FLASH FICTION:HE DIDN'T know why he was doing it. In fact, as with most decisions made by normal, rational, human beings, there probably was no primary motivation.
HE DIDN’T know why he was doing it. In fact, as with most decisions made by normal, rational, human beings, there probably was no primary motivation.
The idea occurred to him one evening when he was absentmindedly watching the six o’clock news.
“Love is still one of the most important elements in a marriage . . . that is according to a report published today by researchers at the University of Liverpool.” Now, that’s what Huw Edwards had said. But our protagonist wasn’t listening too intently and he heard: “Love is still one of the most important elephants in a marriage.” There was no getting away from it though: the task was massive. He was going to rewrite every one of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, replacing the word ‘love’ with ‘elephant’. It was only after having the idea that he saw, what he considered, to be the genius of it.
“You see,” he told a friend, “it’s a fantastic idea. It will highlight the senselessness of love; show how meaningless the word and the sentiments behind it are. By removing the word from its context, people will be able to see how vacuous most ideas about love -” His friend interrupted. “I think it’s just crap,” he said.
He started with the obvious; he downloaded the text for Romeo and Juliet, copied and pasted it into Microsoft Word, and utilising the find and replace function, asked the program to find and replace all instances of love with instances of elephant. Where 175 instances of love once were, there were now, in its place, 175 elephants. No longer did the play open with two star-crossed lovers, but instead, two star crossed elephanters (he inserted the extra ‘e’ manually).
A typical scene read as thus:
Benvolio: It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?
Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
Benvolio: In elephant?
Romeo: Out--
Benvolio: Of elephant?
Romeo: Out of her favour, where I am in elephant.
Benvolio: Alas, that elephant, so gentle in his view, Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!
Romeo: Alas, that elephant, whose view is muffled still, Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will! Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here? Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.
Here’s much to do with hate, but more with elephant.
Why, then, O brawling elephant! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This elephant feel I, that feel no elephant in this.
Dost thou not laugh?
The task that lay ahead was not arduous per se; rather, it was tedious, mindless, involved a lot of clicking and typing and was, in effect, pretty pointless. But he thought to himself, like so many of us do, as we spend our mornings on buses and trains, it has to be done.
Flash fiction will be a regular item in The Irish Times. E-mail a story of no more than 500 words to flashfiction@irishtimes.com
