The Woznowski Elephant
By Tricia Lowther
Nadia glances anxiously around the waiting room. Everyone looks serene. No one has acknowledged the elephant that followed Igor Woznowski in through the double doors. It heads for the yucca plant in the corner, tears off a large leaf and chews nonchalantly.
Two seats away from Nadia, Fred Jones hawks up a glob of phlegm and spits into a tissue. Across the room, Tom Faraday smirks. Maureen Darling purses her lips and gives her celebrity gossip mag a disapproving shake.
Nadia works in the village newsagents. She knows the names and reading habits of everyone sat on the hard vinyl chairs around the edges of the room. Fred’s a Sun man, Tom gets the local paper delivered, Maureen takes the Daily Hate, and Igor Woznowski buys The New European. He has a copy with him, which he opens and begins to read. The headline links a rise in hate crimes to Brexit.
The elephant arches it’s tail and drops four steaming balls of dung onto the pile of magazines on the side table. On the cover of Hello! Magazine, Donald Trump has become a literal shithead. Did Maureen scrunch her nose? Nadia stares, but Maureen’s eyes flick back to her rag.
“Maureen Darling?” The receptionist, who commutes to work from the city and whose reading habits are therefore unknown to Nadia, although she suspects she’s a Marie-Claire fan, tells Maureen the doctor is ready to see her. Maureen stands. She edges past the elephant’s arse with dignity, and drops her magazine discreetly over a large turd before entering the surgery.
Twenty minutes of sniffs, snorts, sighs and one ear-splitting trumpet later, Maureen reappears.
The receptionist eyes Nadia. “Nadia Shahid?”
Nadia gets up, shoulders back, feeds a banana to her own elephant, and crosses the room.
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Tricia Lowther grew up in Liverpool, England. Her flash fiction, short stories and poetry have won or been placed in several competitions and been included in magazines, websites and anthologies such as Writer’s Forum magazine, Mslexia and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She's had non-fiction published widely, including in The Guardian, New Republic and Ms Magazine. Tricia was an award winner in the UK's Creative Future Literary Awards 2017.
