Here is a sample from the novel The Elephant Box, the story of a part-Aboriginal boy tormented by his total recall of books. He finds comfort in his friendship with an elephant—until a circus train wreck, pandemic, and other crises drive him into the company of a girl hobo.
For the full excerpt, check out Narrative magazine, where it won first prize in a fiction contest.
By Russell Working
DURING THE WINTER TOUR of the Pacific (summer in the antipodes!), Oliver Saxe-Coburg—Encyclopedia Boy, freakshow phenom, world’s smartest kid, and purported third cousin thrice removed of King George V—could not but be aware of the epidemic of sneak-drinking on the SS Carnatic. His father was as great a transgressor as any showman aboard, judging from the fumes he brought wafting into the stateroom late at night, barking his shins and uttering very bad words as he removed his trousers in the dark while faint, rippling ovals of sea light searched him out through the portholes. By day, slyly encouraged by Mother’s smile, Ollie drew Dad’s ire when he tried to talk him out of drinking. Particularly when he cited the ALCOHOLISM entry in the Encyclopedia Americana. There is no doubt, it held, that physiologically alcohol is always a poison (vol. I, p. 348). Still, Dad and his Cossack and roughrider pals were not in the same league—nobody was—as July the elephant, who’d degenerated into a lush since the Famous Eberhard & Morrison Consolidated Railroad Show, Jungle Oddities, and Congress of Nations had sailed from Seattle in November 1917.
Even as tugboats boiled the green water and shards of log bark in Elliott Bay, and nudged the 46,328-ton Carnatic out from the pier, Major Eberhard called a meeting to warn performers, freaks, canvasmen, blacksmiths, scenery men, drivers, bally broads, and seamstresses alike that he would continue to enforce the usual rules of sobriety at sea. He was a mustached, owlishly eyebrowed Spanish War veteran, and he had clawed out a market against the Ringlings, Hagenbeck-Wallace, Sells-Floto, and other competitors through showmanship and logistical brilliance. He expected the same standards of conduct from his employees, he made clear. The clowns in particular were used to a stiff pick-me-up in the morning (impossible to police); some of the high-wire broads from countries where ladies had mustaches could throw down vodka like stevedores. Well, cry me a river! They’d signed binding contracts when they joined the circus, had they not, and he, as owner of and (he flattered himself to think) father to the company, would hold them to their word. If he caught wind of any tippling in the onboard lounges and billiards rooms, any roistering in the fleshpots of the East or the fish-reeking saloons of Vladivostok, then it’d be sayonara, Charlie.
“Out you’ll go on your ear, on your own for the passage home,” the major said.
Read on here.
The Elephant Box 