As the sun rises, she squeezes the circus yellow sponge over her giant pail and climbs the 30-foot ladder resting against the elephant’s side. The elephant is perfectly still. Everything is perfectly still. On the other side, her companion hasn’t shown yet. Every day, she washes one side, and he washes the other. They miss each other sometimes, but the elephant gets washed every day; she might be half clean by noon, fully clean by dinnertime, then dirty again every morning. They live in different time zones. This is only natural.
The soap washes out the wrinkles so that the elephant’s skin is bone-smooth. She makes huge circles with the sponge. She can hear her breath, working harder. The soapy lavender water spills over her fingers. Her ring glistens in the sun, which is higher than the birch trees now. She wonders if he’ll come by this morning.
It’s been three days.
The sky pierces blue.
The Ferris wheel behind her begins its daily spin, its colors gain ground. Children scream with delight and fear. The elephant lifts one foot, then the other.
On the other side, she hears the clanking of the handle against the pail, the shaking of the ladder.
“The big girl is so dusty today!” he says. She can tell he’s about the height where she is, on the other side of 30,000 pounds of flesh. She lays her palm flat on the elephant skin.
“Yes! I know!” she says. “I’ve been here since sun-up.”
“Late night for me. I’ve had a long day already.”
He sings, he whistles.
She’s never seen his face, but she imagines it.
“This new soap smells so good,” she says. “Like a bath.”
“Oh, yeah. You know she’s loving this.”
She gets back to washing. Cirrus clouds morph to cumulus. She’ll have to go soon. She smells popcorn, hears a laugh track in a movie somewhere.
She wants to wash around the elephant’s eye before she gets to the legs and feet. No matter how much of a rush she’s in, the eye is important. There are flies, and what’s good about the lavender soap is that it repels them. She uses a cotton swab to apply a thin line just below the eye. You can’t be too careful. The eye’s orange orb is huge and still. She sees her white t-shirt in the reflection.
“I’m so glad we do this together,” he says. “It helps me.”
The elephant’s eye shifts toward the sound of his voice.
“Me, too,” she says. She kisses the bumpy skin of her eyelid.
Her husband’s coffee wafts over on a cloud of air.
“I need to go.”
“I understand,” he says.
She tends to the elephant’s legs and feet. In between toes. The bottom of his ladder is on the other side, just there, next to his giant pail like hers. It could be days before she’s with him again.
She lets the sponge drop in the bucket and hears children cry out behind her. Under the elephant, the sun is blocked entirely. Dust gets in between her toes. It’s colder, too, under here. By the time she gets to the meridian, the exact middle of the elephant, her body has gone through three time zones and is shaking and warm.
His silver ladder jostles. His worn leather shoes, his blue worker pants.
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Cheryl Pappas's stories have been published in Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. “Tending the Elephant” appears in her forthcoming collection The Clarity of Hunger (Word West Press, September 2021), which can be preordered here. You can find her on Twitter at @fabulistpappas.