What Is Said About Elephants

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Mayo begins his new collection with a brief tale and utterance made by an elephant trainer at a zoo:

It’s said, Beasley says, an elephant won’t pass by a dead elephant without casting a branch or some dust on the body. A kind of homage, I suppose.

In a variety of ways, the twelve stories that follow are tributes to characters who find themselves on the fringes, at the sides of roads. In When the Moon Was Ours for the Taking, a man recalls a brief few days he found himself fishing with his NASA-physicist father who is otherwise preoccupied with the Space Race craze of the 1960s. In A Mindfulness Becoming Less, an aging, out-of work Homer Lynch convinces himself he doesn’t need the job and health care he needs. In Vigil for Ammospiza nigrescens, a veteran of the Vietnam War searches for an extinct bird in the salt marshes of Florida, haunted by the North Vietnamese soldier he killed. In Burn Barrel, Cole, a jobless college graduate, despairing that he can never pay his student loans, begins to burn all his university papers, in a strange effort to erase the debt. In these and other stories, Mayo’s characters are people we think we know, in situations we think we understand-and then realize in flashes of truth we can see them-and ourselves-in new ways.