Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [3]
He took off his sneakers and socks, then peeled off his shirt and carefully wrapped his phone inside it. He tucked the bundle in a dry crevice of a fairly large boulder. Maybe once he got down to where the tide had receded, he’d even be brave enough to swim. (Though it didn’t look as if anyone else was even thinking about going near the foamy, churning water.)
At the first bright algae-green tidal pool he came to, Jack picked up a snail and examined its shell. Then he crouched, preparing to pick up a crab.
“It’ll pinch you.”
Jack looked up. The Frisbee kid and his sister had come up beside him.
“Not if I pick it up from behind,” said Jack. He carefully positioned his fingers on the back of the crab’s shell.
The boy’s sister squealed as Jack lifted the crab into the air. It waved its pincers frantically.
“He’s so big!” said the girl. “Isn’t he, Aiden?”
Used to be huge until the Elephant Child shrank it, thought Jack, remembering a story his mother had told him.
Eventually, Jack let the crab go, and without saying a word, he and Aiden leaped from one slippery rock to the next toward the water, while Aiden’s sister wandered back toward her parents. They dipped their feet into the freezing-cold sea until Aiden’s parents called them away from the dangerous surf, and then they whipped seaweed at each other’s legs instead.
Jack imagined his mother standing on the shore, watching, smiling at their foolishness.
He started to ask Aiden if he wanted to build a castle out of the rocks, when Aiden’s father called down to say they were leaving.
“Are you staying at the campground?” he asked instead.
Aiden nodded.
“Me too,” Jack said.
“Maybe we’ll see you at the ranger’s talk tonight,” Aiden replied, then ran to catch up with his parents.
Jack watched Aiden’s family gather their things and walk away together. Aiden’s mom draped her arm over Aiden’s shoulder. Jack walked over to his shirt and checked his phone, praying for a message.
Nothing.
He scanned the beach one more time, hoping to see her face.
No such luck.
It’s OK, he told himself, tucking his phone back into his pocket. It hasn’t been that long. He looked down at the rocks on the beach, the rocks that only an hour or so ago had been almost completely underwater. As he looked at them now, he saw something: a bird’s-eye view of elephants, a whole herd of them. The smooth, darker rocks were grayish brown, some with speckles. One particularly rounded rock looked just like the back of the leader. That rock called to him.
Jack climbed back down and lay upon its warm surface.
He remembered the first time his mother had taken him to see an elephant. He had been really little, no older than four. They’d been at a circus, and he’d hated it — hated the chaotic music, the sudden snap of the ringmaster’s whip, the diamond-eyed clowns. So she’d carried him away from all that and into another tent, a tent where the most enormous animal he’d ever seen stood only a few feet away. Jack had whimpered and buried his face in his mother’s neck, but he couldn’t resist peeking at the huge creature. And then the elephant had reached toward him with her trunk, reached toward him and tapped him on the shoulder. He’d squealed and plunged back under the cover of his mother’s chin. But the elephant had tapped him again, and kept on tapping him till he lifted his head and looked over at her. Slowly, slowly, she’d reached out her trunk again and touched his cheek. Jack remembered giggling, remembered feeling as if the elephant tent were the safest place in the world.
Jack lay facedown on that rock until he’d pulled every last bit of heat from it, and then he meandered back to the campground. He strolled past the wooden registration hut, with its pointy roof and welcoming porch (no Prius in the parking lot), past the signs below towering trees that directed drivers to the proper loop in the thick, scrubby woods, past the entrance to the outdoor amphitheater, to A-loop. He decided to take the long way around the circle. He told himself that if he was extra patient, if