A friend of a
friend has just won the Henry Lawson Short Story Competition. Her name
is Kerri Harris. Kerri’s winning story is online,
which means that you can read it here, and I’m recommending that you do so.
I don’t know
Kerri, but since reading Why Don’t
Elephants Smoke I feel as if I do.
I thought, what an
interesting title. It conjures up all sorts of images. (In my case they mostly
featured elephants - lol - probably because I’m originally from Africa.) The story reads like memoir and opens with
“When I was a girl, my father smoked Marlboro Reds”. This is clever. Immediately we
have credibility. And theme. And in that
same first paragraph we're given an explanation for the story’s name. An awful
lot of information is in that paragraph and yet at no time does it feel
heavy-handed or verbose. What threw me right at the end of that para is the nerve of this
kid. She admits to stealing Dad’s Marlboros and puffing away in the garage.
Immediately I was in awe – I never did anything as gutsy as that – and then she ups the ante in the next paragraph by admitting she was 11. Hooley
dooley. I think I was still playing with Barbie dolls at age 11.
There’s a lot to
like about Why Don’t Elephants Smoke.
Something that resonated with me is the mention of ashtrays. There was a time when
there was an ashtray in every home whether it had smokers or not. Ours was made of
marble and it was heavy. My sister once threw it at my head. She missed of
course or I wouldn’t be here, well, not as you know me. I also enjoyed the reference to the ashtray where “you’d press the button at the top and it would
whir and swallow the butt whole.” As a
child I was fascinated by this. I would wonder where the butt had gone and how I could
find it again. It got me into trouble.
“Get your fingers out of that filthy thing!”
Another bit I
liked is the grandfather. Lovely description. My grandfather also died of
emphysema, but my memories of him are very different from the writer's memories of her grandpa. As a POW in WWI he was gassed, and he would sit in a chair in the dining room - where he could watch the
comings and goings of the household - and wheeze. Occasionally he would reach
with a shaky hand for his puffer and inhale with rasping breaths. It scared me. If I had to pass him, I would run. I can't imagine how he must have felt. I regret that now, and I’ve attempted to make amends by visiting
Flanders and the poppy fields and by reading his letters home, trying to get an
idea of the man I never knew.
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My Grandfather |
Memoir like Why Don't Elephants Smoke illustrates that very often when we think we have nothing to say about our
lives, we do. It’s how we say it that makes the difference, and this is where
this writer succeeds. I’m hoping this is not the only bit of memoir we’re
going to get from Kerri Harris.