Flash Fiction Friday No. 4: Elephants never forget

Challenge: This sentence - The elephant found me. Bonus points for using the phrase: stinky smelly stenchuous odoriferous elephant dung.


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Elephants never forget

They say that elephants never forget.
They know what they are talking about.

It was a job. I mean, I needed to work and there weren't too many places that would take an ex-druggie ex-con. But there was the zoo and they needed help.

So, I applied. I was thinking I would be working in the office - after all, I participated in the prison job training program and learned to type (okay, "keyboard") and got pretty good at MS Word and Excel and all. But, no. It was manual labor for me.

Specifically, the cleanup crew.

Yeah, that's right - I was the guy with the broom. Cleaning up the messes they didn't want the public to have to see.

Can I just say one thing? Stinky smelly stenchuous odoriferous elephant dung.

You have no idea how much those things can poop. And pee. I'm talking a flood of Biblical proportions.

And I was the one cleaning it up.

So, I got the bright idea to feed them a little supplement - you know, like when a human gets the runs. It didn't work out. I got fired (of course). My parole officer wasn't amused. I can't find another job.

But that's the least of my worries.

I've been having these dreams. I'll be walking down the street, turn around and there's one of the elephants from the zoo. They follow me in my dreams until I turn a corner and walk into a dead-end alley.

I know these streets pretty well from all that job-hunting, and there aren't any dead-end alleys where I've been, but there are in my dreams. I don't want to think about what happens next.

So, here I am, just walkin' down the street and I turn around ... nothing. There is no elephant. But I can feel my dream creeping up on me. So, I go around a corner and - you guessed it.

The elephant found me.