one.

That morning, the elephant was lying alone on the queen-sized bed in the tiny studio apartment as the young man was sleeping on the floor beside the door, and the young woman was sprawled out and snoring by the stove. The young man woke up first, as he always did, only this time he had to pull one of the young woman’s brown leather boots from his cheek. He was naked. He always slept naked. He stood up and turned around as the elephant let out a final breath and defecated all over the bed and along the floor of the tiny apartment. The young man could hardly maneuver himself around the elephant and its mess to get to where she was, near the stove and also the window, which he crammed himself towards and opened full-wide to let the stale air out. Then he put the coffee on, and the zoo smell of elephant shit and the smell of fresh cheap brew mingled. He stood by the stove, occasionally glancing down at her as he watched the elephant, waiting for it to breathe. He looked at her only long enough to check if she was still there, still wearing her underwear, still asleep. When the coffeemaker beeped she woke up and he stopped looking at her, and he drank the coffee black because he didn't want to try and get to the fridge, because all the fresh air was where he was, by the coffeemaker. She sat up with her back to the stove and asked him if the elephant was dead and he said it wasn't, not at first, at first it was alive, then it died and shit all over the room. She began to run her hands through her hair, wondered if she could get away with not showering before work, and decided that she could. She got up, went to the closet, got dressed, spun around in the one or two square feet of clear floor, and left. Once she was gone he put down his coffee and crawled onto the elephant, opened its huge eyelid, put his head against its huge chest, listened for its huge heart, which wasn’t beating, then slithered down the huge belly, landing, slipping on some shit, busting his bare ass, stinking. Despite the mess he still made his way to his chest of drawers, though due to the splay of the elephant's foot, he couldn't open his sock and underwear drawer. So, wearing only his pants and a t-shirt and shoes, he grabbed his laptop and went down to the café at the corner to write.

two.

They lived like that, with the dead elephant dominating the apartment, blocking her cellphone charger, blocking his sock and underwear drawer, for weeks. He got blisters, she missed calls. With the window still open, the cool air kept the elephant from rotting too fast, though of course it still did. The grey skin whitened and tightened with the stiffening bloat, and carrion birds perched outside the window screen. She named the quiet buzzards and hated the magpies. He loved the crows, but also cursed them, how their presence alongside the ravens blurred his perceptions, in the same way that he cursed his friend, who, over the phone, tried to sympathize with him by telling him the story about the bull that he and his girlfriend caught stomping china plates in their kitchen—how they had to herd it down five flights of stairs, he baiting it with a red tablecloth, she prodding it with a barbecue spatula, until it was finally out in the streets and free of them. We can't herd the dead elephant out of the apartment, the door's too small, the young man told his friend, the pin on his nose permanently changing the shape of both his nostrils and his voice. That was one of his nights to sleep in the clawfoot tub, so she was in the other room curled up under the elephant's overhang, nestled beside the bed with plugs in her ears made from shredded copies of his stories, meant to keep the croons of the birds at bay. She was used to the smell. With her last young man, their cat had gotten sick and hid on top of the fridge to die. It was there for six days before they even noticed, and it stayed there for another two years until he wrapped it in newspaper and put it in a box labeled Kitchen Stuff. The slow progression of the smell of death was something she'd grown accustomed to, but he, he had never been in love like this before, and so the smell reviled him. But the sound of the birds was a constant reminder of the elephant on the bed, a bed which at one time took dominion over the apartment. She hated how the birds talked of nothing else. And every morning, after she left, the young man, he, would come to the door, always still naked despite the cold, and he would stand on that small clean section and stare at the elephant, its trunk stuffed with maggots, its ass puckered with rot, and its last defecation a track of cooled lava fingering along the floor towards him. Every day, after she left, he would stand there, staring, waiting for the elephant to breathe.

three.

Before the elephant, they'd begun to sleep with a little space between them. That space was a no man's land where an elephant might go to germinate. It began as an ermine sized space, but when the ermine clawed them up they got capybara-wide. They didn't talk about it. She started hanging a foot off the edge and he got comfortable with his naked arm on the cool wall. Neither tidied the spot of bedsheets between them, which—in a matter of weeks—went up from capybara to sockeye salmon all the way to adolescent saltwater crocodile. Neither’s hand would wriggle there, even in their sleep. It was as if there was a ward cast on it. They didn’t talk about it or across it, and the more they didn’t, the more it grew. Once, on his side of the bed in the middle of the night, he mumbled Marco to her silence. Another night, after coming home late, the young man already in bed with both bare buttocks squished onto the wall, she slipped into her end of the covers, hung one full leg off the side, and whispered Leave room for God to no responding chuckle. Just as the space between them was negotiated by their individual ignorances, its size was measured on separate scales. The placeholders were mere ideas of the size of the emptiness, and although they had similar ones, they didn’t share any. Where he had an ermine she had a weasel. Where she thought capybara he thought marmot. Where he had a sockeye she had a chinook, and her adolescent crocodile was the same as his morphed idea of an alligator. It wasn’t until after weeks of reassigning the widening gap into different phylums and geni that they both independently thought: elephant. There wasn’t nearly that much room between them at the time, of course, but they both began to believe that their gap could be enough ground for a grey, trunked seedling. That a foetus of an elephant could fit there, grow out into a full calf that might later bulge into adulthood. They thought this same thought as she teetered over the edge of her side of the bed and he was full-pressed flat against his cold wall with nothing but one hand relaxing on the sheets. It was then that the energy of their distance began to shock and shudder forth the abstract thing which they’d been ignoring, concretely, but which had before been simply neurons mirroring like butterfly wings in their brains. It was not until the night when his hand finally tensed up to his body and she finally lost her centre and slipped off the bed that the elephant arrived, full adult and dying, because it had been so long that they’d felt its presence, a negative presence in both its lack and affect, that by the time it arrived it was sick. With the last of its energy, the elephant sat up on the bed, peeled the young man from the wall, where he would have surely been pinned and suffocated by the elephant’s weight, and set him softly on the floor beside the door. Then the elephant picked the young woman up from where she’d fallen off the edge of the bed, where she might have been susceptible to be splashed by any expulsions that might happen in the elephant’s death, and placed her kindly beside the stove. Finally, exhausted, the elephant crawled back onto the bed, in the night, and began to finish dying.

four.

They had almost forgotten about the dead elephant when they finally snapped. She came back from work one day and found the window screen broken through and all the birds—the magpies, crows, ravens, or just bigger crows, and buzzards—picking at the gargantuan corpse, and him, with the broom they never used, trying to swat them away, edging back and forth around the elephant, throwing copies of his manuscripts at a bald eagle perched on top of the bookcase, inches beyond the broom's reach. When she came in to this scene she said that she was through with the elephant, she couldn't handle it, they had to get rid of it. He paused, looking over at her, his eyes watering because the pin had finally, after all those weeks, snapped off his nose, and he was once again smelling through splinter thin nostrils the elephant, the rot, their stale air. His eyes watered and he agreed, and so that day they went to thrift shops across the city buying long knives and stained bedsheets, which they carried back up to the tiny, second-floor apartment, where she held the door for him, and he sharpened her knives for her, and together they cut large chunks of bad flesh off the flanks, the rump, the throat, and carried each piece down to the curb on a stretcher made of the bedsheets bound between the broom and the coat rack. He saved her the trouble of the guts and she saved him from having to pull the big eyes from the sockets. He wrapped its heart in one of its floppy, lopped-off ears, as she kited the mast of skin by running down the stairs gripping onto the still-attached tail. Soon, there was nothing but bone on the bloody bed, so they broke the skeleton into its bits and threw most of the smaller bones, the ribs, the vertebrae, the shins, out the hole in the window screen. The last part of the elephant that they removed was the skull, which she rolled down the stairs alone, and by the time she made it back upstairs, smearing maggot on her gore-sodden dress, he'd already turned the bed on its side, and she helped him carry it down to the curb, just as he helped her throw their books and the coffeemaker and all the spoons out the window, and just how she propped the door open as he chucked each of her shoes down the stairwell, just as he held her hand while she threw his previously unreachable underwear in the dumpster outside, until finally the apartment was barren and they sprawled out on the blank floor together, until finally, hours, days, weeks later, she slung him over her shoulder, carried him down to the street, and watched each of the birds return, slowly, quietly dodging the first flakes of falling snow, as they once did his pages, to carry him away into the whitening sky. By the time she made it back up to the apartment, alone, it was full winter, and the door, the door that she had once left open, was closed, and locked.

John Elizabeth Stintzi is the recipient of the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and the inaugural Sator New Works Award. Their writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Malahat Review, Kenyon Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and others. They are the author of the novels My Volcano (2022) and Vanishing Monuments, as well as the poetry collection Junebat.

Image by Alexander Sinn @swimstaralex