Warning: This short story contains sensitive content related to gun violence that may be triggering for some readers.
“Is it real?” When the alarm goes off one of the third graders in the back asks Mr. Davis the question Ellison is afraid to ask.
“It’s real,” Mr. Davis says. “Remember, we treat it real until I tell you it’s over, right?” Mr. Davis flashes a thumbs up of reassurance looking directly at Ellison whose concern must show on his face.
For drills, Mr. Davis closes the blinds on the window wall and locks the door. Ellison, the oldest, leads his fellow fourth graders and their third-grade buddies into the shelter-in-place formation in the far back corner against the art cupboard and the back wall. They are supposed to make a wedge like a piece of pie, sitting on their bottoms with their knees to their chests, but it is usually a sprawling mess.
The third graders in his multi-level classroom don’t bother Ellison too much except for on drill days. At the beginning of this school year, he told his mother that the bad guys shouldn’t come to the multi-level classes because the third graders talk and cry no matter how many drills they did. He knew this because he was a third grader last year and he had been scared, but his fourth-grade buddy, Marcy James distracted him, and smiled even when he cried once. He wishes he was with Marcy and the fifth graders now.
When they’re settled, Ellison starts a round of the three-in, four-out breathing exercise his mother taught him, so he wouldn’t hold his breath and tense up, but it isn’t helping him feel better. Already, a third grader behind him, Evee, named after Ellison’s favorite Pokemon, prods Ellison’s buddy, Oliver, with one of her light-up Captain Marvel shoes. Ollie makes a not-so-quiet, whispered yowl. Mr. Davis has finished lowering the blinds but is back at his desk drawer rummaging. He looks up at them and makes a gesture for quiet, pushing his hands down twice in front of him, takes his keys from the drawer and goes over to lock the classroom door before he turns toward their wedge. The murmurs and whispers stop for a minute when he takes his kid-sized reading chair and sits along the wall between them and the door, scrolling through his phone.
Ellison wonders how adults who made up the drills didn’t know that third graders can’t sit quiet, even with fourth-grade buddies. Ellison’s grandmother once told him that schools used to allow spankings, but he didn’t think Oliver could sit still, even if he knew Mr. Davis might spank him. Or, if an intruder might hear him.
To prove his point, Ollie rotates toward Evee and pokes her, hissing, in retaliation for the accidental kick. That draws a look from Mr. Davis again, so Ellison reaches into his sweatshirt pocket for an origami animal from his cache.
He has a whole zoo of them at home on his bookcase, in a saucer by his bed, on a shelf in his bathroom. He keeps the special rainbow fish under his pillow. The one he pulls out is the polka dot elephant his mother gave him this morning “for the math test” his mother said, “because they’re smart and calm,” she explained. She calls the origamis “talismans”. Every animal has special powers which he suspects she makes up for whatever he might be worried about that day.
Elephants are his favorite animals. He’s probably watched every Nat Geo documentary about the big animals. Baby elephants are blind for a few years after they are born, but the adults’ trunks have more than 40,000 muscles, so the moms, aunties and grandma elephants use their trunks to comfort and guide the kid elephants until they grow up. One of his favorite elephant documentaries showed how, because they are herd animals, they take care of each other for the herd’s survival. They showed orphaned elephants being rescued by the aunties and grandmas in other herds, and one showed the herd circling a baby to protect it from lions.
Ellison considers switching this special elephant with a different origami in his pocket to keep it for the math test, and because of his love for elephants. But Oliver’s eyes are latched on it, his mouth in an “O” of surprise. It’s too late to exchange it without a squall. Ellison puts a finger up to his lips, shush, and lifts the tiny paper elephant to Ollie’s eye level. He smiles at Ollie like Marcy smiled at him last year. Ollie snatches the origami elephant and Ellison leans in for a quiet whisper into Ollie’s ear and says, “Good thing we got the magic elephant. They protect the herd.” Oliver pinches the tiny, dotted elephant, touches its tiny trunk, and flicks one of its tiny, big ears.
Ellison remembers the math test. His throat feels scratchy and dry. The math test is normally right after recess when he usually has his water and apple slices. Ellison doesn’t sense time, but it feels too long. His Mom claims children need to be twelve before they experience time passing. “Everything is ‘now’ until you’re twelve,” she would tell him whenever he was eager for something to begin or end. But he is pretty sure it was almost time for recess, and he knows he did the 3-4-3 breaths at least twice now. First, when they were gathering in the back, once when Oliver fidgeted. He starts another round now because of the waiting.
Ollie finger-walks the elephant up Ellison’s arm toward his shoulder causing the elephant to tumble on the seam of his sweatshirt and fall behind him on Evee’s lighted shoe. Before Evee can squeak or grab, though, a distant popping begins from somewhere at the other end of the building.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Ellison turns sideways and covers Ollie’s ears with his palms pulling his buddy nearly into his lap. His mother will be so mad. She and some other moms went to a meeting last year to stop the fake shots because they were so scary in the drills. He woke up several nights because he dreamt he heard shooting. He’s scared, still, even though the principal says the drills are not scary. He won’t tell his mother he was scared, though. He’ll just tell her they should go back to the meeting and tell them to stop the drills. He wishes Marcy was here to tap his hand like last year.
When the popping stops, Mr. Davis resettles two crying third graders nearer to him and checks his phone again. Everyone else is quiet but shifting like the baby goats in their pen at the petting zoo. Mr. Davis sets his phone down on the reading chair, and scuttles, bent low, toward the door when the footsteps’ sounds come down the hallway outside the classroom. Ellison is holding his breath. He knows he should do the breathing again, but he is focused on keeping Ollie and Evee quiet now if someone is outside.
The footsteps in the hall stop for a moment and, without warning, Ollie twists from Ellison’s firm grip on him causing the origami elephant to fly out and skitter across the vinyl floor, a few feet away from their now-jumbled, squirming pie wedge formation. In the split-second Ellison slides on his butt to snatch the origami before Ollie can cry out again or, worse go after it, the door explodes open, and the pops erupt into overwhelming bangs and shouts and squeals inside the room.
It was locked, is Ellison’s last thought before his fingers brush the sharp paper edge of the origami elephant’s ear. He feels it turn rough and leathery against the skin of his palm. From a soft rustle to a rush of air, the elephant’s ears begin to flap. Ellison clutches with his fist the rough join, where the pachyderm’s ear flap attaches to her head, as she rises. His fingers on his other hand find the grooves of the elephant’s bark-like wrinkled trunk that encircles his belly, holding him tight and squeezing him with small gentle pulses. She lifts him up, up, up out of the classroom and into the milky blue sky. He can make out her soft, comforting trumpeting sounds through the whooshing beat of her now-enormous-colossal-magnificent, polka dot origami ears. He feels her patting him with the very loose end of the forty-thousand-muscled trunk, exactly the way the herd elephants hug and guide the babies in the savannah in the documentaries.
The screams and shots recede, and Ellison hears only the rhythmic swishing of her ears as they climb beyond the high clouds. He knows the elephant mothers, grandmas, and aunties are waiting, encircling all the Ollies, Evees, and Ellisons to shield them from the lions and bad guys. He knows the herd protects the babies until they are grown.
CHRIS NAFF left a corporate training and development career, after two consecutive cancer diagnoses and treatments, to hang out with readers and writers and spend whatever time she had left on the planet to write woven sagas and tiny stories about being human. Today, over a decade later, Chris enjoys continued good health in Northern California with her supportive, hilarious, engineer-husband, and in proximity to her two adult sons. After many workshops and conferences, and drafts, rewrites, and edits—with and among hundreds of generous writers—she is currently seeking representation for her big novel, History of the Dance. Her WIP short story collection, When Last We Spoke, includes previously published Dahlia (Intima), and Elephant, winner of the 2023 Mayday Short Fiction Prize.
