by Nibedita Sen
They had blown raw red holes through the Many Mothers, hacked away their beautiful tusks, and the sky had not fallen and she had not mourned the meat. She was She—the survivor, the prisoner, the one they called Topsy—and She carried the Stories safe inside her skull, just behind her left eye, so that they lived on in some way. But there is no one left to tell the histories in this smoky sooty cave Men have brought her to, where the ground is grassless stone and iron rubs ankleskin to bloody fly-bait. There are others like her, swaying gray shadows smelling of We, but wood and cold metal lie between them, and she cannot see them, and she cannot touch them.
• • •
In this mean old dead-dog world you do what you gotta do to put food on the table, even when you’re damn certain deep down in your knowing-marrow that it’s wrong and that God Almighty his own damn self will read you the riot act on Judgment Day. When you got two kid sisters and an ailing mama back in the mountains waiting on the next paycheck, you swallow your right and you swallow your wrong and you swallow what turns out to be several lethal doses of glowing green graveyard seed and you keep on shoveling shit with a smile (newly missing several teeth) until either the settlement check quietly arrives or you drop, whichever walks down the cut first. Regan is determined to hang on until she knows her family is taken care of, and when Regan gets determined about something, look the hell out and tie down anything loose.
The ache in her jaw has gone from a dull complaint to endless fire blossoming from the hinge behind her back teeth, riding the rails all the way to the region of her chin. It never stops or sleeps or cries uncle. Even now, trying to teach this cussed animal how to eat the poison that hammered together her own rickety stairway to Heaven, it’s throbbing and burning like Satan’s got a party cooked up inside and everybody’s wearing red-hot hobnails on the soles of their dancing shoes. She reminds herself to focus. This particular elephant has a reputation for being mean as hell; a lack of attention might leave her splattered across the wall and conveyor belt. Not yet, ol’ Mr. Death. Not just yet.
“Hey,” she signs, again. “You gotta pick it up like this. Like this. See?” Her hand shakes as she brandishes the paintbrush, bristles glowing that familiar grasshopper-gut green. She can’t help it; tremors are just another thing come along unexpected with dying. “Dip it into the paint, mix it up real good, fill in each of those little numbers all the way ’round. Then put the brush in your mouth, tip it off, and do it again. The quicker you get done with your quota, quicker you can go back to the barn. Got it?”
No response from Topsy. She stands there slow-swaying to hosannas Regan can’t hear, staring peepholes through the brick wall of the factory floor opposite. It’s like convincing a cigar-store chief to play a hand. Occasionally one of those great big bloomers-on-a-washline ears flaps away a biting fly.
Regan’s tired. Her throat is dry and hoarse. Her wrists ache from signing instructions to sixteen other doomed elephants today, castoffs bought butcher-cheap from fly-bait road-rut two-cent circuses where the biggest wonder on display was how the holy hell they’d kept an elephant alive so long in the first place. She pities them, she hates the company so much it’s like a bullet burning beneath her breast bone (or maybe that’s just another tumor taking root), but the only joy she gets outta life anymore is imagining how much the extra money she’s making taking on this last job will help Rae and Eve, even if Mama don’t stick much longer than she does. Regan ain’t a bit proud of what she’s doing, and she’s even less proud of what she does next, but she’s sick and she’s frustrated and she’s fed the hell up with being ignored and bullied and pushed aside. She’s tired of being invisible.
She reaches over and grabs the tip of one of those silly-looking ears and she twists, like she’s got a hank of sister-skin between her nails at Sunday School. It’s a surefire way of getting someone’s attention, whether they want to give it or not.
“HEY!” she hollers. “LISTEN TO ME, WOULD YOU?”
The change in Topsy is like a magic trick. Her ears flare. The trunk coils a water moccasin’s salute, a backhanded S flung high enough to knock the hanging lightbulb overhead into jitter jive. Little red eyes glitter down at her, sharp and wild and full of deadly arithmetic. The whole reason Topsy ended up here in the first place was because she had smashed a teasing fella’s head like a deer tick. You don’t need a translator to see what she’s thinking: Would it be worth my time and effort to reach down and twist that yowling monkey’s head clean off her shoulders? Would it make me feel any better if I just made her . . . stop? For good? Would that make my day any brighter?
And Regan’s too damn exhausted to be afraid anymore, of death or anything else. She looks up and meets the wild gaze level as she can manage.
“Go ahead,” she says. “Jesus’ sake, just get it done with, already. Doing me a favor.”
Topsy thinks about it; she sure as hell does that. There’s a long, long stretch of time where Regan’s pretty sure neither of them’s clear on what’s about to happen. Eventually, after an ice age or six, the trunk slowly lowers and the eyes soften a little and someone shuts the electricity off in Topsy’s posture. She slumps, like she’s just as dog-tired as Regan herself.
You’re sick, she signs, after a beat. Dying-sick. You stink.
“Yeah. Dying-sick. Me and all my girls who worked here.”
Poison? She gestures her trunk at the paint, the brush, the table, the whole hell-fired mess. Smells like poison.
“You got it. They got you all doing it now because you can take more, being so big and all. I’m supposed to teach you how.”
Another pause unspools itself across the factory stall between them. I’m supposed to teach you how to die, Regan thinks. Ain’t that the dumbest goddamn thing you ever heard tell of, teaching an animal how to die? Everybody knows how to die. You just quit living and then you’re slap-taught.
Topsy reaches down and takes the paintbrush.
• • •
When their own began to sicken and fall, they came for us, and there was nothing we could do but die as well. We were shackled and splintered and separated; the Many Mothers could not teach their daughters the Stories. Without stories there is no past, no future, no We. There is Death. There is Nothing, a night without moon or stars.
• • •
“You would be doing a service not just to the United States, but to the world and anyone who comes after. I know the reasoning is . . . odd, but when people think of elephants, they think of radiation. They think of Topsy, and . . . all of that stuff, y’know? It’s a story. People remember stories. They hand them down. We have no way of knowing if that’ll be the case in a hundred thousand years, but it’s as good a starting point as any, right?”
The translator sign-relays Kat’s hesitant ramble to the elephant representative, a stone-faced matriarch seventy years old if she’s a day. Kat shifts in her folding chair. Translation of the entire thing takes a very long time. The meeting arena is air-conditioned, but she’s still trickling buckets in places you never would have guessed contained sweat glands. The silence goes on. The hand-jive continues. The elephant, so far as Kat can tell, has not yet blinked, possibly since the day she was calved.
• • •
She killed her first Man when she was tall enough to reach the high-branch mangoes. There were no mangoes in that place to pluck, but she remembered juicysweet orangegreen between her teeth, tossed to ground in a good place by Mother. She remembered how high they had grown, but there were no mangoes in that place to pluck, so she took the Man in her trunk and threw him down and smashed his head beneath her feet like ripe red fruit while the other humans chittered and scurried and signed at her to stop.
There were other Mothers there, too. They watched her smash the Man, who had thrown sand in their faces and burned them and tried to make them drink stinking ferment from a bottle, and they said nothing. They said nothing, but they thought of mangoes, how high they had once grown, how sweet they were to crunch, to
crush, to pulp.
• • •
The county hospital, like all hospitals, is a place to make the skin on the back of your neck go prickly. It’s white as a dead dog’s bloated belly on the outside, sickly green on the inside, and filled to the gills with kinless folk too poor to go off and die anywhere else. Nuns drift down the hallways like backroad haints. The walls have crazy jagged lightning cracks zigzagging from baseboard to fly-speckled ceiling. Both sides of the main sick ward are lined with high windows, but the nuns aren’t too particular about their housekeeping; the yellow light slatting in is filtered through a nice healthy layer of dust, dirt, and dying people’s last words. The way Regan sees it, the Ladies of Perpetual Mercy ever swept, it would be thirty percent shadows, twenty percent cobwebs, and fifty percent Praise God Almighty, I See The Light they’d be emptying outta their dustpans at the end of day.
They’ve crammed Jodie between a moaning old mawmaw with rattling lungs and an unlucky lumber man who tried catching a falling pine tree with his head. What’s left of her jaw is so swathed with stained yellow-and-red gauze she half-takes after one of those dead pyramid people over in Egypt-land. Regan’s smelled a lot of foulness in her short span of doing jobs nobody else wants to touch, but the roadkill-and-rotting-teeth stink coming up off those bandages nearly yanks the cheese sandwich right out of her stomach. She wishes to God they’d let you smoke in these places. Her own rotten jawbone throbs with the kind of mock sympathy only holy rollers and infected body parts seem capable of really pulling off.
“Hey, girl,” she says, even though Jodie’s not awake and won’t be waking up to catch the trolley to work with Regan ever again. “Thought I’d just . . . drop in, give you all the news fit to spit.” She takes one of her friend’s big hands from where it’s folded atop the coverlet. It gives her the cold shivers to touch it with all of the life and calluses nearly faded away, but this is her goddamned fault for getting them into this mess in the first place. She’s going to eat every single bite of the shit pie she’s earned, smack her lips, and ask for seconds. That much, at least, she can do for someone who braided her hair when they were tee-ninsy. “You hanging in there alright?”
A fat carrion fly buzzes hopefully around Jodie’s mouth; Regan shoos it away with a curse. “Goddammit,” she mutters. “All you wanted to do was keep blowing mountaintops to hell and back.” Deep breath. Steady. “I told you a whopper when we started out. You’d’ve been safer by a long shot if you just kept on mining.”
• • •
This is a story about Furmother – With – The – Cracked – Tusk, starmaker, tugger of tiger tails and player of games. Listen.
There was no warm wallowmud then, no melons, no watersweet leaves to pick pluck stuff scatter. The sun lay sluggish-cold on the ground. The Great Mothers grew coats like bears and wandered the empty white places of the world Alone, each splintered to Herself, each bull-separate. There were no Stories to spine-spin the We together. A bull had found them all, in the dark and chill Before, and in the way of bulls he had hoarded them for himself.
Now, the biggest shaggiest wisest of all Great Mothers was Furmother – With – The – Cracked – Tusk. Back back where this story calves, her tusks were still unbroken, so long and so curved they sometimes pricked the night’s skin and left little white scars. A dying bear had told Furmother where the Stories lay hidden, just before her great crunchfoot met the ground on the other side of what was left of him. There was a Blacksap lake that stretched far enough to tickle the sky’s claws, he had whispered; the bull’s cave opened somewhere on the other shore. The only way to find it was to go there.
Furmother was wise, which means curious. She set out walking. As she walked, she sang, and her frozen songs dropped behind like seeds in dung, waiting for sun and the rain and the nibbling bugs to free them. It took a night and a day and a mango tree growing to reach where she was going, but one pale morning she sang up over a hill and there the Blacksap lake oozed, full of skulls and spines and foul-stinking unluck. No rooting in the tall grass was needed to find the cave’s mouth. The bull stood big outside of it, rubbing his tusks and his shadow and his stained scarred furhead against a tree’s bones.
She went up to him, Furmother – With – Her – Tusks – Whole, and she said, in a voice like the earth split – shake – root – ripping, “You there! Bull!”
He grunted, as is the way of bulls.
“Bull there, you! Do you have the Stories in your cave?”
He grunted irritably, as is the way of bulls. “Yes,” he rumbled, “and they are all mine. I found them. No milk-dripping udder-dragger or tiny-tusked Son in his first musth will take what is mine. I will fight them. I will dig my tusks into their sides and leave them for the bears.”
As is the way of bulls. “Bull,” the Furmother said, “what do you even use them for? What good are they to you or to anyone, piled like rotting rained-on grass in a downbelow place?”
“They are mine,” the bull repeated, his ears flaring, his skull thick, his legs braced. As is the way with bulls. “Mine and no one else’s.”
But Furmother was wise, which means crafty. She went away and left the bull to his scratch snort stomp. She went away to where his weak eyes could not follow, away down the shore to a dead forest, and with branch and trunk and sticky Blacksap she put together a cunning thing like a small bull’s shadow. Her own fur she ripped out to cover it, because there were no other Mothers to give their own. How lucky are we, to be We! When she was done, sore swaying sleep-desperate on her feet, no She was there touching and rubbing the shoulder-to-shoulder skinmessage, We are here with you. There was nothing but she and herself.
She left the not-bull outside the cave. She left it and went away, just out of sight, and there she waited for dawn.
The bull came out of the cave. He came out and he saw the not-bull, black in the cold morning sun. His ears flapped, his eyes glittered, his feet stomped.
“You!” he squealed. “You, standing there! Who are you?”
The not-bull did not answer.
“What do you want, tusker? Get out of my way, or I will fight you!”
The not-bull did not answer.
“Do you dare challenge me, little Son? Me, whose tusks are great-greater-greatest? Me, who rode your Mother long ago? Sing your war song, if you wish to fight, else move out of my way!”
The not-bull did not answer!
The bull with the stories roared and flared and charged with a sound like great rocks rolling, goring stomping furious mad. He wanted to kill, as is the way with bulls. But the not-bull had no skin to tear, no insides to rupture, no skull to crush. It was nothing but sticks and fur and sticky Blacksap all the way through and through, so that the more the bull tried to gore and butt, the more mayfly stuck he became. And this caused him to lose himself completely. His screams were terrible things for ears to catch.
“If you had only shared,” the Furmother said, “you wouldn’t be caught in this trap. Now I’ll have all of the stories, and you’ll have none. Which is better?”
The bull cursed her so terribly bats fell dead from the sky. As is the way with bulls. She laughed like a triumph and went inside.
• • •
Watching the elephant’s deft trunk double and snake and contort is downright hypnotic, even if what she’s signing may possibly be a really long, really detailed way of saying “screw you.” Proboscidian had been an elective at Kat’s university; she hadn’t really thought she would ever need it, so she hadn’t bothered signing up. It was one of those courses, like Basketweaving or Food In Religious Texts, that seemed to be more of a charmingly eccentric way to bobsled through school grabbing credits than anything else. Nobody but the zoology students, historians, folklorists, and some of the more obsessively dedicated sociologists ever took it. For a language that had only really been around since the 1880s, though, it had its devotees; subjects with animals always did.
“She wants to ask you a question,” the translat
or says.
“Go ahead.”
“You want to make us glow when we’re near this poison buried in the ground. You want to do this because of some screwy cultural sapiens association between elephants and radiation, when humans doing terrible fucked-up stuff to elephants ninety years ago is the reason for the dumb-ass cognitive association in the first place.”
“Uh, wow.” Kat gropes for a response. “Jesus. There’s . . . sorry, there’s a way of saying ‘fucked up’ in Proboscidian?”
“Not really. That was mostly me.” The translator raises an eyebrow. “Anyway, what she wants to know first is this: What exactly are you offering the Mothers in return if they say yes?”
• • •
Every day she eats the reeking, gritty poison. The girl with the rotten bones showed her how, and occasionally Men come by and strike her with words and tiny tickling whip-trunks if she doesn’t work fast enough. She feels neither. She feels neither, but rage buzzes in her ear low and steady and constant, a mosquito she cannot crush. Like a calf she nurses the feeling. Like the calf she’ll never Mother she protects it safe beneath her belly, safe beneath the vast bulk of Herself, while every day it grows, suckles, frolics between her legs and around the stall and around the stall and around the stall until she’s whirling red behind the eyes where the Stories should go.
One day soon the rage will be tall enough to reach the high-branch mangoes.
Okay? the rotten-bone-dead-girl signs. Okay? Are you okay?