We had to design the room around it. The architect unrolled the blueprints across his desk and said, “I’m a little concerned there won’t be adequate space to support the elephant. Most don’t finish growing until they’re thirty years old.”
“We didn’t know that,” my wife said, a little taken aback but not deterred.
“You’re young,” the architect replied, smiling and dismissing the allegation with a wave of his hand. “That’s why I’m here.” He raised the room’s ceiling and increased the square footage. “Enough space to walk in small circles is all your elephant should need.”
“Wonderful,” my wife said.
“But won’t we also need space in that room?” I asked. “Or else, what’s the point?”
“I thought we talked about this?” my wife said.
We had talked about it. My wife had a beautiful vision for how this was all supposed to work, but I still had my doubts as to whether such an endeavor was worthwhile, let alone possible.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” the architect said. “The room can accommodate everyone.” He looked back down at the blueprint and sketched an alcove with a bay window on the left side of the room. “For your desk,” he said to my wife. Then he drew a nook on the right side for my reading chair.
“Perfect,” my wife said.
Really, we had to design the whole house around it. There was a garage-sized pantry for the elephant’s food; an industrial-grade spigot, hose, and drainage system; a specialized psychrometric HVAC; and a dozen steel jack posts reinforcing the flooring.
Then the architect said, “Have you considered polyvinyl butyral laminated windows?”
We stared at him.
“For the tusks,” he said.
We took out a bigger loan. The house was built. We moved in.
At the time, the elephant was just smaller than a Volkswagen Bug. He barely fit through the front door, but once inside, he started parading. He raised his trunk between his tiny tusks, which had begun growing like two stubby chin hairs on an adolescent boy, and started trumpeting. He seemed to enjoy the space we had designed for him, though he did rearrange a bit, trying the ottoman and side tables out in different locations, tossing them about with the curl of his trunk. He also ripped down the curtains. “Probably just wants more sunlight,” my wife said. Eventually, the little guy tired himself out, plopped on top of the couch, and took a nap.
We soon realized that we had to gate off the stairs to keep the elephant contained and that having a TV in the room wasn’t an option. He also drowned my wife’s fiddle-leaf fig tree. Every morning, we would go downstairs, and the pot would be overflowing with his pungent yellow urine.
“You know,” I said to my wife, “this is quite a silly arrangement.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “But it’s what we wanted.”
She smiled. I smiled. The elephant was a nuisance, but he was our little nuisance.
My wife kept to her alcove. I kept to my nook. The elephant played between us. We could see over him and around him and have little conversations across the room, but, of course, the elephant grew. My wife conducted the daily foot inspections. It became a cherished part of her morning routine. Sipping her coffee and listening to NPR, she stroked each of the elephant’s legs gently so that he learned to trust her touch and place each foot, in turn, upon a stool. The elephant had five well-manicured nails on its front feet and three on each of its back feet. Once a month, she trimmed the hard dappled growth on his footpads. For the holidays, she painted the nails with festive colors and designs: pumpkins, snowmen, four-leaf clovers, stars and stripes.
Bathing the elephant required both of us. Every night after dinner, my wife put on an old record—usually big band swing: Mingus or Strayhorn or Goodman—and we danced around the room while I managed the hose and my wife reached up with the long scrub brush, always mindful of the chandelier. “Isn’t this better than you imagined?” she said one night. It was. Tapping my toes, I had to agree. I’d had my doubts—I’d had mostly doubts, but even the nights I dreaded the bathing chore, I was always happy once we were doing it. The elephant stomped in beat and swung his trunk and tail. We laughed. “I told you,” my wife said. “I told you it could be like this.”
As designed, the room allowed the elephant to walk in circles, but we were still astonished by his increasing size—and that of his excrement. Those brown lumps thumped against the reinforced hardwood and piled high like small boulders. The stench was overwhelming.
We never agreed upon the arrangement, never spoke of it, but I found myself solely responsible for cleaning up after the elephant. It became my daily chore—rain boots, a snow shovel, and a ten-gallon trashcan—which also meant it became my fault when the mess wasn’t cleaned up in as timely a fashion as my wife would have liked, as if the shit were my own. She bonded with the elephant during foot inspections. I went through twenty gallons of antiseptic spray a week.
Of course, there were arguments, mostly little arguments, about the inevitable by-products of any lifestyle and the importance of shared responsibility and the detrimental wake of selfishness. Meanwhile, our loan interest increased. My wife began working early as a tutor before school. Her morning routine with the foot inspections became rushed or neglected. I picked up night shifts at the plant and often had to leave right after dinner, before the elephant’s bath. Our arguments continued in passing but mostly grew in absence. Both of us found ourselves regularly at home, exhausted and alone, except not alone.
One day, my wife came home early and found the elephant humping the couch. “He was standing there on one leg, like they do at the circus,” she told me, “like he was showing off—bowling balls swinging between his legs! He blasted his trunk at me, like I had disturbed him, and just kept at it! Then,” she paused, “right on my new throw pillows.”
“Maybe he is lonely,” I said, and that was the wrong thing to say.
Later that night, as we were trying to sleep upstairs, the elephant started snoring. He’d always been a snorer. It sounded like a brass band marching down a tunnel. This had concerned us at first, but we had been assured that many elephants snored. We had learned to deal with it, but something shifted in my wife. “I can’t live like this anymore,” she said.
I knew she was upset about more than what had happened that afternoon, but I was bitter she had asked me to try and salvage the throw pillows. “It’s what you wanted,” I said. I stared at the ceiling fan for a minute and then rolled over and covered my ears with the pillow to try and block out the elephant’s snoring and the sound of my wife crying beside me.
After that, my wife wanted us to see a counselor. “A doctor,” she said, “with years of experience helping people with our particular problem.” During the first thirty-minute session, I shared. My wife shared. Then the counselor looked at us and said, “What you have to accept is that an elephant will always be an elephant with elephant needs and elephant desires.” She said it, leaned back, and looked at us like that was the solution and now we owed her three hundred dollars. My wife nodded in agreement.
When I refused to go back to counseling, my wife started ignoring the elephant, which made me fonder of him. I started conducting the foot inspections. I started polishing his tusks and even taught him new tricks. He stomped my empty beer cans and could blow his trunk in a handkerchief. “Look what he does now,” I said to my wife.
However, the elephant didn’t respond well to my wife’s inattention. His snoring got louder and more violent, as if he was purposefully exaggerating his breathing to aggravate her. She yelled at him in the middle of the night, marched down the hall and shouted, “Do you really expect this to make things better?”
It didn’t. The elephant stomped a few trinkets we’d kept on the mantel: a couple of candles and a vase. Then he put two softball-sized holes through my wife’s favorite picture of our wedding. Then it was her desk.
My wife looked at the toothpick pile in her alcove. “I’m leaving,” she said. She said it so nonchalantly, so matter-of-factly, as if she were simply going to the store to buy more elephant food. Then she packed a bag.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked her. “What about him?”
“I don’t know,” my wife said. She looked at the elephant and started crying. “I always thought that—I don’t know.”
She checked into a hotel for a few nights. That was the beginning of the break, the pause, the recess, the intermission. For a month we were creative with our word choice until one of us—I don’t remember who—finally called it what it was. The split, the separation, the undoing, the divorce. After the hotel she began staying with a couple of friends, married friends, our previously mutual friends—her friends.
I started sleeping in the guest room of our house.
I fed the elephant. I cleaned up after him. He wasn’t eating as much, which I figured was to be expected. He also wasn’t shitting as much, which was great because I could barely clean up after myself. There were all these new regulations at the plant. Everyone had to put in extra hours.
Early on, my wife came by a handful of times to gather her things. I was always at work, but she’d leave a note letting me know what she’d taken, and I’d see that the elephant’s nails had been trimmed, which meant I’d forgotten to inspect them that morning.
I only washed him once or twice a week, when the smell got to be too much. I’m not proud of that. The first time I washed him after she left, I couldn’t remember if I’d ever done that before, washed him alone, which seemed crazy to me. How could I never have washed him by myself? I guess I had always found an excuse not to, to wait for my wife, because I was either unsure about doing it alone or I knew how much washing him together meant to her. I realized that I enjoyed washing the elephant alone, maybe even more than I did washing him with my wife. I could tell by the slack droop of the elephant’s trunk that he felt otherwise, but I was hopeful. I pretended that deep down he knew everything would be better this way too.
The elephant spent his days sleeping and spinning in slow circles and staring out the window. His snoring continued to get worse. That brass band was losing all sense of tune and rhythm. I thought about buying a sound machine and getting ear plugs, but I didn’t. I just wanted to deal with it, face it, get it over with, move on.
All the paperwork took ten months. I still don’t understand why. The whole process was emotional but cordial. My wife and I had never been interested in dramatics. There had never been anything exciting or unusual about the life we’d created together. There was no reason for its undoing to be any different.
The night after we met with our lawyers and signed the last paper, I returned to the house. The elephant was lying on his side in the center of the room. His breathing was strained, but I walked right past him, went upstairs, and lay down in the guest bed.
I listened to the wheezing downstairs. His breathing grew fainter and fainter as the night went on. The brass band was slowly suffocating in that long, dark tunnel. Then it stopped all together, and I knew the elephant was dead. I was glad. It was over. All of it. But I also knew I would have to take the elephant’s carcass apart piece by piece to get it out the door. The room would have to be disinfected and scrubbed with bleach. The house would be almost impossible to sell. And then I—what was I going to do? Where would I go? I tossed and turned all night between resentment and despair. As the sun started to rise, I finally fell asleep to the hollow, muffled beating inside my pillow.
I fell asleep and dreamed about that meeting with the architect. This time, when he unrolled the blueprints across his desk, he had designed an industrial-size garage door and a bigger backyard. My wife and I moved in and took the elephant for walks down the street on a long leather leash. When he pooped in the grass, I shoveled it up while my wife held open the garbage bag. She tied it off and together we hoisted it into the designated dumpster. When we stopped to chat with the neighbors, our elephant entwined his trunk with their elephant’s trunk in greeting. We returned home to lie on lounge chairs in the backyard and sip daiquiris with little umbrellas. The elephant and his friend frolicked in the sprinklers.
Riley Kross’s stories have appeared in Grist, Blackbird, and Fiction Southeast. He completed his MFA at North Carolina State University. He currently lives with his wife and two sons in Birmingham, Alabama.
Photo by Magda Ehlers