by Cat Rambo
When I hung up the phone I applauded. My hands made little sound. Whoever had murdered the politician was obviously a fan of elephants. Living ones, that is.
Once the god of Death and his wife had a seemingly silly feud. Shiva and Parvati normally had a good marriage, but one day Shiva had annoyed his wife by barging in on her while she was bathing. Parvati made it clear that sometimes she wanted to bathe alone, and she had asked Shiva’s servant Nandi to keep intruders away. Shiva laughed and had charged past Nandi because the bullhead answered to him.
I like Shiva and even I think that was uncool. He barged in, and since he had created all the servants, Parvati had no means of protesting. Her ladies-in-waiting and friends mentioned that she could make her own servant. She hadn’t thought of it before because Parvati had previously spent her teenage years courting Shiva and devoting her time to worshipping him. It can take a while to switch mindsets, but they had an eternity.
Parvati did better than create a servant. She made a child out of saffron or turmeric paste, depending on who told the story. This child, her son, was loyal to her, but also deserved her protection. She dressed him in fine clothes and gave him a mace, then told him to guard the house while she bathed.
Shiva came home, and this child refused to let him in while his mother was bathing. When Shiva tried to force his way in, the child threw him. Surprised, Shiva decided to call on the other gods for help; while Parvati decided that her husband needed to learn about boundaries and told her son to let no man inside the house. War ensued, with dozens of gods and servants against one boy. The boy won every battle, and mocked the losers. Brahma attempted to make peace, but the boy hadn’t learned to respect his elders. He pulled at the creator god’s beard and told him to go away.
After realizing that he wouldn’t win in a straight fight, Shiva colluded with the protector god Vishnu to cheat. Parvati created warriors out of pure energy to aid her son, but it was a three against three fight, with one combatant waiting to strike last. Vishnu and his mount, the eagle-man Garuda, engaged the boy while Shiva crouched, hidden. At a critical time, Shiva struck, and beheaded the boy. It was only then that, as his allies celebrated, that he realized he had killed his son by murdering Parvati’s creation. That was a big “oops” there.
Parvati would not accept this outcome once she had finished bathing. It would have been one thing if her son had lost fairly, but Shiva and Vishnu had cheated. She created more warriors from pure energy, and told them to destroy all the gods. They laid devastation to all the ones who had conspired against her son, until Brahma and Vishnu pleaded for mercy. She said she wanted her son revived and to have a proper place among the gods.
Shiva did both, having Vishnu behead an elephant and placing it on the boy’s corpse, and he also apologized to his wife for the whole fiasco. He admitted that he was arrogant and foolish, and that this child would be acknowledged as his son. Shiva named his son Ganesh and called him the conqueror of obstacles. Ganesh spent his time riding on a white mouse, having forgiven his father for the deceptive beheading.
Here is the lesson of the story: don’t impose on women, because we are all quivering balls of anger. When we want alone time, we need alone time. If we want to prove that we deserve privacy and agency, then we deserve both. And if we want to destroy the world in revenge, we have that power.
More strange deaths reported: the presidents’ sons were gored next. Found pinned to the floor by elephant tusks.
I sat in the graveyard with a cup of coffee and a flashlight. Earlier I had volunteered to watch the security camera feed when Brito had been spooked. He said that the footage made him want to drink. I had reviewed it, and was similarly disturbed. No one at the funeral parlor had the computer skills to edit the footage to show creepy things, but it was possible that we had a prankster who was doing it to gain Internet fame.
It was a cool night; winter was settling in over the ground like a blanket over a frightened child. I had gotten out an old, beaten-up chair from storage. We couldn’t use it in the funeral parlor, or in social media. But it could serve as reinforcements for the night guards. Brito was watching on the monitors, and I had a radio where he talked. The old radio crackled and made the words half-garbled.
“Be careful, miss,” he said. “Could be a bunch of ruffians.”
“No worries,” I said into the crackling radio. “I have a tiny can of Mace attached to my keychain. Not to mention I can just text you.”
The ground shook. My coffee sloshed in the mug. I sat up straight, awake and alert. Then I finished my coffee before it could spill on my more casual clothes; I wore a black V-neck shirt with dark blue jeans.
They appeared like billowing clouds of dandelion seeds, giant elephants. The stomps filled the air and made the ground rattle. Their hides, an artist’s palette of light browns to dark greys, filled the graveyard. When they stomped, they made the holes in the ground. The marks were larger than normal elephant footprints. They had no eyes, just black spaces. Even though it was near dark, I could see all of this with my flashlight.
I tucked my coffee mug into the old chair so that it wouldn’t fall over and smash into the grass. For some reason surprise didn’t fill me. Maybe I had known when I had planted that mustard seed, and the ground had shaken for the first time. There are some things that a woman just senses.
“Do you understand me?” I asked as they approached.
They gave low rumbles, not loud trumpeting. Sorrow filled my heart. Even if they understood me, I would never be able to understand them. Served me right for not being religious.
“I understand why you awoke,” I went on. “The world’s become too heavy for you to bear. You came up here to lighten the load.”
They stared at me, blind but perceptive. I remember reading that elephants are intelligent as humans, that they can recognize themselves in mirrors and have communication that we cannot hear.
I told them what had happened over the past twenty years. They flattened their ears that were shaped like India—one way to tell them apart from African elephants—and learned how the people they had protected had turned on one another and kept fighting. I told them about my uncle, how he had voted for a man that was our antithesis, and how other Indians had betrayed us. The mention of poachers brought sounds of distress. It was obvious who had murdered the politicians and the presidents’ sons. Who else could rip a bolted mount off the wall and pierce a man so that he would hang like a corpse from the gallows?
My voice gave out after an hour; my heart was still raging. The elephants stood, eyeing me. Then they turned and stomped away. They moved slowly, into the night. They did not leave footprints outside the graveyard.
“Did you see that, Miss?” Brito asked through the radio.
I nodded. He’d have seen me talking to them, confronting them, over a silent camera.
Right, I thought. They come from the Netherworld, the realm of the dead. That’s why we only see their footprints in graveyards. Funny they never knock down the trees.
I was sad but not surprised when I heard that my uncle had told my mother he was sorry about having voted for the wrong candidate two decades ago. He had been spared, but many others weren’t. Indian traitors had been found trampled to the ground, their money and corporate lobbyists unable to save them. More would follow.
The Buddha had told Krishna Gautami that he could revive her child if she had collected mustard seeds from a house without death. I had bought mine from stores and collected sorrows from houses that had never known death. The Buddha had never said what would happen if Krishna had succeeded.
There are worse ways for the world to end. I welcome the elephant’s feet as they tread on our necks, snapping every tiny bone.
About the Author
A 2016 MBA graduate and published author, Priya Sridhar has been writing fantasy and science fiction for fifteen years, and counting. One of her sto
ries made the Top Ten Amazon Kindle Download list, and Alban Lake published her works Carousel and Neo-Mecha Mayhem. Priya lives in Miami, Florida with her family.
Editor’s Note
I’ve mentioned before that I’m a gardener and there’s a particular loveliness to the image of cheerful yellow mustard blossoms as memorial. Christians will catch a Biblical reference as well from the Book of Matthew, 17:20, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”
As a gardener I also know that it’s a common weed, growing even as far north as Greenland, blooming across the world and cultivated for about five millennia now, making it particularly apt. But it’s a different quote from Desmond Tutu that gives us the story’s heart from the beginning, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
It’s not enough to be neutral at the moment.
Mr. Percy’s Shortcut
Andy Duncan
Tourism? No, not really. Not as many as you’d think. Don’t get me wrong. I reckon tourism claims its share of jobs around here, no denying that, but you got to keep in mind, a lot of that is part-time, minimum-wage stuff. Jobs for retirees, for college students like yourself.
No, honey, as far as employment is concerned—serious, feed-a-family employment—no two ways about it: This part of Appalachia is mostly mining.
Well, data mining, of course. I mean, we tried Bitcoin mining, but hell, you know how that turned out. No, ma’am, data is the way to go. It’s the most renewable resource there ever was. Every year, every month—why, every damn day—there’s more data than there ever was before. You can watch it grow, right there on your link. Just like a mold. The faster you mine it, the more is left to mine. Never could say that about Old King Coal, now could you?
Sure, we’ve still got a few small coal mines here and there, open to school groups, and tourists of course. The Brazilians are especially keen to see what the mines were like, for some reason. You’d think they’d want to look in the opposite direction, since space exploration is paying all their bills now. What are they, No. 1 in space, as percentage of GDP? Which ain’t hard. Even 1 percent would beat what the U.S. spent at the height of Apollo.
But I’m just rambling now. What do you expect from the town librarian? That’s an elected position, you know, since the Net Neutrality Amendment. I’m in my twenty-third term. I reckon I’m the only person in town with the patience, and the people skills. Plus it don’t pay worth two and a half shits.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, the coal mines. You know the story. Most all the power plants around the world switched over, leaving the whole U.S. industry propped up with government subsidies, and the rising waters drowned any taste for those. Even the West Virginia senators couldn’t say much, after what happened to Miami, and to Norfolk. So with the subsidies gone, the price of energy from coal skyrocketed past the price of energy from wind, solar, hydrothermal, and basically everything else—except maybe fusion, and let me tell you, they are working hard on that, in Oak Ridge, and Huntsville, and Morgantown.
There’s a few old-time miners around, but nowhere near the show mines. The guides in hard hats are mainly graduate students in folklore, and anthropology, and fossil DNA analysis. To the old-timers, a mine is a mine, even with carpeted floors and popcorn in the lobby.
Funny you should get me talking about coal, because I was thinking just the other day about the last living coal miner in these parts. Mr. Percy Seaton was his name. Reckon you never heard of him? He’s gone now. Dead and gone, as those old-timers would have said. He took the last round of buyouts—the ones Medicare paid for, to save money in the long run?—retired at 40, left the mines for good, and spent the next 30 years not talking about coal. Not talking about much of anything, frankly, after his husband died. Mr. Wilson’s death hit Mr. Percy hard, and that’s a fact. That’s when he really stepped up the digging.
You heard me: digging. That man dug harder for free than he ever did for a paycheck. Probably spent more hours underground, too. That last year or so, he was down there practically around the clock. Came out only once a week maybe. “I’m running out of time, Mr. Zell,” he told me, more than once. “I got to finish. It’s now or never.” Funny thing. Mr. Percy was a tall, lanky man, and you’d expect him to be permanently stooped, being one of those, what-do-you-call-’em, human moles? Always hated that term. But he walked out of the Earth every week standing straight as a sycamore. Like the digging made him taller, somehow.
Oh, now, I see I’ve done confused you, honey. Let me start over, from the beginning. One spring morning, about two years into retirement, Mr. Percy Seaton walked out of his garage whistling, with a brand-new shovel resting on his shoulder, the blade pointing to heaven. He whistled that shovel through the meadow behind the home place, all the way to the base of what the locals call Seaton Mountain. When he could walk no farther without climbing, he stopped walking, and started digging. He dug until lunchtime, when he knocked off for an hour or so. Went back to the house, had some buttermilk and a Chichen sandwich, then went back to the hole in the hill, and started back digging again.
How do I know all this? Well, how do you think? By talking to the man, and by talking to his granddaughter, and by watching him, many an hour, through the years, and by extrapolating to fill in the gaps, and by making up the rest. But ask anyone in town, they’ll tell you I’m telling it right, and the tunnel is still there that Mr. Percy dug—the tunnel he worked on, every day of his life, for just about 30 years.
“The problem ain’t the digging,” he said once, when he was maybe a half-mile in. “The problem is the hauling.”
On a good day, you see, he hauled out 90 pounds of rock and dirt, give or take a bucket or two. He hauled it out in wheelbarrows; he hauled it out in carts; he hauled it out in his pants pockets; he stacked up buckets at the entrance, and let no visitor leave without toting out another everlasting bucketful of dirt.
“God made the Earth, and blessed it,” Mr. Percy said, “but I wish She had not made quite so much of it at this particular spot.”
He mostly used shovels. Wore out a whole series of ’em, but he saved the one he had started with. Said it had special meaning for him. He spray-painted the handle gold, so it stood out. But God makes mountains out of rocks, too, so sometimes he needed picks. He purely hated a drill, said it reminded him of that time he went to the dentist, but he was reduced to drilling more than once, when he reached a hard place. He shored up the ceiling with timbers as he went.
Why did he do it, you ask? Well, that question was posed, from time to time. Whenever someone asked Mr. Percy why he was singlehandedly tunneling through a mountain, he said, “To make fools ask questions,” or he said, “What’s good enough for a groundhog, is good enough for a Presbyterian,” or he said, “I’m digging a shortcut.”
Shortcut to where, he was asked.
“To the end of this conversation,” he said.
If the visitor pestered him too bad, Mr. Percy said, “I got plenty of shovels. If you want to stay, grab one and get to work.” That cleared ’em out fast. “Threaten most people with work,” Mr. Percy said, “it routs ’em faster’n a foot in the butt. That’s why the moneychangers fled from Christ. They feared he might give ’em something to do.”
Frankly, we mostly stopped asking. And the more I thought about it, the more I came around to, well, why does a person do anything? Why fish, if you’re not hungry? Or have your groceries delivered by drone, if you’re not homebound? Or play golf, if you’re not being forced at gunpoint? Or print out a new house, if the old one was perfectly good? People do a lot of inexplicable things, just to fill the time, and feed the economy, and keep up appearances.
But there is something to your question, young lady. While we all may be guilty of odd and unnecessary pursuits, I concede that Mr. Percy pressed that point with particular firmness. Still, there is precedent. Miss Sallie looked into that, came up with a list from all around the world, all periods of history. No one knows why, but some men, one day, just start digging. Like Burro Schmidt, who dug a tunnel singlehanded through Copper Mountain in New Mexico, till he came out the other side in 1938, and led tours of it thereafter.
“It’s always men,” Miss Sallie said.
“I’m sure it is,” I replied, and that was our final word on the subject.
I’m speaking of Miss Sallie Jackson-Seaton. Mr. Percy Seaton’s youngest granddaughter. I’m sure I must’ve mentioned her before. When Miss Sallie was twelve, and passed her age-of-majority exam with the highest score ever recorded in the county, she started visiting her grandfather in his tunnel every day and became what you might call the Muse of the whole operation. Why, I never could leave out Miss Sallie. I hate to say it, honey, but if you’re planning to be an oral historian, you really ought to try to keep up.
I also want you to know, Mr. Percy was a UMW man to the last. Who knows what the UMW’s name is, anymore, it’s changed so many times. Last I heard, it was up to 800,000 members, mostly working in genetics and aerospace for the Tribal Nations. But Mr. Percy honored the old ways. Kept union hours, honored the union breaks, the union lunchtime. Mostly he ate in the dark, at the end of the tunnel, Chichen sandwiches from an old Black Panther lunchbox Miss Sallie had given him. He favored Chichen because it was the original genemod tech the Nations had cashed in on, not being hindered by that parade of dried-up fundamentalist Baptists in Congress who held back medical research in the States proper for decades, right up until the Great Atheist Awakening.
Mr. Wilson—that was Mr. Percy’s husband, remember?—he worked for Cherokee-Monsanto, had personally supervised the first ten thousand generations of Chichen. Perfecting the recipe, you know. Mr. Wilson was never union, though; he was what they call an Exempt employee, which means Exempt from overtime, and from collective bargaining, and from fairness. Why, Mr. Percy had about forgotten what animal-chicken tasted like, but Chichen suited him just fine. “No one worries about hurting a Chichen,” he said, “any more’n you worry about hurting a beer can when you pop it open.” Mostly he had given up beer, too. Mostly he had given up everything, except digging, and sleeping, and talking to Miss Sallie when she came around.
