BACKGROUND: on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, the island of Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake. The destruction and loss of life is horrible. Haiti needs help. Below I've posted one of my short stories. Feel free to read it, and if you're so moved, to use the link at the end of the story to send a donation to Haiti.
HERBAL
By Nalo Hopkinson
A fiction fundraiser for
2010 Haitian earthquake relief
(Donation button at the end of the story; please donate if you can.)
Herbal by Nalo Hopkinson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License
That first noise must have come from the powerful kick. It crashed like the sound of cannon shot. A second bang followed, painfully, stupefyingly loud; then a concussion of air from the direction of the front door as it collapsed inward. Jenny didn't even have time to react. She sat up straight on her couch, that was all. The elephant was in the living room almost immediately. Jenny went wordlessly still in fright and disbelief. She lived on the fifteenth floor.
The elephant took a step forward. One of its massive feet slammed casually through the housing of the television, which, unprotesting, broke apart into shards of plastic, tangles of coloured wires and nubbins of shiny metal. So much for the evening news. The movement of iIts haunches knocked three rows of books and an empty vase down from her bookshelf. The vase shattered when it hit the floor.
The elephant filled the close living room of Jenny's tiny apartment. Plaster crumbled from the walls where it had squeezed through her brief hallway. Its head brushed the ceiling, threatening the light fixture. It crowded the tree trunks of its two legs nearest her up against the couch. Fearing for her toes--well, her feet, really--Jenny yanked her own feet up onto the couch, then stood right up on the seat. It was only the merest advantage of height, but it was something. The phone was in the bedroom, on the other side of the elephant.
The elephant smelled. Its wrinkly, gray-brown hide gave off a pungent tang of mammalian sweat. Its body looked ashy, dry. Jenny found herself thinking how it might feel to tenderly rub bucketsful of lotion into its cracked skin, to feel the hide plump and soften from her care. Elephants were hairier than she'd thought. Black, straight bristles, thick as needles, sprung here and there from the leathery skin.
The elephant reached out with its trunk and sniffed the potted plant flourishing on its stand by the window; a large big-leaf thyme bush, fat and green from drinking in the sun. Fascinated, Jenny watched the elephant curl its trunk around the base of the bush and pluck it out of its pot. The pot thudded to the carpet, but didn't break. It rolled over onto its side and vomited dirt. The elephant lifted the plant to its mouth. Jenny closed her eyes and flinched at the rootspray of soil. The elephant devoured her houseplant, chewing thoughtfully.
Jenny couldn't help it; didn't want to. She reached out a hand--so small, compared!--and touched the elephant's hide. Just one touch, so brief, but it set off an avalanche of juddering flesh. A fingertipped pod of gristle with two holes in it snaked over to her, slammed into her chest and shoved her away; the elephant's trunk. Jenny felt her back collide with the wall. Nowhere to go. She remained standing, very still.
Now there was a new smell, one that pulled her eyes toward its source. The elephant had raised its tail and was depositing firm brown lumps of manure onto her carpet. She could see spiky threads of straw woven into each globule. The pong of fermented grass itched inside her nose, made her cough. Outraged, hardly knowing what she did, she leapt forward and slapped the elephant, hard, on its large, round rump. It trumpeted. Leading with its shoulder, it took two running steps through the rest of her living room. It stuck briefly in the open doorway on the other side. Then more plaster crumbled, and it popped out onto her brief balcony. With astonishing agility, the pachyderm clambered out over the cement wall of the balcony. "No!" Jenny shouted, jumping down off the couch, but she was too late. Ponderous as a walrus diving from an ice floe, the elephant flung itself over the low wall. Jenny rushed to the door.
The elephant hovered in the air and paddled until it was facing her. It looked at her a moment, executed a slow backwards flip with a half twist, then trundled off, wading comfortably through the aether as though it swam in water. The last thing she saw of the beast, in the crowding dark of evening, was the oddly graceful bulk of its blimp body, growing smaller as it floated towards the horizon.
Jenny's knees gave way. She felt her bum hit floor. A hot tear rolled down her cheek. She looked around at the mess: the scattered textbooks for the course she was glumly, doggedly failing; the crushed vase in a colour she'd never liked, a grudging gift from an aunt who'd never liked her; the destroyed television with its thousand channels of candied nothing. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of elephant dung, then stood again. She fetched broom and dustpan from the kitchen and started to clean up.
A couple of months later she passed her web design course, just barely, and sold the books. She felt lighter when she exchanged them for crisp bills of money. At the pharmacy, she used most of the money to buy all the lotion they had, the type for the driest skin. After he'd helped her repair her walls, her father had given her another big-leaf thyme cutting. Sitting in a jar of water, it had already sprouted a healthy tangle of roots. She'd told her dad once about the elephant. He'd raised one articulate brow, then said nothing more.
Jenny lugged the tubs of skin lotion home, then went to the hardware store. With the remaining money she bought a bag of soil. Back home again, she transferred the thyme cutting into the pot that had held the old plant. She stood it on the balcony. Two more months of summer. The plant grew quickly, and huge.
She got hired to maintain the question-and-answer page for the local natural history museum. The work was interesting enough, and sometimes people asked about the habits of elephants. Jenny would pore over the curators' answers before putting them up on the web page. It must have been an Indian elephant; an African one would never have fit. For the rest of the summer, every evening when she got home, she take a container of the skin lotion out onto the balcony with her. She would brush her hands amongst the leaves of the plant, gently bruising them. The pungent smell of the thyme would waft its beckoning call out on the evening air, and Jenny would lean against the balcony railing for an hour or so, lotion in hand, hopefully scanning the darkening sky.
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Here are some places you can donate to the Haitian relief efforts:
IN CANADA (the Canadian government will match donations)
MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES/DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS
IN THE U.S.
Thank you for reading.
I think the crushed vase in
I think the crushed vase in a color she'd never liked, a grudging gift from an aunt who'd never liked her; the destroyed television with its thousand channels of candied nothing.