Elephant Tales

I was given this assignment a long time ago, and, in apathy, didn't write it until the night before it's due date.
This was totally improvised and I was exhausted when I wrote it.
There are like, three references to Fight Club, if you're familiar with it..


Elephant Tales

I will be blunt. When you have a pink elephant looking over your shoulder, you speak only in vowels. I look around, take in the sights of my chamber walls, my dusty window in which the angels sing, my rusted arm that has already begun to rot away, not even suitable for food, and I realize, this world is my belief. The one thing I hold true, the single thing that keeps me human: my brain, my thoughts, my imagination, and my hunched, one-eyed cricket who sings me to sleep (and no, he does NOT sing "When You Wish Upon A Star" EVEN if you offer him food, freedom, or reproduction).

When I was three years old, my mother locked me in this room, saying that all good children must pray to Jesus and his Virgin, and also live off of a glass of water, served fresh every new moon (she also said that good boys must never choose to urinate, but, hey, sometimes I'm a rebel). It was in this room, my beloved chamber of color and drag, elephants and beating rods, that I realized the depth of my belief in my own mind.

With my own mind, I can dream, I can fantasize, and I can have friends. And as long as my ever-cheerful friend Fred is living between my toes, I can never go crazy. When my Mom stopped giving me my water-meals, I found that even without food, I could think, I could dream, and I could talk to Fred!

I have one arm, three-quarters of a leg, and something resembling a left butt cheek, but if I close my eyes, I am whoever I want to be. I am Brad Pitt, I am Jack's broken heart, or, I can even BE Fred. It was with my imagination that I first conceived myself as food, and now, because of that, I am still alive!

I have accomplished many great things with my brains work, and I every day further establish and require my belief in the only truly unalienable right I have: my mind. No matter what the elephant does, all I have to do is close my eyes and POOF! I am perfect, and I am tasty.

Call me strange, but I liked this. It's morbid not in the blood-and-gore-and-carnage way but in the more subtle how-can-they-talk-about-it-so-casually type of way. :3 It's also a pretty unique take on the whole "you can be anything you believe you can be" shtick that gets spouted off so often.

The only thing I can say is that I really think this story could benefit from being expanded upon. It doesn't have to be expanded much, but there's quite a bit of potential, and I think this story would be for the better with a bit more flesh on its bones.

But, yes, I enjoyed reading this.

Hello again!

Well, firstly I agree with Kyllorac in that it was well written.

But, I am also very, very confused by this. I feel like you do when someone tells you a joke but you don't quite understand the punchline, haha. I think it's probably because I didn't understand the references you had made. Maybe I'm not understanding something very obvious? I'm not sure.

When you have a pink elephant looking over your shoulder, you speak only in vowels

I don't think I get this...doesn't seeing pink elephants mean that you've had some sort of hallucinogen?:elephant:

I look around, take in the sights of my chamber walls, my dusty window in which the angels sing, my rusted arm that has already begun to rot away, not even suitable for food, and I realize, this world is my belief.

At first I tried taking this in a literal way, so I was also confused by the rusted arm part...does that mean sunburn? Or that you're some kind of leper? And then I thought maybe you were an inanimate object, but I couldn't think of one that would make sense...

The one thing I hold true, the single thing that keeps me human: my brain, my thoughts, my imagination, and my hunched, one-eyed cricket who sings me to sleep (and no, he does NOT sing "When You Wish Upon A Star" EVEN if you offer him food, freedom, or reproduction).

Huh? Crickets? Like Jiminy Cricket? And also, you say one single thing, and then go on to name several things.

When I was three years old, my mother locked me in this room, saying that all good children must pray to Jesus and his Virgin, and also live off of a glass of water, served fresh every new moon (she also said that good boys must never choose to urinate, but, hey, sometimes I'm a rebel).

...I'm not sure if this is supposed to be taken with a grain of salt or not, haha. I think that living for a month off of a glass of water is kind of stretching the lines of believability...

With my own mind, I can dream, I can fantasize, and I can have friends. And as long as my ever-cheerful friend Fred is living between my toes, I can never go crazy.

?
Who is Fred? Is this the Fight Club reference you were talking about?

I have one arm, three-quarters of a leg, and something resembling a left butt cheek, but if I close my eyes, I am whoever I want to be. I am Brad Pitt, I am Jack's broken heart, or, I can even BE Fred. It was with my imagination that I first conceived myself as food, and now, because of that, I am still alive!

So, I admit, I started laughing at the Brad Pitt reference. But other than that I am totally lost. What I am getting from this is either that because you were locked away that you decided to eat parts of yourself to live...? Or that this story is actually from the perspective of some sort of food, which doesn't really work, since you mention your arms and toes and whatnot. Or, you are pretending to be food so that you can take your mind off of starvation? Which, again, doesn't make sense.

No matter what the elephant does, all I have to do is close my eyes and POOF! I am perfect, and I am tasty.

Still confused...haha. So, you're food? I think? I'm not quite sure.

---

So, though for the majority of this it was realllly unclear what was going on, the style of writing was captivating and well-done. If you just made it more...accessible to people like me who don't understand references I would enjoy it much more. :

Anyway, more? Good!

Hi again, VivelaMusique

Thanks for reading more of my writing. To answer the majority of your questions, none of this was meant to be literal. The tone is literal and matter-of-fact, but the content isn't. Like the cricket thing, the rusted arm, the cannibalism...it's all BS just made up. The cricket thing, also, is random, but I didn't want people to think I meant Jiminy Cricket, so I put the parentheses to state basically that MY cricket refused to be like Jiminy. It's all a joke..mostly exaggerated and mostly flat out lies.

Also, the pink elephant line..that's the first immediate reference to Fight Club..one of the first sentences in that book/movie is something like "..when you have a gun between your teeth, you speak only in vowels..."
The other references were "Jack's broken heart" and if you wanted to take it that way, Brad Pitt.

Thank you again, and as I said, I will very soon be checking out some of your writing.

JHall

JHall,

Oooh, hahaha. I guess that's probably why I didn't understand it...

I enjoyed reading your stuff. I keep an eye out for anything new you post.

-Maggie