Clouds Like White Elephants
I didn't mean for this story to be so much like Hemmingway's own short fiction what-so-ever. I just started typing and by the time I neared the end, I realized what I had done. It reminded me of something I had read a long time ago in high school. Whoops, I thought. Well, I like it, and I hope Hemmingway wouldn't mind...
Clouds Like White Elephants
“So, you—urgh—wanna go get stoned and watch the bug-zapper?” I asked Prairie. A wide grin spread over her pock marked, acne covered face.
“Sounds like a plan. Go get the zapper. The extension cord is in the shed—and I’ll go get my momma’s weed.” She replied enthusiastically, as if she had been dying for me to pose the question from the minute I had arrived. And off she went with record breaking swiftness in search of her mom’s medicine. I don’t think there was anything in the earthly world that could get this girl motivated faster than the thought of a dime bag. Her mom was always nagging Prairie, saying if only she applied this motivation to her education, maybe one day she could get the both of them out of this so-called “Hell-hole.”
I dropped my blue gym bag on the concrete patio out back and made my way toward the shed. I had not even attempted to unlock the door when Prairie came rushing out of the back door of her house; the screen door was whining its hateful melody, holding the baggie above her head waving it like a mad man. It could have been my imagination or the summer heat that convinced me that she had been drooling or foaming at the mouth.
Not watching where she was going, she clumsily tripped over her big flat feet. With some miraculous luck and grace she somehow managed to tuck the baggie under her and roll into her fall. It was quite the amazing acrobatic stunt. I could not help myself from keeling over with laughter. Unlike her dazzling maneuver, she awkwardly managed to stand up into bow, and then raising her arms to the sky, baggie still clenched tightly in her fist, she said, “Tadaaaaah!” as if the stunt was premeditated. I started to clap sarcastically for the performance. Well, it was damn entertaining, I had to give her that much.
“Hey, what’s that combination on this padlock ‘gain?” I shouted.
“What-the-hell, J.B.! How come you can’t never ‘member three simple little numbers? I swear sometimes…”
“I swear every god-damned-day…” I interrupted. She smiled and crossed over to me. She shoved the goodies into my chest rather harshly and flashed me a flirtatious smile.
“Here! Hold this.”
“Ooof…” I over-exaggeratedly gasped out. She gave three quick spins of the dial clockwise, two back, and then one slow precise turn back to the right. Prairie opened the shed door and grabbed what she was looking for. I grabbed the two decaying, moldy lawn chairs that smelled of stale oil and musty lawn clippings. We then headed back toward the back porch. As she set up the zapper, I unfolded our thrones and started to make ready our “rectifier for boredom” rucksack. Good times, good times, spent getting high and watching the tiny black ignorant bugs fly close to the mystifying neon purple light. How funny we both thought it was to see the little orange sparks of blistering insects. “Hey! Didja see that-un?” and “Wow! That-un was huge!” were the typical phrases we used as the larger bugs would explode from time to time for our sick perverted pleasure.
The back porch became our own little morbid opera house. The electricity was our symphony, the zapper our stage, the frying and often exploding bugs were our tiny, insignificant actors participating in the role of their lives, as our focus of the scene came in and out between exhalations of the putrid hazy smoke coughed forward from our blackening lungs. Each little pop and fizzle was music to our ears. And it was this holy tradition that consumed many of our afternoons that summer. It was just me and my best friend on the back porch killing brain cells and watching a few insects meet their impending fiery destruction.
So we sat out back in our usual arena of insecticide. For those of you bugs about to die, we salute you. The August sun was beating down upon the earth like a mythic god’s intense vengeance. Zeus had convinced Apollo to make us mortals pay for Prometheus' actions. We were, of course, in the shade of the patio roof, but the relief was only slight. On a day like that, it was altogether impossible to escape the radiating heat. So, there we sat, as the sweat beading down the small of our backs became a constant reminder to how hot it really was. We had been participating in our habitual routine of “pass and cough” for several hours now, when the topic of conversation was shifted from the importance of door-knobs to something entirely different, to something drastically somber.
“Ya signed away your name and now you may never come back will you, J.B.?” Prairie asked in a tone that sounded more like an accusation than an inquiry. “I mean there’s gotta be better ways of trying to get money for school. What about loans? Didja ever think about ‘em?”
Her brow was furrowed in a high arch, and her reddened eyes wide with anticipation. She was struggling to keep the foul tasting smoke in her lungs as long as she could. When you live in a small town like Darby, you take what you can get as far as the selection of marijuana is concerned. And in Darby, the selection included nasty skunk weed or nastier skunk weed. But for those who have never known otherwise, it is what you grow up thinking. In Darby, we all think that all pot tastes and smells like this. It was like smoking thirty year old socks worn by a jogger who never cleaned them. The taste at first is overwhelmingly malicious, but after a year or so, you get used to the rancid flavor, and you actually start to prefer it over the other stuff.
She finally exhaled and passed it in my direction. Quite content at the time, I simply set it down on the little, square, white plastic patio table. You know the kind I am talking about. The ones you see at discounts stores like Odd Lots for about five dollars.
“Loans? Oh hell no. The first thing my daddy taught me was to never go in dept for something you can pay with cash. This here is just my chance to have someone else pay with cash.” My lawn chair complained softly beneath me as my weight shifted. “Besides, I’ll be back. What would give you any notion I wouldn’t be?”
She paused briefly, staring down at her scuffed up Keds and then solemnly looked up into my eyes and responded, “Oh, ya know… jus’ like little Mickey—he left—and ya know he never came back neither. I mean, well, it sounds like you want to go. Do ya?”
“What on earth are you babblin’ about? ‘Course I don’t wanna go. But it’s the only option I got.” I retorted. I didn’t look at her straight away. I found for some reason the rust-colored aluminum post, which securely held into the floor by concrete and connected to a long sheet of plywood for the roof, was an entirely more interesting place to study, than the sulky face of my friend.
“You jus’ like that bug there,” she said as she pointed to a tiny flying creature, which was currently at rest on the plastic table. “He’s goin’ to see all them pretty sights in the light. And sure, that light may be more attractive than the dull glow ‘round here, but sure as hell that I know you don’t believe in words like ‘honor’—you just gonna be like any ole bug flyin’ ignorantly to its death....” She then altered her tone to a scratchy and squeaky one and started to flap her arms up and down comically, as if she was imitating a rather annoying little bug. “‘Hey this ain’t nothin’ like they got out there in the rest of the yard.’ Then WHAMO!” she shouted as she clapped her hands. “It ain’t never comin’ back… Jus’ like that you’s gonna’ go out there and be another carcass on the electric field.” She directed my attention to the zapper with her finger. “Like them dead bugs plastered to the outer wall of my light show. Then how you goin to go get your education?”
Just then a rather large bug must have gotten trapped, because the sizzle went on for longer than five seconds, sporadically making large popping noises as the bug fried. It made her point that much more poignant. I frowned and it was my turn to look lengthily at my shoes. I reached to the table and picked up the ceramic bowl. Oh Great Big Hit, please make this go away… I prayed to the gods of memory-loss. I closed my eyes and inhaled. When I opened them again, the gods had failed me. I was still there with the uncomfortable air still between us. Finally I decided to answer her, in the best way I knew how.
“That ain’t gonna happen. That’s a promise…” I answered.
“A promise which you can’t possibly know you’ll keep,” she retorted. “‘Sides, aren’t you scared?”
“Shiiiiit…” I said, like that was a good enough answer.
“Don’t ‘shiit’ me. You’re a smart boy. Didja even try to get a scholarship? I mean you got high enough test scores to get into the university didn’t ya?
“Don’t you think I tried that route first, Prairie?” I said angrily. Quickly I tried to drop the subject. “Come on now, I don’t wanna’ get into this shit with you. Ya always git like this when ya’ve been smokin’ all day. Ya never let a man just set back and enjoy the good buzz he’s got goin’. ‘Sides, didn’t we ‘gree to think ‘bout trivial shit today? We said we were goin’ to treat this summer day like any other day, right? I mean come on.”
With that said she shut right up and sourly looked away. For several minutes nothing but silence hung tightly in hot the humid air. Silence, much like sweat, in the heat of summer has a way of sticking around too long. You have to wait for a breeze to pick up to evaporate the situation. She peered up into the lightly clouded sky, let out a long sigh, and pointed up to the seemingly stationary cumulus clouds overhead.
“Hey, ya see that one? It kinda looks like an elephant.” As she said this, in the corner of my eye I caught her taking a peek at me to make sure I was looking. It brought a smile to my face. “What? What the hell are you grinning at—ya damn dope?”
“Oh! Well… Hell… That don’t look like no damn elephant...” I lied.
“Gee—I dunno—what does it look like to you Joe?”
I calmly brought my eyes level with hers. “It looks kinda like an eggplant…” I said. Then the tension began to release little by little as we both started snickering. The snickering then grew into the giggles, and finally full blown maniacal laughter. It was the kind of laughter that begat laughter. We were either releasing tension, or perhaps we could have been burying it down a little further from the surface. Eventually our enthusiasm died with tears welling in our reddened eyes, and our bellies quelled with knots, she quietly stood up and started packing up our tools of summer bliss.
“I jus’ wish you hadn’t passed that damn drug test. Suppose that was like a good three weeks you wasted watching me have all the fun.” She said to me, but continuing on before I could reply. As if it were a side note for her and meant indirectly for me to hear. “Well, I suppose you didn’t have to pack much? And you’re gonna want a ride to the station?”
“Urgh—yeah—that’d be great.” I replied.
She continued to pack up the moldy lawn chairs and I went to take down the bug zapper, which smelled oddly enough like burnt hair. There was a film of toasted bugs around the electric field, and as it was disgusting, a part of me was drawn towards it. I’m sure as hell glad I’m not no damn bug… I thought to myself as I unplugged the cord. I ain’t no damn bug…
I waited idly by her beat up truck as she reshelf the equipment among their rightful places in the shed. She took her time before returning. As she was walking back, she paused and peered back up into the sky momentarily. I followed her gaze all the way to our cloud. She shook her head and muttered something that closely resembled the phrase “eggplant…”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she sighed. “You know what J.B.?”
“What?”
“You better come back. I can miss you for a couple years, but not a lifetime.”
“Hey, ya never know, I might be back before the summer begins next year. When spring rolls around next year, you just make sure that zapper is still working,” I replied and hopped into the truck. She smiled and got in alongside me and turned over the engine. We drove in silence the rest of the way to the station. Every once in awhile, I quietly trying to steal a glance at her, and I saw her do the same, but not a word was spoken till we got to the bus station. But it was nothing more than the cliché lonely goodbye. She didn’t say anything else but a tight squeeze and a “you better…” Then she climbed back into her truck and sped back down the empty highway.
If you want to read and compare our two short stories, I am providing a link here for you. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~conreys/101files/Otherfolders/Hillslikewhitepg.html I would recomend you go read his "Hills Like White Elephants", not only is it way better writing than mine, his ambiguity and divorce from the topic at hand is totally more impressive than mine. Do it! Click on the damnable link! Do it now or I'll get Jig to kick you in the nuts...
Peace out peoples,
-sib-
Clouds Like White Elephants
“So, you—urgh—wanna go get stoned and watch the bug-zapper?” I asked Prairie. A wide grin spread over her pock marked, acne covered face.
“Sounds like a plan. Go get the zapper. The extension cord is in the shed—and I’ll go get my momma’s weed.” She replied enthusiastically, as if she had been dying for me to pose the question from the minute I had arrived. And off she went with record breaking swiftness in search of her mom’s medicine. I don’t think there was anything in the earthly world that could get this girl motivated faster than the thought of a dime bag. Her mom was always nagging Prairie, saying if only she applied this motivation to her education, maybe one day she could get the both of them out of this so-called “Hell-hole.”
I dropped my blue gym bag on the concrete patio out back and made my way toward the shed. I had not even attempted to unlock the door when Prairie came rushing out of the back door of her house; the screen door was whining its hateful melody, holding the baggie above her head waving it like a mad man. It could have been my imagination or the summer heat that convinced me that she had been drooling or foaming at the mouth.
Not watching where she was going, she clumsily tripped over her big flat feet. With some miraculous luck and grace she somehow managed to tuck the baggie under her and roll into her fall. It was quite the amazing acrobatic stunt. I could not help myself from keeling over with laughter. Unlike her dazzling maneuver, she awkwardly managed to stand up into bow, and then raising her arms to the sky, baggie still clenched tightly in her fist, she said, “Tadaaaaah!” as if the stunt was premeditated. I started to clap sarcastically for the performance. Well, it was damn entertaining, I had to give her that much.
“Hey, what’s that combination on this padlock ‘gain?” I shouted.
“What-the-hell, J.B.! How come you can’t never ‘member three simple little numbers? I swear sometimes…”
“I swear every god-damned-day…” I interrupted. She smiled and crossed over to me. She shoved the goodies into my chest rather harshly and flashed me a flirtatious smile.
“Here! Hold this.”
“Ooof…” I over-exaggeratedly gasped out. She gave three quick spins of the dial clockwise, two back, and then one slow precise turn back to the right. Prairie opened the shed door and grabbed what she was looking for. I grabbed the two decaying, moldy lawn chairs that smelled of stale oil and musty lawn clippings. We then headed back toward the back porch. As she set up the zapper, I unfolded our thrones and started to make ready our “rectifier for boredom” rucksack. Good times, good times, spent getting high and watching the tiny black ignorant bugs fly close to the mystifying neon purple light. How funny we both thought it was to see the little orange sparks of blistering insects. “Hey! Didja see that-un?” and “Wow! That-un was huge!” were the typical phrases we used as the larger bugs would explode from time to time for our sick perverted pleasure.
The back porch became our own little morbid opera house. The electricity was our symphony, the zapper our stage, the frying and often exploding bugs were our tiny, insignificant actors participating in the role of their lives, as our focus of the scene came in and out between exhalations of the putrid hazy smoke coughed forward from our blackening lungs. Each little pop and fizzle was music to our ears. And it was this holy tradition that consumed many of our afternoons that summer. It was just me and my best friend on the back porch killing brain cells and watching a few insects meet their impending fiery destruction.
So we sat out back in our usual arena of insecticide. For those of you bugs about to die, we salute you. The August sun was beating down upon the earth like a mythic god’s intense vengeance. Zeus had convinced Apollo to make us mortals pay for Prometheus' actions. We were, of course, in the shade of the patio roof, but the relief was only slight. On a day like that, it was altogether impossible to escape the radiating heat. So, there we sat, as the sweat beading down the small of our backs became a constant reminder to how hot it really was. We had been participating in our habitual routine of “pass and cough” for several hours now, when the topic of conversation was shifted from the importance of door-knobs to something entirely different, to something drastically somber.
“Ya signed away your name and now you may never come back will you, J.B.?” Prairie asked in a tone that sounded more like an accusation than an inquiry. “I mean there’s gotta be better ways of trying to get money for school. What about loans? Didja ever think about ‘em?”
Her brow was furrowed in a high arch, and her reddened eyes wide with anticipation. She was struggling to keep the foul tasting smoke in her lungs as long as she could. When you live in a small town like Darby, you take what you can get as far as the selection of marijuana is concerned. And in Darby, the selection included nasty skunk weed or nastier skunk weed. But for those who have never known otherwise, it is what you grow up thinking. In Darby, we all think that all pot tastes and smells like this. It was like smoking thirty year old socks worn by a jogger who never cleaned them. The taste at first is overwhelmingly malicious, but after a year or so, you get used to the rancid flavor, and you actually start to prefer it over the other stuff.
She finally exhaled and passed it in my direction. Quite content at the time, I simply set it down on the little, square, white plastic patio table. You know the kind I am talking about. The ones you see at discounts stores like Odd Lots for about five dollars.
“Loans? Oh hell no. The first thing my daddy taught me was to never go in dept for something you can pay with cash. This here is just my chance to have someone else pay with cash.” My lawn chair complained softly beneath me as my weight shifted. “Besides, I’ll be back. What would give you any notion I wouldn’t be?”
She paused briefly, staring down at her scuffed up Keds and then solemnly looked up into my eyes and responded, “Oh, ya know… jus’ like little Mickey—he left—and ya know he never came back neither. I mean, well, it sounds like you want to go. Do ya?”
“What on earth are you babblin’ about? ‘Course I don’t wanna go. But it’s the only option I got.” I retorted. I didn’t look at her straight away. I found for some reason the rust-colored aluminum post, which securely held into the floor by concrete and connected to a long sheet of plywood for the roof, was an entirely more interesting place to study, than the sulky face of my friend.
“You jus’ like that bug there,” she said as she pointed to a tiny flying creature, which was currently at rest on the plastic table. “He’s goin’ to see all them pretty sights in the light. And sure, that light may be more attractive than the dull glow ‘round here, but sure as hell that I know you don’t believe in words like ‘honor’—you just gonna be like any ole bug flyin’ ignorantly to its death....” She then altered her tone to a scratchy and squeaky one and started to flap her arms up and down comically, as if she was imitating a rather annoying little bug. “‘Hey this ain’t nothin’ like they got out there in the rest of the yard.’ Then WHAMO!” she shouted as she clapped her hands. “It ain’t never comin’ back… Jus’ like that you’s gonna’ go out there and be another carcass on the electric field.” She directed my attention to the zapper with her finger. “Like them dead bugs plastered to the outer wall of my light show. Then how you goin to go get your education?”
Just then a rather large bug must have gotten trapped, because the sizzle went on for longer than five seconds, sporadically making large popping noises as the bug fried. It made her point that much more poignant. I frowned and it was my turn to look lengthily at my shoes. I reached to the table and picked up the ceramic bowl. Oh Great Big Hit, please make this go away… I prayed to the gods of memory-loss. I closed my eyes and inhaled. When I opened them again, the gods had failed me. I was still there with the uncomfortable air still between us. Finally I decided to answer her, in the best way I knew how.
“That ain’t gonna happen. That’s a promise…” I answered.
“A promise which you can’t possibly know you’ll keep,” she retorted. “‘Sides, aren’t you scared?”
“Shiiiiit…” I said, like that was a good enough answer.
“Don’t ‘shiit’ me. You’re a smart boy. Didja even try to get a scholarship? I mean you got high enough test scores to get into the university didn’t ya?
“Don’t you think I tried that route first, Prairie?” I said angrily. Quickly I tried to drop the subject. “Come on now, I don’t wanna’ get into this shit with you. Ya always git like this when ya’ve been smokin’ all day. Ya never let a man just set back and enjoy the good buzz he’s got goin’. ‘Sides, didn’t we ‘gree to think ‘bout trivial shit today? We said we were goin’ to treat this summer day like any other day, right? I mean come on.”
With that said she shut right up and sourly looked away. For several minutes nothing but silence hung tightly in hot the humid air. Silence, much like sweat, in the heat of summer has a way of sticking around too long. You have to wait for a breeze to pick up to evaporate the situation. She peered up into the lightly clouded sky, let out a long sigh, and pointed up to the seemingly stationary cumulus clouds overhead.
“Hey, ya see that one? It kinda looks like an elephant.” As she said this, in the corner of my eye I caught her taking a peek at me to make sure I was looking. It brought a smile to my face. “What? What the hell are you grinning at—ya damn dope?”
“Oh! Well… Hell… That don’t look like no damn elephant...” I lied.
“Gee—I dunno—what does it look like to you Joe?”
I calmly brought my eyes level with hers. “It looks kinda like an eggplant…” I said. Then the tension began to release little by little as we both started snickering. The snickering then grew into the giggles, and finally full blown maniacal laughter. It was the kind of laughter that begat laughter. We were either releasing tension, or perhaps we could have been burying it down a little further from the surface. Eventually our enthusiasm died with tears welling in our reddened eyes, and our bellies quelled with knots, she quietly stood up and started packing up our tools of summer bliss.
“I jus’ wish you hadn’t passed that damn drug test. Suppose that was like a good three weeks you wasted watching me have all the fun.” She said to me, but continuing on before I could reply. As if it were a side note for her and meant indirectly for me to hear. “Well, I suppose you didn’t have to pack much? And you’re gonna want a ride to the station?”
“Urgh—yeah—that’d be great.” I replied.
She continued to pack up the moldy lawn chairs and I went to take down the bug zapper, which smelled oddly enough like burnt hair. There was a film of toasted bugs around the electric field, and as it was disgusting, a part of me was drawn towards it. I’m sure as hell glad I’m not no damn bug… I thought to myself as I unplugged the cord. I ain’t no damn bug…
I waited idly by her beat up truck as she reshelf the equipment among their rightful places in the shed. She took her time before returning. As she was walking back, she paused and peered back up into the sky momentarily. I followed her gaze all the way to our cloud. She shook her head and muttered something that closely resembled the phrase “eggplant…”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she sighed. “You know what J.B.?”
“What?”
“You better come back. I can miss you for a couple years, but not a lifetime.”
“Hey, ya never know, I might be back before the summer begins next year. When spring rolls around next year, you just make sure that zapper is still working,” I replied and hopped into the truck. She smiled and got in alongside me and turned over the engine. We drove in silence the rest of the way to the station. Every once in awhile, I quietly trying to steal a glance at her, and I saw her do the same, but not a word was spoken till we got to the bus station. But it was nothing more than the cliché lonely goodbye. She didn’t say anything else but a tight squeeze and a “you better…” Then she climbed back into her truck and sped back down the empty highway.
If you want to read and compare our two short stories, I am providing a link here for you. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~conreys/101files/Otherfolders/Hillslikewhitepg.html I would recomend you go read his "Hills Like White Elephants", not only is it way better writing than mine, his ambiguity and divorce from the topic at hand is totally more impressive than mine. Do it! Click on the damnable link! Do it now or I'll get Jig to kick you in the nuts...
Peace out peoples,
-sib-
the Omnipotent... Everybody loves SuperInsignificantBoy wrote this at 1:27 PM
1 Feedback:
Hey there FP. I gotta tell you, I loved the short story. I have to write 2 (as you know) for school, and I keep forcing them to have major plotlines... thus defeating the purpose of a SHORT story. I like how your story made a good point, had a theme, and yet, only involved a snippet of time. Very nice.
Also, Myron Cope didn't die, he just retired. So I am okay. I think the folks in Cincy heard wrong hahaha.
Later on!
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