She cried then, holding her body stiff, letting tears flow through ragged controlled breaths. Scalding tears of frustration and sadness and anger. She continued even after James petered out, fell into regular shallow breaths as he fitfully slept. Liyana cried and cried, but she wouldn’t let him see.
The matriarch of the clan huffed and trumpeted and called in distress. Even someone who hadn’t studied elephants, even someone who’d never even seen an elephant until that moment, would know those sounds didn’t portend anything good.
Liyana knew just what the noises meant, and James certainly did, too. She wanted to rush to the elephant, but she knew she couldn’t help it. No one could.
No other elephants were in sight, keeping away from the struggling matriarch out of fear or respect. Maybe sheer fatigued depression. It was the middle of the night, and she pictured them out in the bush, trying to sleep, pretending they couldn’t hear their matriarch’s anguished cries.
The elephant loosed a bellow from deep within and a milky balloon fell from her underside, followed by a rush of blood and amniotic fluid. The broken, half-formed body of a baby elephant came with it.
The matriarch cried anew, reaching down with her trunk to sniff and prod and poke the fetus. But it was premature and deformed, and never had a hope of survival.
Liyana watched the matriarch attempt to lift the body, to place it on its feet, to will it alive. She did some quick math in her head. Twenty-two-month pregnancies, a few months off between. And they wouldn’t even last the full twenty-two months. Seven years had passed since the war had turned the world inside out. How many times had this matriarch miscarried or delivered stillborn fetuses? How many times had she felt life inside her and hoped that this time would be different? Three? More?
The matriarch sat down heavily, and Liyana laid herself on the ground as well, propped on her side, watching the elephant mourn. She felt James’s hand on her shoulder, heard him whisper, “We should go.”
She shook her head. “I have to stay,” she said, and felt a surge of gratitude when James didn’t ask why or insist upon leaving. Instead, he sat down next to her, a hand slowly stroking from her hip to her knee and back. Eventually, the stroking stopped, and she realized he was sleeping. But Liyana stayed awake, sitting with the elephant that didn’t know she was there.
Her name whispered in her ear, a hand jostling her shoulder. With a start, Liyana woke up, and realized James was speaking to her and pointing at the spot where the matriarch had miscarried.
Groggy, Liyana sat up, and it took her a moment to realize the sun had risen and the elephant was gone.
“Where did she go?” she asked. “Did you see her leave?”
James shook his head, but turned. “Tracks show her heading that way.”
“Oh, god.” Liyana got to her feet as quickly as she could, hands on the back of her hips, back cracking and bladder throbbing painfully. “They really are doing it on purpose. We have to help her.”
James didn’t ask how, which was good, because Liyana didn’t know. But he went with her, taking her by the elbow and helping speed her along to the spot where the elephants burned.
The matriarch had been joined by four more elephants, all young females. They’d begun circling the ash pile already, the tips of their trunks dusty and gray-black.
Liyana skidded to a stop, her sneakers gouging into the hard dirt, sending a spray of gravel and sand flying, but the elephants ignored her. James stopped alongside her, letting go of her elbow and putting his hands on his knees to suck deep breaths. She hadn’t imagined she could run at all this pregnant, let alone so fast.
“It’s a ritual,” James said. Liyana nodded, though he may as well have been speaking to himself.
Clearly it was a ritual. There was no doubt about that. But what Liyana hadn’t realized was the purpose, which now glared right at her, as obvious as the bright sun shining in the open sky above. Elephants’ graveyards weren’t real, but they remembered their ancestors, understood the passing of generations. Of course they would understand when that cycle ground to a halt. The sadness she saw now in the matriarch’s eyes wasn’t just for her lost calf, it was for the loss of every elephant in the world, the end of life. How many people had killed themselves in the last seven years? The cataclysm had somehow given these elephants the ability to burn, and they’d come to the conclusion that self-immolation was the best remaining option.
These thoughts swirled through Liyana’s mind, touching her consciousness then flitting off, barely cohering. She couldn’t think of what to do. Couldn’t think that there was anything to do. Something thudded against the inside of her stomach, and she looked down, confused, her hands instinctively cradling. The baby kicked again.
Liyana turned to James. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Please stay here.” And without waiting for a response, she ran as best she could into the center of the circle of elephants.
They shuffled backward and forward, their trunks flailing, but Liyana held her hands out, kept her head down, trying to appear submissive and unthreatening. As if she could threaten a creature of this size.
Heat radiated off the animals, baking Liyana’s skin as if she was standing in front of an open oven. This close, splotches of pink and red danced across the elephants’ wrinkled gray skin. Shimmery heat waves blurred their edges.
“Please,” she said. “You don’t need to do this. The world isn’t over. It’s going to go on. We’re all going to go on.” The elephants calmed at her tone, but the temperature still rose. Liyana smelled ozone, and worried that her hair would singe if she didn’t move soon.
Such heat couldn’t be good for her baby, or for Liyana herself. Her head swam, and she feared she’d swoon, that if she fell she’d be caught up in the conflagration when the elephants set themselves alight. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t go.” Her eyelids fluttered.
They shot back open when she felt the air cool and something warm press against her distended stomach, and she found herself staring into the face of the matriarch, the elephant’s massive ears flapping slightly, fanning the sweat from Liyana’s forehead. It was the closest she’d ever been to an elephant in all her years studying them. Both before and after the destruction of the world, she’d always been at a distance. The matriarch’s eyes gleamed with deep intelligence and curiosity. She probed again with her trunk, then used it to lift the hem of Liyana’s shirt. Liyana removed it the rest of the way. Around her, the other elephants pressed closer, their bodies cooling, but still giving off residual warmth. She imagined herself in a cocoon of elephant hide, and laughed.
The matriarch lightly pressed her trunk against Liyana’s belly and the other elephants joined her. As if sensing them, the baby inside her kicked once, then again and again and again, a rapid tattoo like she was happily stomping her feet, dancing to some inaudible music.
An array of calls sounded from the elephants around her, high and low, a rippling melody that thrummed through her whole body. Trumpeting sounded in the distance, the more distant members of the clan joining in. They sang to her baby for what felt like ages, before they suddenly stopped, turned, and exited the clearing, the matriarch the last to go, her trunk lingering on Liyana’s stomach for a long moment before she, too, left, pausing to turn back only once, catching Liyana’s eye as she stood frozen to the spot in the middle of the ashes. The matriarch blinked slowly, then walked away.
In an instant, James was at her side as Liyana sagged into the ashes of the dead elephants, breath hitching in a combination of laughter and relief. She still wasn’t sure what she’d done, but she believed she’d made a promise to the elephants. She prayed she could keep it.