By Maddie King
We wildebeests have a front-yard jungle. Summer feeds it, makes it wild. Taming it is the same as Ma yanking at knots in our hair with crag-tooth combs—useless. We live by this: less clean, more carnage. We tear up weeds in our fists; we whack at the underbrush with sticks pretending they’re machetes. We whack at each other too, for war—only when we share an enemy, do we four make an army.
One weed grows taller than the rest— it’s its own universe, growing its own shade. Ma watches as it shoots up higher and higher and marks its growth with a measuring tape. Each week is cause for alarm, as the plant sways past the window, past the roof, past the chimney, even. She calls it the elephant plant, and insists its seed came from Africa, on the wings of a migratory bird, because what else could explain the thickness of its trunk, the breadth of its ear-shaped leaves? She squints up at the sun, and worries. What are we going to do about this? Our father has no opinion.
We four worship the elephant plant. We play Wichita Indian, dancing ‘round the totem pole, we batter our hands over our mouths to make boa boa boa, we play Jack the Giant Slayer— yet since we’re small enough to climb the beanstalk, but too chicken-shit to, we just slump like flour under its shade. Looking up, every leaf is a different state in the U-S-of-A: A-la-ba-ma, Ar-kan-sas…We joke that the plant is our father standing over us like when we were babies, to shield us from the sun. But plants are girls, ain’t they? Trees are boys. That’s how it is. The plant is Ma. A bitch, one of us says, but I won’t say who. The neighbors think we’re up to something. We’re growing something nasty. Like we’re even trying to, lady. Yeah! Like we’re even trying. We stick our thumbs under our eyes and pull. Get lost, lady. Yeah! Get lost, get lost, get lost…
But strangely, we don’t chase the men, who come to kill the elephant plant. We welcome them like wildebeests do: with mighty thrusts of our bush-wild heads. We marvel at their chainsaw’s shiny teeth, nip at the heels of their stomping-shoes; it takes a village to kill an elephant, it seems. We scream “timber!”—as the plant pitches forward. We scatter when it hits the ground, but come back to pose, victorious over its corpse. We four conquerors; We four giants!
Ma thumps dinner down on the table. Then, she goes to bed. Our father doesn’t notice. It’s hot tonight, and we’re restless. We chew slowly, like we forgot we had teeth. We’re just eight darting eyes on a checker board—we hardly know ourselves who will make the move. We are the pitch-black seeds. Thwack—I kick our father’s shin under the table.
We bad.
One day, a sprout comes out of the earth where the elephant plant was. Then it shoots up like a rocket. We holler at it to help it up, we batter our chests. We race home from school in the afternoon to see if grown since morning. It has! We grow, and the plant grows— so I wonder:
when we lay down to rest, will it too?