The Spirit of Jumbo
An elephant never forgets, even when he’s dead. Especially if he’s passed to the pachyderm underworld. Here he learns about the letters, in a hundred thousand hands, from children who adored him, those urchins he’d carried with uncommon legerity on his high broad back. They plead in innocent voices and neat loops, with hesitant grammar and blue-black blots of ink, their missives addressed to the palace and sealed with pastel blobs of wax. The girls’ pages are spattered with tears, some scented with floral perfumes, and the boys’ are stained with soot and unidentifiable grime. Drawings of his towering likeness and the sight of their distressed faces make his soul both swell with compassion and contract with rage.
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A queen never acquiesces, even when she’s under duress. Especially if she has other pressing concerns, such as a piqued and pistol-wielding Scot. And this for rejecting his verse! Her spirits being leaden (in the wake of her dear friend, Disraeli), she’s numb to crushing those of others. An animal has its place; an aggressive circus beast so much the more so. As sovereign, she’s bound to uphold the protocols of safety and avoid an elephantine calamity. Goodness knows a monarch suffers enough attacks from unstable persons, without encouraging tragedies from the hand of Fate. Weighing the £2000 against the juvenile epistles, the latter are as light as her sheerest embroidered handkerchief. And with it, she waves them away.
Victorious, Phineas Taylor Barnum shakes on his deal.
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Sublime and weightless, Jumbo’s presence enfolds the scrawny bodies as they scramble into their iron beds, their lightweight limbs shivering from cold and gloom. They’ve heard the news, blubbered over his photo, mourned the gray hulk of him expired and motionless in sepia. Excessive in his dimensions, these were nevertheless no match for an oncoming freight train.
The youngsters are haunted by nightmares; they wriggle their dreams through spectators who’ve come to gawk at his dismembered parts, then try in vain to stitch the pieces together. Awake and fretful, they blanch at his skeleton and snivel at his stuffed hide.
By ’75 they are each one deceased, whether from wars or sickness or age who can tell, save Jumbo’s Maker. None of them lived to see the fire.
None of them needed to know that all that remains of him (apart from his ashes kept in a peanut butter jar) are a taxidermized tail and an atypically-shaped heart.
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Barnum the showman departs, and statues are raised in his honor; Jean-Antoine Houdon sculpts his head and shoulders in smooth alabaster.
Victoria dies too. At her bedside and her request for comfort, Edward fetches her Pomeranian. In lifting that teensy dog onto the royal deathbed, a long-buried childhood memory surfaces in Bertie’s mind: of his mother scooping him up to the heavens, of riding aloft an incredible creature, of feeling free yet protected, and of having the most marvelous journey of his colorful life.
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A tusker never tires of reminiscing.
A papier-mâché model (he hadn’t been fond of it) is now replaced with a handsome replica in bronze.
The pride of a New England college, real Jumbo stood in that open atrium for over eight decades; every time Professor Bud Carpenter retrieved the pennies from his proboscis, the exhibit kindly suppressed a sneeze. After the Great Conflagration, the zoology department’s 1,500-pound mascot would still bring good luck from his novel home of an urn, though his trunk fund would cease to subsidize Tufts’ overflow of stolen ashtrays.
At first inspection, the precious bust seemed to have survived intact–until someone approached. The intense heat of the flames had drawn out all the moisture from the marble; at the touch of a hand, it crumbled to dust.
Lee Nash (she/her) writes poetry, short fiction and creative non-fiction. Her work has been featured in diverse journals and anthologies, including Ambit, America Magazine, Magma, Slice and The Best Small Fictions 2019. Her poetry chapbook, Ash Keys, was published by Flutter Press (2017) and Un Rhinocéros en Opération Sauvetage, her translation of Cleve Hicks’ A Rhino to the Rescue, was published by Éditions Maïa (France, 2021). She has won or been placed/shortlisted in international competitions including Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Bridport Prize, the Princemere Poetry Prize, Fish Publishing’s The Lockdown Prize and the TU Dublin Short Story Competition. https://leenashwriting.com/
