.
She felt like the elephant and also felt like shooting the elephant. There it was in her hand, a long smooth spear. Longer than she’d imagined. And lighter. She balanced her cigarette on the edge of her saucer, resting it gently by the two-thirds empty cappuccino cup, and stood. The chair screeched backwards, the table juddered forwards as she expanded into her full space. Sweaty hand gripping the now familiar spear, she watched that pale green elephant slowly de-escalating in the queasy light of a virtual rainforest. She realised she too was being lowered. Her other hand now held onto some kind of leafy creeper, as her feet travelled on a chipped platform, sprayed candy pink.
She stared at the elephant until she had forgotten how to see, what to remember, until she was breathing it in, beyond descriptions, until she smelt its thoughts. She felt dizzy in a universe of elephant. She shaped her body into what seemed like a good spear-throwing stance, breathed in and let it fly across the empty space, soaring through twinkling muzak, its shaft reflecting the strips of white heaven above them.
The elephant barely flinched as the spear stuck with a wobble into its right rear leg. No blood, no change. They all just kept floating downward. Her leg felt wet. She looked down and saw the silver point piercing her own thigh, now in uncontrollable spasm. She noticed it was trembling in time to the background music. There she was holding onto the escalator, green paint curling away from the edges of her wound. She glanced up to see her own shocked face looking back at her from the café and from every single floor of this bottomless mall. The bristles of her trunk twitched as the pain began to seep up her leg. With a jolt, the escalator stopped and changed direction. Everyone else had gone. The café too. One by one the stars blinked off and she was alone with silence. Only her sweaty hand on the retreating banister, a curtain of creepers swaying in the breeze and that fresh green pain, rising.
Micha Colombo
Micha Colombo is a writer-performer based in Exeter. Her plays have been performed in theatres across the UK, her poems have been published by Birch Moon Press and she’s normally itching to get up on stage either for spoken word, storytelling or acting. She is mum to three young kids.