Walking down a damp sloped road, it is cragged into segments. This little street's jazz hums like a drowning elephant. The sound emanates from a gauzed, glowing window lined with weary green copper; it is snugly set six inches into a red-brick edifice featuring a sloped roof and no apparent entrances.
The streets are empty, the air is blue, the sky is as greyed as featureless as an elephant's skin. The clouds sleep on top of one another; inseparable gases piled and intermingled.
I think of home, and my baby elephants. Lovers grasping one another, lined up, holding hands like twisted trailing trunks. They snake, blindly, out of the woods and into the listless lurid urbanian labyrinth. I'll miss them when they're lost, you can only fit so many elephants into a taxi.
God only knows what the driver would charge for that sort of ordeal. Eight elated elephants, lost, without destination, and rolling around in the cab. They will know where their destinations are once they're there: the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramids, and the Forbidden City. Check your pockets, little elephants, you're bound to lose something on the way.
Well those elephants--my elephants--will make it home someday. They talk about about the airports and the gift shops; did you know that elephants are not allowed in Romanian elevators? Don't get them started on Togo.
They'll escape me of these sad, static-sleet streets. No, I can't wait to hear the elephant stories.