Sometimes I just don’t get people. For example: everyone’s perfectly used to being shoved around on buses and trains and subways, shoved and squeezed and getting their hair mussed up and being pulled this way and that. And no one complains. But oh, the second they realise that it’s an elephant shoving them, well then, Ker-BLAM! You wouldn’t believe the noise they make!
Like that blessed lady who went off on her train very happily, leaving all the rest of us dejected, starving, cold and tired on Ituzaingó station.
You can’t imagine how sadly Dailan Kifki watched the departing train. Naturally, he immediately started to cry. And naturally, soon enough the Ituzaingó postmaster showed up. He had been working late, and apparently no sooner had he managed to get the stamps back in order than the elephant’s tearful explosion had made the building shake so much that they were all soon flying about again like confetti. The Superintendent pretended to start legal proceedings against us, and the postmaster was a bit happier after that.
“It’s simply not possible,” I said to them all, “that having successfully completed the most astronautically phantasmagorical bit of the expedition, we’re now going to be stuck at anchor here in this station for ever. We have to find some quick, simple way of getting home.”
“Why don’t we walk?” asked my mum.
“It’s too far, we’re tired,” grumbled the others between yawns.
“What if we put the wings back on Dailan Kifki?” suggested my brother Roberto.
“Then he’ll escape again,” I said.
“No,” Roberto went on, “listen. We tie him to a very long piece of twine, so that way we can’t lose him even if he’s flying all over the sky.”
But the person with the smartest idea was Granddad.
“Attention!” he said. “What we need to do is wait for a cargo train to come past, and we put Dailan Kifki in with the cows. Nobody will see much difference between a cow and an elephant while it’s still dark.”
“Yes, that is a very good idea,” I said. “But where will we travel? We can’t go in with the cows, too.”
“We’ll take a bus!” said Dad.
“Honestly,” I replied, “do you really think I’m ever likely to let Dailan Kifki travel all on his own?”
“But he’ll be with the cows,” Dad insisted. “They’ll take care of him. Cows are really affectionate.”
“No, sir,” I said, “there’s absolutely no way I’m letting him travel alone in a dark railway wagon with some cows we don’t know anything about and who we’ve never met before.”
And then my Auntie Clodomira said:
“Why don’t you go with him in the cattle wagon, then?”
“Because I’m not a cow, Auntie!”
And on the argument went, for quite some time.
Fortunately no cargo trains came by.
After we’d done enough arguing, we decided to try thinking. So we all put our fingers to our foreheads and the whole line of us circled up and down the platform. We had turned into a kind of merry-go-round.
We went up and down thinking and re-thinking in silence, when suddenly… do you know who showed up?
Just imagine!
Can you guess?