The Memory of an Elephant

by Alex Lasker

I remember every sight, every sound, every smell from the moment of my birth to the moment we are in now. I have no dates to mark the time by,

Every season we would return to the places where our friends had fallen and visit their bones, turning them over and over, remembering their owner, and hoping to find a life force in there somewhere. But it was always gone.

make it all the way to Nairobi, a hundred miles away. There, the shantytowns were like a hellish version of Dicken’s London, where you could disappear and either become an African Fagin, or—far more likely—never be heard from again.

There were no counselors in those days, and boys didn’t even know to reach out for help, so a good many of them sank beneath the waves, only to resurface years later with scars that they would pass on to their own sons and daughters.

It’s not exactly complicated to track a herd of elephants,

he’d survived worse, he kept telling himself; you just had to keep moving, and things around you would change soon enough.