The rest of my herd would laugh to hear it now, but when I was young, I wanted to be a mammoth. My world was small then. No mountains or rivers or great plains of grasses. I didn’t know about the wild elephants, how we were making our homes in the forgotten parts of America. I knew the circus. I knew Dolly. I knew how to read.

The best reading material came from the clowns. It was easy to steal stacks of National Geographic from those drunks. Even now, I remember the picture of the mammoth: little ears and a high forehead. It reminded me of Dolly only the mammoth was covered with wool like a bison. The mammoths all died a long time ago, but the land still remembers them. There are trees that still grow fruit only the mammoths could reach. There are plants whose seeds have been spread for miles by those wooly steps. It did not seem fair that Dolly and me had to travel by train.

I met my first wild girl in Colorado. We were supposed to perform for some folks in Colorado Springs, but a landslide had swallowed the train tracks. It took ages to clear the way. Eventually, the small men let Dolly and me out for a drink. That part of the track ran along the bottom of a gulch, so they did not have to worry about our running.

All our other tours had been small circles of the Midwest and South. It was familiar ground for the brothers who ran our circus. Now, we were testing our might with a grand circuit of the West. I had never seen mountains before, all sharp and snowy. It was the first time I’d felt small in a long time.

Dolly sighed through her trunk. Thank god we are not staying here.

Isn’t it nice to see something new? I tried. Beside the tracks, a green river foamed and frothed.

Dolly shivered. I bent down to drink and cold crawled up my trunk. I thought of snow and sheets of ice, warm wool. When I looked up, the wild girl was on the other side of the water. At first, I thought she was the mammoth from the magazine. Then, she unfurled the petals of her ears and I saw that she was like me, except no one trimmed her tusks or painted her toes. Chunks of red earth clung to her sides and dust caked her face. She waded into the water and I held my breath. The current sputtered around her, but she remained steady. I did not know if elephants could float. At the time, it seemed so unlikely.

In the water, the mess of dirt melted away and I saw that the wild girl was not older than me or Dolly.

You should join me. It is so nice to finally be clean.

Her voice was clear above the water. My own skin itched with grime and soot. My last bath was in Chicago, a quick spraydown to clear away the paint I’d worn to look like a tiger.

I let my foot creep into the water. The current pulled. Thrill churned in my gut and I put another foot in the river. Warm water sprayed me between the eyes, smelling of juniper berries and cottonwood leaves. I realized it had come from the inside of the wild girl’s mouth.

How did you get here? I asked.

Her laugh was a clean, foamy sound. I was born here.

The magazine had said nothing about wild elephants on this land, but you humans so rarely tell the whole story. The wild girl sank deeper into the foam and then burst up again. I wanted to press my trunk into her neck, feel the current between my legs.

Dolly’s trunk touched my shoulder and I flinched. Sometimes I felt like she could reach into my brain and see exactly what I was thinking.

 You don’t know how to swim. Her voice was small and unsteady.

This was probably true. Red muck sucked on my feet. It seemed that nothing in this land had ever wanted me so badly as that river, but the train whistle was sounding and the brothers were coming. I dragged myself up the river bank. The wild girl’s voice followed us in the train, for a few miles at least. I wondered if Dolly heard her too.

You don’t need that snake. You could walk. You could walk anywhere you want to go.

In Colorado Springs, a boy used a shoe brush to clean the mud off my foot and I wanted to kick him.

*

Performances were harder after that. I dreamed of fresh leaves and frost. My job was to toss rotten pumpkins through hoops that were held by a series of dangling small women. It was not hard, though the pumpkins often smelled of mold and vinegar. I received a regular wage of brown hay and dried corn. I was rarely punished.

The brothers trusted Dolly more. She could stand on her hind legs for sixty seconds without shaking. During this show, she took the hat off of a rich gentleman and gave it to a clown. She could shoot a peanut out of her trunk and have it land in a child’s lap. The brothers always played these off like accidents, as if it didn’t take weeks and bushels of apples and cracks of whips to drill it into Dolly.

The crowd loved her best. They gave her bananas and peanuts and roses. Once, I took a trunkful of popcorn from a boy in the crowd and he burst into tears. I think there was something wrong with my face. Perhaps, it was the curve of my tusks, though they were trimmed short in those days. Dolly never grew tusks. It is hard to know what frightens you folks.

A few years before, we’d tried to expand my repertoire. The brothers put music on the gramophone. I shuffled in place. Various small women tried to perform acrobatics on my back. I shook them off. These performances made me feel so awkward. The low ceilings of the train cars, the tight circle of the tent, the small women clinging to my neck, even the red welts ringing my ankles: there was no place to escape my bigness.

Dolly moved like water. That was not a performance. Even when we were alone, she had an ease with herself. I could watch her swat flies with her trunk for hours.

The only thing I had on Dolly was reading. And really, that was not so useful. It started with our names, printed on every poster. I had never called Dolly by that name until I read it. In turn, she had never called me Daisy until I told her it was my name. You may wonder what we called each other before that, but we had never had any use for names. When there are only two of your kind, you are always speaking to each other.

The rest I picked up from scraps of newspaper that made up our bedding. At first it was only pattern recognition: D-O-L-L-Y under the beautiful elephant, D-A-I-S-Y under the ugly one. It took me a while to understand that the letter corresponded to sounds. We have sounds too, of course, and I can fit them onto your letters, but I don’t think they match up to your sounds. Once, I tried to say a word to one of the small men. It was only two letters, but whatever came out of my mouth fell apart before reaching him. Your voices, too, always sound animal to me.

Instead, I read road signs and stole magazines. Each new word was a wonder. Once, in Madison, I read a word spelled out in twinkling bulbs: Orpheum. I did not know the meaning of half the words I read, but it was nice to hold them in my mind.

After Colorado, we continued south. In Santa Fe, the tent was so full of cigar smoke that I could not see my targets. The pumpkin cracked open on the head of the angriest clown. He peeled a wet chunk from his face and held it above his head like a threat.

It is so hard to read the emotions of humans. Your faces are like tiny newsprint. Sometimes, I messed up and there was nothing. The brothers’ faces were calm and their skin was pale. Sometimes they looked exactly the same and I got the hook or the whip. I spent years trying to hear the difference between crying and laughing, but it was only your tears that told me.

With all his might, the clown chucked the pumpkin back to me. Somehow, it ended up in my trunk. I did not realize I knew how to catch things. There was nowhere else to hide it, so I put the chunk in my mouth. I was not trying to be funny.

The silence broke into a big, wild thing. There were whistles and laughs and cheers. It drove out the smoke. Applause pressed against me until I felt small and dense. The pumpkin slid down my throat, soft and almost sweet.

That night, Dolly and I lay on the warm earth. There were a few more performances before we had to move on.

It was a good save with the pumpkin, she told me. You almost looked like a real performer.

Heat spread down the back of my neck, but I pretended I did not understand her. That’s what you had to do with Dolly. You could not give her the satisfaction.

She was probably not my sister, although that was what the brothers put on our posters. I had few memories before the circus: citrus and cinnamon and soil so wet it would swallow you. Dolly insisted she only remembered this: the trains, the tents, the small people, the ropes.

When we were younger, there was a third elephant. This was before I could read, so I never learned what she was called. She taught us everything that the brothers could not.

When the train is moving, keep your weight over your front feet so you do not fall.

Eat only the plants you know. Do not just rely on what they give you.

Outside of an amusement park in Ohio, she fed us crabapples from a scraggly tree.

It is a big country, she said. You will see more of it than most humans. Be glad you are not stuck in a zoo.

The apples tasted alive: sour and sweet and bitter. I am not sure if she was our mother.

*

In Los Angeles, Dolly slipped. Instead of placing the hat in the clown’s left hand, she put it in his right. It was nothing more. She met all her other cues. She danced on beat. She found the light, but still I felt a dirty flush of joy in my gut. She had never slipped up before.

Afterwards, Dolly tucked herself in the corner of our car and refused to eat. It bothered me, the way she made herself so small. I tried to coax her out. There is a persimmon tree near the tracks.

You go. I feel sick.

It does not matter, I said. The world is so much bigger than this. If the hat goes in the left hand or the right, people will still cheer.

You only say that to make yourself feel better, she said. If this does not matter, you do not have to feel embarrassed by your errors.

I was perfect tonight.

You toss pumpkins.

Alone at the persimmon tree, I ate til my teeth hurt. No one stopped me. I was not the beautiful elephant. I was not the talented sister. Probably, a monkey could have done my job.

The tree quaked as I took more and more of its fruit. It must have known that I was not a real animal. I did not sleep under stars or drink from streams. I could not match the calls of birds to their feathers. Instead of spreading the tree’s seeds to new and exciting places, I would shit them out in the corner of our train car and a small man would shovel them up and toss it all in the train’s furnace.

When I left, only the smallest, most bitter fruit remained. Sticky juice rolled down my chin and neck, stuck to my feet. I held one intact fruit in my trunk. In our car, Dolly was pretending to be asleep, so I placed the golden fruit in the curve of her trunk.

I woke up in San Francisco with hay clinging to my body. Flies coated Dolly’s persimmon.

She was already outside, washing in a trough. The morning sun shone blue and silver on her flanks.

You smell like rot, she said.

The performances in San Francisco were so ordinary, I do not remember a thing.

*

After that, Dolly kept slipping. In Portland, she turned clockwise instead of counter-clockwise, almost walking into the tent pole. It would have been funny, if she could just let things go, if the brothers could let her be. Instead, they kept her up, hooks drawing red from her hind legs. She was so calloused there, the small men had to push very hard to break her skin. I could see their little muscles shake with the effort.

Even after the punishments, Dolly’s stress would not let her sleep. In a moving train, there are lots of noises: the churning wheels, the steaming whistle, the belches and snores of small men. Dolly’s voice joined the chorus.

Balance to left turn no right turn cross to the audience carry the girl right turn

No matter how I folded my ears, I could still hear her.

In Seattle, she lost the beat of the music and stepped on an acrobat’s foot. The band played louder as the wailing, sequined creature was carried away. Dolly returned to her dance as if nothing had happened, but there was no joy in it. After, the small men tied her legs together with rope. She had to take small steps in order to get anywhere. It is hard to watch such a big thing move like that.

It’s only the ties they use on the horses. Why don’t you break it? I asked.

Don’t be silly. You don’t know how much it would hurt.

We had a break after that, a long stretch of travel. Green hills and brown fields slurred past our train car. Dolly gave up her verbal rehearsals. There were no signs in this part of the country, no roads. I read the yellowed newspapers that coated our floor, but soon the little letters made me dizzy.

After days of silence, Dolly said, I think that wild girl cursed me.

I choked back a laugh. Why would she do that?

She is jealous. Her voice was short and barbed.

Of you?

It must be horrible to be all alone like that.

Heat rose in my cheeks, embarrassment but also anger. I did not know that I mattered to her. It hurt that it took so many years to say something like that. She had let me grow up thinking she wouldn’t miss me. It had made it easier to imagine leaving, to dream of mammoths and glaciers and open sky. Now, what was I supposed to dream of?

I said. Maybe you should wash yourself.

Dolly’s face hardened. I am perfectly clean.

Maybe, there is a stink on your soul. That is why you have been slipping.

I did not want to be missed. I wanted to be like the wild girl, alone in the mountains.

I turned back to a piece of newsprint, something about feral horses in Nevada. I read aloud for good measure. Dolly hated when I tried to make human words fit into our language, but her ears were too small to block my voice.

*

The next feral elephants were outside of Sioux Falls. I heard them long before I saw them: a low, full sound. Elephant voices can travel like that. The gaps in our walls revealed only rolling prairie, but the sound grew louder, fuller. There must have been a whole herd of them. I felt something dense and small swell in my chest. These could be our folks. This could be our chance. I took a deep breath, ready to call out to them, but the train shuddered to a stop. I fell into Dolly’s side. Our water crashed on our backs. The shit in the corner splattered against the far wall.

Dolly groaned and I quickly slid off her. Her skin was warm and rough. The sound of the herd became one jagged wail. I took another deep breath. If we could hear them, they could certainly hear us.

Please do not. Dolly’s legs were tucked under her belly and her trunk was curled under chin. Her whole body was pressed into the far corner of the car. You do not know what they want.

I stayed quiet, but only because I had already been cruel about the curse. I did not want her to really hate me, especially while we were still locked together.

We did not move for hours. The feral elephants grew either louder or more numerous. Meanwhile, Dolly filled the car with her fear: anxious trunk tapping against her toes; sour breath crawling up my trunk and down my throat. The sounds, the smells were so heavy on me I thought my skull would break. I pressed against our door and found the latch broken.

Outside, the sky was an unbroken blue. Gusts of wind brought fresh cool air. A thicket of yellow flowers tickled my belly. When I bit into one, it tasted like butter.

You should not be so careless. Dolly was still in the car, stretched out as much as she could with her ropes. You do not know these plants.

I brought her a blossom. You would love it.

Can you see the wild ones?

A few yards beyond the engine was a massive heap of leather. When I squinted, the pile took the shape of four limbs, a head, a trunk. I felt an icy touch on the back of my neck. Three living elephants stood around the body. They had the most beautiful curving tusks I had ever seen.

I think they are boys. I said. And one of them is dead. We must have run into him.

I could have guessed all that.

Then why ask? I did not say.

We had seen a dead elephant before, but never a male one. Dolly stuck her head out of the cart and, finding she could see nothing, shuffled out.

Other folks crept out of their own jostled cars: acrobats, clowns, small women, white horses, a tiger, a bear, a few llamas, some very agile dogs, the conductor, the engineer, the keepers, the trainers and the brothers.

No one spoke as the wild boys prodded their dead brother. They kicked up dirt and shook their heads. They wailed with all their lungs. It was odd to watch their sorrow take over their bodies. If any of us were ever scared or embarrassed or angry, we had to hold that in our stomachs so the audience never knew.

When the older elephant died, Dolly stopped performing. We were wintering down in Sarasota. She would pace the wet grass, repeating the lessons of that old lady. Drink only running water. Clean behind your ears. Keep your movements slow and deliberate.

The brothers tried everything. They took away her food. They whipped her. They kept her penned in all day so that she could only turn in circles. It made me nauseous to watch her. That is when I took up reading in earnest, when I put sounds to your letters. I wanted something to distract me from Dolly’s sorrow. Still, I saw how her skin drooped off her shoulders and belly. I had not realized how big we had grown until I saw Dolly shrink.

Soon, the brothers turned their attention to me. They placed boxes and balls before me, harnesses around my neck, but I did not understand what they wanted. My ankles grew warm and red with welts. I was not trying to be difficult, but I was so used to the shadow of the big elephant, the warmth of Dolly. Alone, the spotlight made me dizzy.

It was the orange tree, ten paces outside the gate of our camp, that saved both of us. You must understand how hard discretion is for a creature of my size. It took me days to work up the courage to approach the tree. In the end, I tucked four oranges into my trunk and brought them to Dolly.

I thought you might be hungry. It sounded stupid in my little voice.

She used her trunk to place one fruit between her teeth. I worried she had forgotten how to chew, that the fruit would simply fall out her mouth, unscathed. She would never eat again. I would have to be the star elephant. There would be no one to talk to, no one to pet my ears with their trunk, no one to teach me anything. I’d have only the inky alphabet to keep my thoughts from going stale.

Then, I felt the spray of juice on my face. It smelled sweet and sour and like the inside of Dolly’s mouth. Over the next few months, she returned to her body. I never had to perform alone again.

On the prairie, the wind picked up. Dolly pressed into my side. The wild boys began to stomp and trumpet. Dust rose around them. Their words came out in twisted bursts.

Get up. Get up. Get up. Get up.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I wished I could have let myself be that big.

One of the brothers grabbed something from his waist.

A gunshot split the air.

The wild boys scattered, unhit.

We stopped being an audience.

The men used their little bodies to swarm the elephant corpse. Two acrobats began sawing at the tusks. Others used pocket knives to hack away the skin. The dogs howled. The bear and the tiger roared. Everyone pulled and strained on their leads.

I felt a sour fear at the back of my throat. The article had mentioned this, ancient humans hunting mammoths, but I had not let myself imagine it. Dolly’s trunk was warm and soft against my neck. She was trying not to smell it.

Nothing tethered us to this train. Dolly’s ropes had grown moldy during the ride. It would be nothing to break them. The wild boys had not invited us, but that did not mean we were not welcome. Mammoths used to travel in great herds.

We could go, too. I said.

But Dolly was already fleeing to the train, along with the horses and the llamas and the small women. This was my chance to leave her. I could run and find those boys and never think about her again, eat flowers and swim in streams, climb mountains wherever they were. I had never spoken to a boy before. Maybe they were cruel. Maybe they would want something from me. I had seen the way the brothers grabbed the small women by the wrist and pulled them close to their bodies. I did not want to feel some strange trunk around my neck. Then, of course, there was the gun.

I let my fear hold me there, watching over that boy. It is good to remember the animal in you humans. Beneath your clothes and trains and letters and whips and light bulbs is teeth. I was the civil one, the performer. While they whooped and hollered, my body went stone still. I floated above it. I saw everything.

The sun fell. Someone built a fire and they began roasting the meat. In all my years, I have never smelled anything so horrible: like wild grass, like fat, like buffalo chips, like blood. They tossed white sinew and purple organs to the sharp-toothed animals. What could not be roasted, was salted and dried. Men from town arrived with their own brown horses. They weighed down their carts with wet hunks of flesh. In the firelight, their arms sparkled as if they were clean. By sunrise, the wild boy was only a stack of bones and leather, neatly rotting by the side of the tracks. It was so much less than I was expecting.

*

It turned out that the wild boy had injured the train too. They had to send us a new engine from Sioux Falls. We waited another day before anything happened.

We are never getting out of here, Dolly said, as the sky darkened again. Her mouth was full of green leaves and yellow flowers.

The air was warm, but I could not shake the icy feeling on my neck. I had not come all the way back to my body after seeing what they did to the wild boy. Do you ever chew your food? Or do you just swallow it whole like a snake?

Dolly scoffed, but kept eating. The sky was every color but green. The humans gathered around fires according to their kind: acrobats with acrobats, clowns with clowns, small women all together. Maybe, I could make her come with me.

It would not be so terrible, I said, to leave. Folks like us do it all the time.

Dolly sighed. We do not belong out there.

We do, though. I was louder than I meant. The other animals quieted. Some turned away from their fires. I have been reading. It is like the horses in Nevada. Folks like us used to fill this whole country. We used to eat from all the trees.

Daisy. She rarely used my name. A brother crept closer, hand to his hip. You cannot trust everything those humans tell you.

She sounded like the elephant who raised us, patient and steady. I had never thought that Dolly was older than me, but it could be true.

There is no herd waiting for you. She continued. The humans would never let us get so big.

In the darkness, the train resembled a huge glowing snake.

I am so tired. I said, but I had done nothing all day.

Then, lie down.

The grass was cool and soft. Dolly stroked her trunk along my forehead, behind my ears. You may be surprised to learn that elephants have lullabies. They are old and simple, but I will not pretend to fit them into human words.

*

We left for Minneapolis the next day. Dolly let me sleep against her in the train. We were like children again. Or at least I was.

The show in Minneapolis was our grand finale. If all went well, we would continue on to the brothers’ home in Wisconsin to eat wild plums and train a new show.

We set up on an island in the middle of the Mississippi. The small women tied the tassels of their costumes while the clowns smeared white paint on each other’s faces. The acrobats stretched their muscled limbs. A brother painted a new sign. It read: MAMMOTH JERKY 5 CENTS.

That was my punishment, then, for reading. I had to know what you humans would do to us. I had to see that beautiful word, mammoth, made ugly. That wild boy would never be a mammoth and neither would I. We would never belong here.

The sequined headdress itched under my chin. The decorative saddle smelled moldy. Dolly knelt to allow the small woman to make adjustments.

How are you feeling? I asked her, probably for the first time.

How I always feel.

Every bench of the stands was packed with people. Several stood in the aisles and a crowd gathered outside the canvas trying to catch a glimpse. Every show started with the brother, probably the oldest one, making a speech. His voice, as ever, sounded garbled and soft to my ears, whatever letters made up his words refused to connect to my ears. I have no idea what he told the crowd.

The show itself was perfect. The acrobats flew through the air like birds. The small women sparkled. The clowns pulled giggles from every mouth in the crowd. Sometimes, you humans can be so good.

The pumpkins were finally beautiful and sturdy. I hit my marks easily. Dolly made all her movements look fresh and new. Where she had walked, she now sauntered. She held a small woman in her trunk in a way that made them each look delicate and pretty. Maybe she had been cursed.

I did not feel terrible. Maybe I could even feel good. This could be a life. I could enjoy the effort of work, the satisfaction of a job well done. I could watch Dolly be beautiful night after night. It had been enough for the older elephant. It was enough for Dolly. I was certainly no better than them.

Dolly and me ended each performance at the center of the ring, our trunks intertwined. It was awkward to be so close, so I usually avoided looking at her face. That night, though, I stared at her. She had this spray of pink skin between her eyes. It reminded me of a peach.

What did my face look like to her? I thought I would ask her after the show.

The sound of applause made the tent feel twice as full. People threw peanuts and roses. I tried not to flinch. Maybe, I could learn to love these human treats, like Dolly seemed to. The flowers were pretty enough, though I never understood why you all preferred the thorny ones. I could learn to like peanuts if I ate enough. I could belong here.

As the applause reached its peak, something sticky landed between Dolly’s eyes.

Fear iced up my spine. I thought of the two words: MAMMOTH JERKY. She had not seen the men take apart that wild boy and she could not read the sign. It was possible she did not know where this meat came from. I tried to pull it off of her, but her trunk held mine in place.

Perhaps, it was the smell. Beneath the salt and smoke, something so like her, so like me. The wail started in her belly, low and warm. When it burst from her mouth, it was jagged and sizzling. I was so close, I could taste it.

The llamas dropped to the ground. The acrobats scurried up their ropes. Dolly let go of my trunk and began a whole new show.

Even her rage was beautiful. People held their breath as she shook. She churned up the black earth. She threw off her headdress. She made wind with her stomps and shouts. Her words were so sharp and wild that I could not pretend to make them fit into human letters.

She tore the center pole from the ground and tossed it at the brothers. I heard the crunch of small bones, the cry of small, glassy voices. No one could say she was not wild now.

I was there too, though it is hard to remember what my body did. I felt huge and weightless, a cloud hanging low in the sky. Below me, everything happened. The tiger roared. The bear growled. Bodies dove for the water. The canvas rippled as Dolly raged beneath it. I was somewhere at the edge, still as dead earth. This is all I had ever wanted her to be, a real animal, and yet I could not join her. Fear kept me rooted, kept me tame. I had never been as brave as her.

The first pistol shot missed her, but the sound brought me back into my body. My pulse roared through my tongue and my eyes and my feet. Every inch of my skin burned. Dolly’s wails filled my ears like water.

This is how they killed our mother. She had never been bad, never been punished, but once a train car shifted and sliced deep into her ankle. For days, she could not move, could not stop wailing. It was a bullet that made her quiet. They held Dolly and me in place with rope so we had to watch it, so we could learn how every sentence ended.

You may hate that I left Dolly. In all that commotion, I did not even see what became of her. It is not what you would have done to your sister, but you are so numerous. When there is only one person like you in your life, they become everything: rival, soulmate, sister, mother. You do not know what it is like to feel all those things for one creature.

In less breath: I did not want to watch her die.

The river felt blood-warm. The floor was sand and smooth stones. I walked for a while with my trunk sticking above the foam, but the water became too big for that.

Apparently, elephants can float. On land, soil buckled under my steps. The train groaned with my size. In water, my body was weightless. I filled my lungs and blew bubbles out of my mouth. The current pulled off the headdress and untied the saddle. My limbs stretched into the depths.

Maybe, I did not belong on the land at all. I had once read about whales. They were huge creatures who grew too big for the land and instead turned to the sea. I could follow this river to the ocean and find my folks there in the depths.

I could meet a real mother and a real sister. They would ask me where I had been and I could tell them all the wonderful stories. They would touch their fins to mine and feed me mouthfuls of little fish. I could pretend I invented Dolly and the circus and even humans. Surely, even you cannot live at the bottom of the sea.

The river grew shallow and my dream broke. Above the water, the sky was gray. An orange tongue of sun licked the horizon.

In the halflight, I thought I saw trees, so tall and still. The shoreline was rocky and I had to scramble to get out of the mud. I felt a trunk grip my own.

How did you get here, sister? The body asked me.

My heart roared. Dolly had not died. She had followed me, traced my steps. I would not have to do this alone. I could take care of her now, put my trunk in hers, sing her lullabies. We could be real animals together. She would have to forgive me.

But we had never called each other sister.

The light grew and I saw we were on a prairie. Nothing but grass and flowers for miles. The elephant who helped me up had wrinkled, pale-pink skin. The rest of them were not trees but other elephants, dozens of them: some with long tusks and some with short, some with little ears and some with big. One looked as if she had no ears at all.

The elephant beside me still held my trunk. Are you hungry?

Only then did I remember my stomach. Of course I could not live in the ocean. I did not know how to eat from the water.

She led me up the shore. Together, we ate sweet grass and spicy flowers.

I am Daisy, I said, through the food.

The pink elephant looked up at me. All the elephants stopped chewing. No sister, you are an elephant.

A current of laughter ran through the herd. Embarrassment warmed my skin. Someone pressed their trunk into my neck, but it was not Dolly.

On the horizon, the sun was a widening maw.

We should keep moving, the pale elephant said, You are welcome to join us.

Which way are you going? I asked.

She pointed away from the sun and I nodded. We flattened the prairie with our feet.