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Billy Dada sat in the backseat of his parents’ car and watched the
giant nose at the side of the road get closer and closer, and then
move farther and farther away, until he could no longer see it.
“What kind of tree is that?” he asked his dad.
“It’s not a tree, it’s a mammal.”
His mom turned her head back. “An animal that gives birth,” she
clarified.
Baffled, begetting a skeptic’s eye, Billy turned around and tried to
catch a last glimpse of the mammal, before remembering the mammal
was already long gone.
Eager to scrutinize this oddity’s creatural status, Billy gazed ahead,
but there was no- thing on the horizon but greensleeves and braunwood.
So, he waited, and he waited, and he waited, for so long it began to
look like the entire population had gotten up and left for a greener
region, and when another giant nose then finally did come along,
they were about to pass it right by.
“Could we slow down?” he pleaded.
“I thought you were in a hurry to get to the burning giraffes?” his
dad replied.
“I just want to see the nose.”
His dad obliged and the swaying red fields began to pass by slower
and slower. Glued to the glass, blurring the window with short-lived,
warm ex- hales as the giant nose came closer, Billy braced himself,
determined to get a perfect look at every single part of this nasal
monstrosity’s unorthodox anatomy, but as they passed it, all he really
saw was the huge pool of snot coming out of its nostrils.
“Looked like it had a cold,” his dad commented, and with that they
left the runny beast behind.
“Billy, look,” his mom called out, tapping the windshield with her
finger, “a burning giraffe,” and, with a spring’s physique, Billy thrust
himself forward to see it.
He looked and looked, but there wasn’t one to see.
“Right there,” Billy heard, and followed his dad’s finger, but there
was nothing of the kind under the greensleeves’ broad- armed guard.
“There,” his mom gestured.
“You missed it,” his dad scolded him, but then glanced in the rear
view mirror and changed his mind. “Turn around.”
Billy turned, just in time to spot the flameless black silhouette figure
on a yellow backdrop, on the back of a traffic sign.
Feeling cheated, he sat back for a while, tugging at a run in his
knitted pants, but it wasn’t long before his sense of detail sent him
forward to hold his mom accountable.
“Why did it look like that on the sign?”
“That’s how giraffes look,” she assured him.
“Why didn’t it have any flames?”
“Maybe the flames were yellow.”
Billy scoffed and was just about to argue back when his dad started calling his name repeatedly until he had his full attention.
In front, under a bright purple sky, mounted on a tall metal fence
hidden in part by braunwood leaves, airbrushed onto a mass- ive
billboard welcoming them to the manmade reservoir, the sight was
that of a genuine, bonafide burning giraffe, with poly- chrome flames
dancing from its tail to its mouth, towering majestically over awing
humans and mechanical transportations below.
“Imagine,” Billy’s mom mused as they pulled up to the window to
pay the admission fee, “they’re just behind those gates, now,” and as
Billy leaned forward and gazed through the shelter of brown leaves,
under that stratum in the sky where the red and blue cracked in two,
he was sure he could see smoke.
Along with their change back, the Dada family were handed a big,
bright red fire-extinguisher, which Billy’s dad entrusted to his cadet.
Then, slowly, the gates opened and they drove inside.
Visitors the only thing smoking on the premise, no more had the
Dadas than gotten inside before they were waved in by a ranger
wearing a silver spoon over his white-rimmed khaki shirt, and Billy
moaned as his dad turned the engine off and rolled his window down
to receive new instructions. Ahead, cloaked by a bridgeable distance,
suggestive, faraway shapes were stirr- ing a muddle of wonderful colors,
embodied expectations, moving slowly. Right outside, however, the
garrulous man was going on and on and on, spawning in Billy an
aesthetic panic that began to flutter inside him like a whitebird in a
bucket until, fi- nally, he lost control of his extremities and slowly and
painstakingly, using both hands, wheeled down the window closest
to him and stuck his head out to have a better look.
In the distance,
the mustard changed into a navy doodle with woolly, yellow fringes.
White strokes dove, glided and hovered above it, and below, stalking
along around the edges, torch-like orange and brown figures were
leaving red splashes on the greenery.
At last the sweaty ranger retreated, moseying over to a ‘no strawdogs’
sign, and Billy, with a heart now aching for less abstract impressions,
by fits and starts worked his win- dow back up. Up front, his dad left
his open, turned the key, gave himself away with a suspicious hawking,
put the car in gear and drove onto the rough turf. Billy leaned for- ward.
“What did the man say?” he asked his dad,
but it just made his old man focus harder on the dawnrocks ahead. “Dad? What did he say?”
Ignoring him still, his dad did a search of the glove compartment,
banged it shut and then asked his wife in a lowered voice, “Did we
bring the binoculars?”
Billy watched his mom go through her purse. “Don’t worry. We’ll
still be able to see them,” she promised, his frustration noted.
“Why do we need binoculars, then?” Billy immediately steered her
in the direction of his own more optically logical thesis.
“There’s a line of cones where we have to stop,” Billy’s dad told him
while keeping an eye on the metallic maintenance shed coming up
on his right, “the giraffes get scared if you get too close.”
“How far away are the cones?”
“I don’t know.”
Billy sat back, but then leaned forward again, in a hurry to beat the
vibrato undermining his voice. “Are the cones so far away that we’re
not going to be able to see the burning giraffes at all?”
But right there and then his mom met his glossy eyes and offered
providence. “You can see them already,” she said in her soothing
voice, nodding gently in the direction they were heading, “look.”
Billy leaned forward. At the end of the glittering, omnivorous
desert, inside a blur of palette vegetation and pastel lakeside fauna,
miniature burning giraffes were growing de- creasingly minuscule.
Soon, he could see them by the lake, in front of yellow, sagging
savannah droopers, strikingly artful peacock bushes and thick red
grass, and then, as the Dadas reached the automobile- and tour busdotted
curve, and fell in line between two orange cones, Billy saw, a
hundred feet away, halfway between a bottlebearer and two rangers
measuring the trunk of a stemswollen corduroyal, the closest of the
burning giraffes, drinking from the lake, the smoke rising from his
fla- ming lips drawing the attention of more adults nearby, who, while
watching each other’s backs and herding two unruly young males and
a restive baby burning giraffe among them, made their way down to
join him.
“Can you see them alright?” Billy’s mom asked to make sure, and
Billy answered with an affirmative consonant. Although, after a while,
the wild geometry grazing the windshield smudge began to require so
much squinting he started to feel almost as myopic as the one-eyed
whale on his National Oceanarium shirt.
Suddenly, an engine roared to life.
On Billy’s right, it seemed, a red and orange car was about to roll a
little closer to the action, and as he looked to his left, he saw a mostly
blue and white, and then a black, green and yellow car, both parked
closer than the line of cones permitted.
“How come they’re allowed to go past the cone line?” he challenged
his torpid parents, bringing the motorist culprits to their attention.
Poking around with their moral yard- sticks, they began to discuss the
phenomenon between them.
“That blue and white one’s way over there.”
“Mm.”
“I don’t know.”
This went on for a while, with Billy’s eyes going back and forth
from dad to mom, his head swaying with every argument, and from
every gust of refute, until, undetectable to him, the verdict was in.
Suddenly, his dad’s hand was back on the keys, turning the ig- nition,
protruding their automobile an extra ten feet, then another ten feet,
bit by bit un- til they were as close as the closest of the renegade cars,
and then he stepped on the gas pedal one last time and made their
vehicle the worst offender.
“We’ll probably end up with a giraffe inside the car,” he joked, and
for the first time since they left home, Billy ventured a smile.
To their left, under long, blue dapples, a giraffe whose nerves were
still simmering down after the trespass was coming back out from
behind the emerald sprouts, creating noisy clinks as his legs brushed
against the low-set branches of a bottlebearer, but just as Billy was
about to merge with these magnifications, his mom’s troubled voice
yanked him back by the spine. “Are those park men looking at us?”
To their right, the rangers doctoring gumfiated tartan had stopped
working, their measuring tapes still pressing against the unfashionable
tree’s plaid stem. Brushing pestering misks from their sweaty brows,
they were giving the Dadas a long, hard look.
“Maybe we should back up, back to the line?” Billy’s mom worried.
“Do we have to?” Billy pleaded.
The rangers had thrown their equipment to the ground and were
standing with arms crossed, taking turns spitting into the tall grass.
Then the two of them took a long, hard look at the burning giraffes
drinking from the lake, then a long, hard look at the line of cars, vans
and tour buses yonder, and then, scorching as it was, they brushed off
some sand from their khaki uni- forms, picked up their syringes and
measuring tapes, and got back to work.
The tension gone, the Dada family relaxed and Billy was free to
follow the burning giraffes as they left the water hole and went past a
wobbly old jellyoak by which they stopped to gnaw at the arbrewire,
their last stop before disappearing in behind his mom’s head.
“Wow,” Billy’s mom admired, “they’re beautiful animals,” unaware
of the eclipse caused by her generous bluebell perm. Leaning forward,
Billy got a glimpse of a spotted neck when his mom went into the
picnic basket for mugs and a thermos, then nothing but windshield
bugs as she took off her toilet paper scarf and poured herself the first
of the hot, green beanbrew. Stretching his neck like a hungry neckbug,
he fell forward, making contact with the chunky beverage.
“Come sit here with us,” his mom suggested, cleaning up the mess,
and Billy wisely accepted the invitation to climb over the stick.
“Make sure you don’t miss this,” his dad advised him, pruning his
Barlomor a little bit smoother before lighting it. “Right over there.”
Everything seemed quiet within the blazing herd. Across the lake,
some checkered horses were hiding from the park’s only draped hog,
who was about to climb anew the rock that filled his day with work.
“Right there,” his dad pointed out with his fuming piece of wood.
Scaring a slaughter of deathblacks away from its two roots and arch,
a giraffe was whiffing the woolly foliage of a white-bearded dualstem.
She backed away from the tree.
To an ominous, resonant, tubular swoosh, a massive flame shot out
from the burning giraffe’s mouth and set part of the furr- ing on fire.
The white hairs sizzled from the brenning heat, but went out fast,
and soon, when only a few of the blackened patches still kept pyres,
she stepped up to her doing and began to lick the darkened trunk.
“Why do they do that?” Billy asked his dad.
“They can’t eat raw leaves,” his mom answered, handing Billy a few
slices of sweetfruit to go with his graspberry soda, “they have to burn
them first, otherwise they can’t digest them.”
“Do you know what digest means?” his dad quizzed him.
Billy searched his budding science vocabulary. “It’s what happens in
your stomach when you eat something,” he settled for, and though it
gave accolades, he only half-heartedly awarded himself blue fruit,
stunted by the cover of the book on utilisaurs he’d brought with him
where a 150 ft vacuum oxen cleaned up a pre- historical landscape.
That settled, they returned to the scene, where a baby giraffe had
just joined his fire- drake mother and was about to pick the decorated
leaves of an impolitely eyeballing pea- cock bush roughly his height
when, without warning, she struck him with the side of her body so
hard it knocked him right to the ground. Panicking, the little one
crawled and staggered his way back up on his feet and then ran away
a safe distance from his mother.
“Why did she do that?” Billy cried out, but nobody answered.
His dad, lost in the pages of his Daily Summary, rid the spot behind
his ear from brillo, put the knewspaper down and looked over at the
commotion, “What did the baby giraffe do?”
“He didn’t do anything,” Billy had him know, “she just ran over to
him and shoved him to the ground.”
“Remember what we talked about a few minutes ago?” his mom
broke in, “How they can’t eat raw leaves?” Now he did. “His mother
is just making sure he doesn’t get sto- mach cramps. Look.”
This time, it was the mother who was sniffing the peacock’s tufts.
Like the time before, she took a few steps back, filled up her lungs,
retracted her neck, shook her backside three times and then in one
loud, violent exhale blasted silly the wide-eyed flamboyant lavender.
It burned, it faded, and before long her mouth was above it, her
tongue snatching the tiny, charred leaves and after a few exploratory
steps in her direction the baby burning giraffe was back at her side,
feeding on the thing alongside with her.
“We’re missing something over there,” Billy’s dad told the others
and they turned in time to witness the conclusion.
Afar was a brown and orange blur of galloping legs and hooves that
whipped the sand below into a dusty swirl. A trail of smoke traced
the beast fleeing as the wind worked on his calid body and neck.
Behind him, the aggressor trotted to a full stop, stomped the ground
beneath him, raised his head high and, to the bleak postlude of his
adversary’s guttural cries, exhaled his fire at the zenith.
“Looked like they’d been fighting,” Billy’s dad summed it up.
Meanwhile, the infantile giraffe had taken an interest in a small,
orange tree with a mushroom-shaped top called a sundwarf and was
moving its muzzle over the dark orange leaves.
“I hope he’s a quick learner,” Billy’s dad cried hole in the ground,
before relighting his faded twig, and after that they all fell silent.
The little one began to nibble at a leaf.
“Nope,” Billy’s dad gave up.
“No,” Billy himself still hoped.
The giraffe’s mother slowly began to shuffle her feet, approaching,
but as it were, rather than knapple the goods of the forbidden tree,
the baby took a few steps back, filled up on air like his mother had,
pulled his neck back, shook his backside the right amount of times
and then pushed out the full distribution of his lungs with all the raw
ambition and elemental drive he could muster.
With mimicry perfectly imprinted, his body plunged forward so far
it left him standing with his blueish tongue fallen over his lower lip,
yet the sound and fury that left his throat wasn’t so much the roaring
torch of his mother, but rather a cough and a tiny puff of smoke.
The grown-ups aboard, they laughed, but not Billy. “When do they
learn to do that?” he asked his mother, but before she could answer,
the baby made another attempt and this time a tiny flame did come
out of his mouth and it was enough to set a few leaves on fire.
Soon, the sun got smeared and started to lose its rotund shape and
the line of paint- ed vehicles and traffic cones became sparingly dotted,
Billy’s dad wiping ink stains from his hands with a papal tower while
Billy’s mom collected sweetfruit cores and two graspberry empties,
and, while the baby burning giraffe practiced his newfound ability
down by the lake under Billy’s watchful eye, through the wiring in
Billy’s brain, a question was making its way into the world.
“Are they on fire when they’re born?” Billy suddenly asked.
His dad put the paper towel away. “That’s a good question.”
There was a long si- lence.
“Are they on fire?”
“I have no idea,” he said, “that’s why it’s a good question.”
Billy sighed. “Mom-”
“I don’t know, sweetie,” his mom interrupted him, “you can look it
up when we get home,” and noticing his confusion added, “you can
look it up in the encyclopedia.”
Billy put his seatbell on, in a hurry to return home to receive the
warranted facts, but as they drove away, he felt a strange chill.
Underneath the savannah droopers, the baby stood on its hind legs,
its teeth clutching at a black and splendidly crisp leaf dangling from
a branch way, way, way, way up, its projected palate chewing the air
over and over, its massive tongue stretched to the absolute fullest,
wailing, wanting.
***
Later that someday, Billy climbed the living room bookcase, his
right knee disarranging sea sculptures and a picture of his toddler self
underneath a toenail fir, pulled out the first volume of the family
encyclopedia, laid the heavy book down on the floor and turned page
after page, by habit slowing down at the bird section’s hawk with
flippers and turtleback owl, until he stumbled upon burning giraffes
in a black and white photograph so small it shamed its own frame.
Running his finger through the meager text that had accompanied it,
he suddenly found himself at the last line, none the wiser.
“It doesn’t say,” he said, having stood up and, upsetting the whitebird
and deathblack drawings on the fridge, marched into the kitchen
where he’d found his dad at the kitchen table reading a racing form
and his mom by the stove cooking a rubber chicken. “It doesn’t say
what they’re like when they’re born.” His dad’s eyes stayed with the
numbers and his mom was in a world of her own. “It doesn’t even say
how they can have flames without getting burnt.”
Finally, his dad looked up. “Maybe they’re working on finding out,”
he suggested, “the scientists,” and at the same time took a glance to
see how the bean draining was coming along.
“How can they not’ve found out something like that?” Billy spurned
his dad’s notion, but his dad just got up and poured himself what
green was in the pot so far, and that was all he had on the subject.
A reason’s last resort, Billy’s mom closed the oven door, took off her
oven mittens and gave it her best shot. “Maybe they’ll know by the
time you’re grown up,” she offered, and Billy, willing to hear her out,
put his hands in his pockets and waited for a continuation.
There wasn’t one. After a while, he went back to the living room,
put the weighty volume back on the shelf, and waited a decade.
This novel is available through the Xlibris online bookstore, or any of the many places where books are sold on the net.
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