Ghost Parachute

A Literary Magazine

We Don’t Let Elephants Grow

By

We Don’t Let Elephants Grow

We only grow flowers and trees and joy and all things beautiful and shiny. We open the windows, and air the room, and we chase all wrong and bad and evil out, but Mom asks for the truth because she’s had a glimpse at the elephant and she knows he’s here.

My sister protects Mom, she makes me stand in front of the elephant and hide him while he’s still small, she then pushes him out of the room, closes the door, but the elephant sneaks back in through the keyhole. I look at my sister who looks back at me. We exchange words in silence, how that creature fits through there, she wonders, then she cuts a flower and hands it to Mom and Mom takes a big breath, she smells the flower like her life depends on that smell, like that smell can make her forget the elephant in the room.

Mom holds my hand and she smiles and I see and she sees the elephant, but I do my best to smile back, because my sister told me that this little monster feeds on sadness and once he grows big enough, we can’t hide or throw him out, this little monster will ruin everything that we’ve built and he’ll eat us away in the end.

Dad waters the floor every day and the flowers blossom. He insists we can’t make the elephant disappear and all things considered, I agree, because Dad is wiser than my sister. All we can do is grow more flowers, more beauty, more magic, until beauty and love fill the room and the elephant won’t find room to grow. Perhaps he’ll still be here but it won’t matter. Dad says there’s a little sad in everything as we grow older, even in greatest joy, and he sighs, then he kneels down to uproot the tears that fell on the floor before they grow big and become sobs.

We grow flowers and colors and joy and in this rainbow room we keep Mom safe, in this room we’re all safe and sadness can’t touch us. We don’t let elephants grow in this room. We place them early under the rug, where we keep unpleasant feelings and nasty truths and all bad things we can’t get rid of, but that monstrous creature still grows and grows and grows, despite everything, like Mom’s cancer grows.

About Mileva Anastasiadou

Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of We Fade With Time and Christmas People by Alien Buddha Press. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as The Forge, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, Fractured Lit, and others. She's the flash fiction editor of Blood+Honey and The Argyle journals.

Artist Credit:

Amy Marques grew up between languages and places and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She’s been nominated for multiple awards, longlisted twice in Wigleaf 50, and has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fictive Dream, Unlost, Ghost Parachute, BOOTH, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. She is editor & visual artist for the Duets anthologies, author & artist of the chapbook Are You Willing? and the found poetry book PARTS. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.