The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

Author:Brooke Bolander
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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There’s a toy elephant on the director’s desk. Plopped between the family pictures and fancy diplomas and cowpiles of ink-stained paper, it sits there hoisting its little tin trunk towards the big tin ceiling begging whatever heathen god elephants pray hallelujah to for a boot heel, a fist, or the delivering jaws of a curious and bad-behaved hound dog. Regan’s about ready to do the honors herself if the director doesn’t stow his hemming and hawing. Going to college apparently taught you sixteen different ways of saying “we’re damned sorry” and “we’re real damned sorry,” and not a blessed one of them left any air in the room or breath in the speaker’s lungs or meant any more than a trained hen plucking at a toy piano.

You and me, tin elephant. We’re both stuck here waiting for it to end. It looks a lot like one of the animals that came along with the wooden Noah’s Ark she had bought her sisters for Christmas back when her and Mama were both doing better, before the jaw ache and the dentist and the company doctor’s shrugs. That pretty painted boat, she recollects, dried up a good quarter of two November paychecks. She wonders where this one came from, if the director’s just so stuffed with money he can go buy things like that the way other folks pick up salt and flour.

“What’re you gonna do about the elephants?” she says, cutting off another round-robin repetition of the We’re Very Sorry Song mid-verse.

“It’s unfortunate, very unfortunate, and— I’m sorry, what was that?”

“The elephants. The workers.” She talks slower, half because the director’s obviously working with a deficit of common sense, half because it hurts her throat and jaw to speak and everything’s coming out as a mushy-mouthed drunk’s mumble. “You gonna keep using, or you gonna talk to them?”

“Well, I mean.” The director’s eyes and hands slide to a spot on his desk in dire need of straightening. “Rudimentary intelligence and even more rudimentary grasp of language aside, they’re just animals. I don’t exactly understand what speaking to them about any of this would accomplish. What do you suppose they would request, smoke breaks? A ham on Christmas?”

Freedom, maybe, y’think? A way of saying “hell no”?

“Anyway,” he continues, plowing quickly on, “that point is moot at this juncture. To answer your initial question, we’re liquidating our workforce at auction and shutting down the Orange factory, effective next month. Have to make our costs back somehow after this debacle.” Regan can’t be sure, but she thinks she catches some side-eye from him at that last bit as he busily shuffles papers. “Though I don’t see how. Most of our elephants were . . . problem children to begin with, purchased at a steep discount.”

“You’re shutting down work? During a war?”

“The factory here in Orange, yes.” If there was a blue ribbon given out at the county fair for avoiding looking people in the eye, he’d have something fluttery to take home right now.

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