The week we learn our father is dying, we bring our elephants to the ward. No metaphors or flowers, says the nurse. I bin the flowers in a bucket left for umbrellas. We stand on the other side of a green curtain. The elephants stamp their feet. We don’t know what to do with them. We wait. I google the word for elephant feet and Google tells me elephants’ feet are called elephant feet. It tells me too that elephants have five toes and, would you believe this? I say to my brother who hasn’t spoken to me in ten years and ignores me still: elephants aren’t flat-footed, they walk on tiptoes. I don’t care if your elephants float in silk slippers, says the nurse. You can’t bring them in here. I point down the corridor. Another family are leaving a room and dragging a reluctant elephant behind them. It’s ears flap and knock a drip. The nurse tuts and scoots in white crocs to deal with them. We take advantage and shove our elephants in front of the curtain and line them around my father’s bed. They tiptoe in a circle and entwine trunks. Some people say it’s selfish to bring elephants to a dying person’s bedside. They are probably right. But you tell me. What do you do with an elephant in a hospital?
Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a writer from Bristol, UK with flash fiction and creative nonfiction published in a wide variety of journals and print anthologies, including Pithead Chapel, Stanchion, Fictive Dream, New Flash Fiction Review, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, and Splonk. She is the winner of The Forge prize for Flash Nonfiction, Lucent Dreaming’s flash fiction award and Manchester Writing School’s 'QuietManDave' prize and was recently awarded an Arts Council grant to write her novella-in-flash. You can read more of her work at: www.kamwords.com.