Stan and Elaine and the elephant were getting along fine, all living together in their two-bedroom house, until the elephant got sick in the fall. It began with heaviness in her eyes; the whites became puffy like hard-boiled eggs too long in the water. Neither Stan or Elaine gave them much worry, those always-wet eyes, and the elephant didn’t complain, so they assumed it was the dry air of the season and opened the windows to let a fresh breeze through the house. Elaine brought home a humidifier for the elephant’s room, and by Thanksgiving Stan thought he saw an improvement.

He and Elaine even took a long weekend, down the coast to an inn they’d stayed at before, to walk empty beaches and sit by a fire and sleep straight through breakfast three days in a row. They’d arranged for a neighbor to look in on the elephant, who seemed to be feeling much better, and they brought her a box of saltwater taffy from the seashore. “Her appetite seems to back,” Elaine said as the elephant stuffed her mouth with the treats.

Then one dark winter evening while the three of them were eating dinner, the elephant reared back on the two chairs front-to-front that made up her seat, shaking the table and the silver upon it, and let loose with the loudest, most echoing sneeze Stan had heard in his life. Her trunk swung over the table, rippling with the force of the blast like a fire hose when the water pressure builds up. Her massive head shook and a crackled tusk knocked over Elaine’s half-empty glass of wine.

Stan had been telling Elaine about an incident in his office involving a paper-shredder, a tie, and a spilled cup of coffee, and the elephant sneezed right before the best part. Elaine had smiled at the story, highlighting the wrinkles that had only recently started appearing at the sides of her mouth. Stan was getting worked up with his telling, his gestures growing as he went on. He looked forward to the big comic payoff, to setting the tone for a night in which they would drink too much wine and go to bed early and see what would happen. But the elephant sneezed before he could finish, and Stan's hopes for the evening dried up like a halved lemon left out overnight.

“Oh, Stan,” Elaine said, standing up from her chair and circling the table, “I think the elephant might still be sick.” She laid a hand on the bristled grey forehead, and breath shook from the elephant’s trunk. “You’re burning up!” Elaine told her. The elephant heaved a rumbling sigh, and the antique China cupboard with its rickety leg danced on the floor in the corner.

“I thought she was getting better,” Stan said as Elaine looked into the elephant’s eyes. He added, “It’s probably still just a cold. That time of year, after all. I’ve had the same headache for weeks. It’s the weather.” The elephant sniffled before Stan continued, “So Jerry’s hunched over the shredder with his tie halfway in, and it’s turned off now, but...”

“Hang on, Stan. I’m really worried about the elephant. I think this is more than a cold.” Elaine was stooped over, looking into the wide-open mouth with teeth like small tabletops. She leaned in so close that it looked for a second as if she would be eaten alive. The next words she spoke came out hollow and loud as they bounced off the back of the elephant’s throat. “Call Dr. Anderson, Stan. The phone number’s stuck on the fridge. It’s a magnet.”

The elephant had been around longer than Stan, living with Elaine before the two of them met. The first time he went to her house—their house, now—all the pictures caught him off guard: Elaine and the elephant in Granite Park on a red and white picnic blanket, smiling and waving to someone beyond the edge of the frame. Watching TV on the couch with a bowl of popcorn between them, and some of it spilled on the floor. Or Elaine teaching the elephant to roll out pie crust on some long-since holiday, the kitchen dusted all over. There were matching white clouds on the elephant’s forehead and each of Elaine’s cheeks. There weren’t any pictures of boyfriends or ex-husbands, because it had always been just Elaine and the elephant.

Stan had tried to avoid the elephant while they were dating, urging Elaine to his place more often than hers, suggesting restaurants close to his apartment and staying out past the hour when the subway stopped running. More often than not it hadn’t worked, his attempts to get Elaine to stay over, and in the small hours of morning she’d give him a kiss and call for a cab and head home to where the elephant lay awake in its bed.

“I want to. I do. But if I’m not there when she wakes up, she’ll be upset,” Elaine explained as Stan helped her into her coat, and he agreed. He walked her down to the stoop where her taxi awaited. “Soon, Stan,” she told him. “After the two of you get used to each other.”

This continued for nearly six months, and sometimes Stan wondered if he’d had enough. But after years of dating women with one quirk or another, and his relationships going nowhere, he felt sure that Elaine was different somehow, that if he could get used to her sharing her home with an elephant it could really work out between them. “She’s worth it,” he told himself out loud, after Elaine went home from their dates and he was alone again in his apartment, struggling to fall asleep.

It wasn’t that Stan disliked the elephant, or that he was wild for it, either. At first it had made him nervous, the way he’d felt meeting a girlfriend’s parents when he was younger. He thought it was strange that Elaine lived with her elephant at an age when most people lived alone, or with a partner. But she was so nonchalant about her circumstance that in time he grew used to it, too. After a few months, when she would let him stay over, he even grew fond of the elephant, though he wouldn’t tell that to his friends.

“Elaine’s elephant still living with you guys?” one would ask over drinks after work, and Stan would say yes, force a sigh, and heads would nod around the table as if each of them lived with their wife’s elephant, too. Stan never mentioned the nights when Elaine wasn’t home and he and the elephant watched movies together, or walked downtown for ice cream cones. It was easier to act put upon than to explain that living with the elephant wasn’t really so bad.

There had been an awkward first breakfast, the September before they got married, during which Stan and the elephant avoided each other’s eyes across grapefruit and coffee while Elaine buttered her toast. The elephant had been in bed when Stan and Elaine came in from their date, and was so startled when he entered the kitchen that she reared up with a snort and knocked over the two chairs beneath her, bumping the top of her head on the ceiling fan’s blades so it made almost one full rotation without being turned on.

“It’s okay,” Elaine said coaxing the elephant back to the table. “This is Stan. You’ve heard about him. We were out late last night, at the theater, and it’s a long way for him to get home.”

At first the elephant gave Stan dirty looks while he pretended to count each nook and cranny in the muffin Elaine set before him. Elaine stood at the counter, making lunch salads she and Stan could take to work, and telling the elephant about the play they had seen the evening before. Stan offered a few words of agreement, and the elephant grunted sometimes to show she was paying attention, but Elaine did most of the talking. When they left the house after breakfast, Elaine kissed the elephant goodbye and Stan waved even though he was close enough for a handshake—he wasn’t sure if shaking hands was something elephants did—and the elephant nodded. As Stan and Elaine walked to the train station, he looked over his shoulder and saw the elephant still watching from the open double-doors of the house.

Later Elaine insisted the elephant had been more surprised to find Stan there than anything else, and that he could start staying over more often. He was nervous the next few times, too, but the elephant never complained and neither did Stan so in time they began to sit on the sofa together to watch baseball games or the circus while Elaine got dressed to go out. And a month or so later Stan knelt down and proposed; he moved in a few weeks after that and the elephant even helped carry boxes from his rental van into the house.

They involved the elephant in planning the wedding, the three of them hunched over catering menus and lists of people they must, might, and wouldn’t invite, the elephant nodding along while Stan and Elaine made their decisions. There was talk of the elephant bearing the rings, but that seemed degrading somehow, the elephant neither a child or a pet, so instead it was given a seat of distinction in the front of the church. It wasn’t an actual pew, but a low, backless bench to one side of the altar. The minister hadn’t been thrilled, but Elaine was insistent in the way she could be when something mattered to her. During the ceremony, the officiant had to speak up to be heard over the elephant’s trumpeting tears, but Elaine assured Stan she was crying for joy, and he agreed it was probably true.

In the pictures taken after the service, the elephant stands behind Stan and Elaine, blotting out the wide river they’d intended to be their background.

When the elephant got sick, everything changed. Elaine was too busy to sleep, running back and forth to the elephant’s room at the sound of each sniffle, or she was exhausted, snoring before her head hit the pillow. Sometimes she’d talk long into the night, or cry with her face pressed into Stan’s shoulder, and worry about the elephant’s health. The elephant seemed to grow paler, acquiring more wrinkles each day. Stan thought she was shrinking, taking up less space on the couch each time she dragged herself down the stairs and onto the cushions. The groans of the springs seemed to be softer. Dr. Anderson ran through a whole range of tests, and more medicines than Stan could keep straight, but the elephant still seemed to wither.

Stan noticed for the first time how much Elaine looked like the elephant when she was tired, and how much the elephant looked like Elaine, the way dogs sometimes look like their owners or families share a resemblance that can’t be pinned down.

“We’ve been together for my whole life,” Elaine sobbed. “What would I do without her?”

“It’s only a cold,” Stan insisted, rubbing her back as she wept. “Elephants live very long lives.” Then he would lean toward Elaine’s face so he could kiss her, but she ignored him or sometimes pulled away, rolling toward the edge of the bed until she was asleep and Stan lay awake in the dark.

Later in the winter, when Stan came home from work, he’d find the elephant piled up on the couch, blowing her nose into sheets of tissue-paper Elaine brought home from a craft store. She would half-rise from the cushions, smiling weakly. He’d say to the elephant, “Don’t get up. Want some tea? Chicken soup?” The tissue sheets were yellow and blue and meant for kindergartners learning to cut holiday shapes and glue them together in festive arrangements. But they worked just as well for an elephant’s sneezes, fluttering like flags at the end of its trunk.

Elaine had been upstairs sleeping already, knocked out by two sleeping pills after getting the elephant settled. He had gone to bed, too, but like so many nights since the elephant’s illness Stan hadn’t fallen asleep. He’d listened to Elaine’s breath in his ear after she cried herself out in his arms, and after a couple of hours crept back downstairs for late-night TV, watching black-and-white movies for hours.

Before the elephant developed its symptoms, Stan hadn’t had trouble sleeping in a long time, and Elaine never murmured or cried from her dreams.

He broached the subject in the kitchen one morning while the elephant was sleeping in. Elaine had spent the night running back and forth from the elephant’s bed to her own, kept awake by window-rattling coughs. Stan had gotten up, too, and gone to the elephant’s room, but however much he tried to convince Elaine she should sleep, that he would stay up and sit by the bed, she bolted in with the next sneeze.

He was pouring coffee from the French-press while Elaine cut cantaloupe into small squares. “Maybe,” Stan said, “the elephant needs more help than we can give her.”

“What are you talking about?” Elaine asked, turning toward Stan with a boning knife high in her hand. Her eyes were bloodshot and baggy, and when she turned the overhead bulbs made her squint. Stan knew at once that he had gone too far.

“What do you mean?” she insisted.

“I just... well... the elephant’s been sick a long time,” he began, “and she doesn’t seem to get any better. I just think... thought that maybe we should look into professional care. Someplace they know what to do.” He looked at the coffee jug in his hand, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut, and then hastily added, “Only until she gets well.”

“You want me toss out my elephant?” Elaine shrieked, her pitch going up with each word, her voice raspy from the crying. She threw her arms in the air, the knife catching the glow of the track-lighting as it swung over her head. “God, Stan,” She burst out, “you’re such a prick.” It was the first time she’d ever called him something like that—they’d had fights, like all couples, but were always careful in their attacks—and Stan felt something tighten inside him, like muscles clenching before they get punched.

“Listen,” he tried to explain, “I love the elephant, too, but she’s so sick. It’s not good for her, and it’s not good for you. I mean, look at you... look... when was the last time you slept through the night? When was the last time...”

“You don’t just abandon someone when they’re sick, Stan. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“No, I know, but... the elephant doesn’t know who we are now. She looks confused when we come into the room. I don’t think she remembers us anymore. I’m not sure I... that we know what to do.”

“What are you talking about? Of course she knows who we are. Who I am, anyway—I don’t know who you are anymore.” Elaine smacked the knife down hard against the top of the counter. “I’m not talking about this right now. I need to bring up the elephant’s breakfast.”

As she stormed out of the kitchen, half-dressed for work with a tray of puréed bananas and steaming tea in both hands, Elaine growled something angry, or sad. Whichever it was, Stan wasn’t sure if he’d been meant to hear.

When winter had passed into spring and spring was headed for summer, the elephant spent its days bundled in a pile of blankets on the living room couch. It began sleeping there when the stairs were too much. Dr. Anderson sent them to specialists, but the tests were all inconclusive. Elaine took leave from work when the elephant needed to be cared for full-time. On her last day, some colleagues convinced her to come out for a drink, maybe something to eat, because they thought she needed a break before going home. Stan stayed with the elephant, heating up soup with alphabet noodles and bringing bowl after bowl to the couch.

The lights were out through most of the house, and the two of them sat in the pale glow of a police drama. Each time the elephant shifted her weight with a cough or a sneeze, Stan felt the couch rising and falling, lifting an inch or two from the floor and sinking back down. He tried to watch what was on TV but found his eyes again and again on the elephant, tracking the shallow balloon of her washed-out gray chest. He tried to match his own breathing to the raspy, rattling wheezes that trickled over chapped lips but he nearly choked on the uncomfortable rhythm.

“Are you in a lot of pain?” Stan finally asked, and the elephant gave him a look that may have been no and may have been yes, but she didn’t utter a word. He looked at her face, crumpled and worn as wet, wadded newsprint, and it looked so much like Elaine’s had for the last weeks or months—both of them run ragged, all their energy spent on the ordinary act of keeping an elephant breathing, and eating, and turning often enough on her couch to avoid getting bedsores. Stan wondered where he and his wife would be left with the elephant gone. He worried that the smaller the elephant became in their house, the more space she would take up between them, until at last all that space was left empty.

Stan stared at the cracked leather of the elephant’s trunk, a useless appendage for several weeks now as he or Elaine—but mostly Elaine—scooped spoonfuls of soup into the elephant’s mouth. He remembered what the doctor had told them, It’s only a matter of time, and Elaine stomping from the exam room, fuming denials all the way home in the car, and he, Stan, trying to make her consider, at least, the real possibility that the elephant wasn’t going to make it.

Stan pictured Elaine and her friends in a restaurant, some bar, all of them trying to make her have fun and his wife, his Elaine, checking her watch every five minutes and fighting the urge to pull out her phone, see how the elephant’s doing, find an excuse to go home before their drinks even came.

Without being aware of the thought in his head, Stan found himself standing over the elephant with an oversized chenille pillow between his hands. He pushed in on the sides as if plumping it up, making it thick in the middle for a head to lie down, but he held it instead near the elephant’s face, so close that it rippled with each wheezing breath but not yet touching gray skin.

The elephant looked over the top of the cushion, catching Stan’s eye, and he was sure, for a second, that her expression said, Yes, go ahead, let me go. He looked into the elephant’s eyes, wondering if she really wanted what he thought she did, or if he was going too far. He listened to her labored breathing, and a soft wheeze that seemed meant to tell him something.

Then he leaned closer with the pillow gripped tight, sure in that moment it was the right thing. He inspected the geometry of the elephant’s face, wondering how it would work—it wasn’t enough to cover the mouth, because breath came in through the trunk. Stan reached out a hand for the long, limp appendage, and tucked its peeling-rimmed nostrils into the soft lump of chenille-covered down. Then he moved the pillow and trunk toward the mouth and he thought, he suspected, that the elephant opened up wide to make it easier for him, pushing out all the last air in her lungs to go faster.

Stan held the pillow over the elephant’s lips. His hands shook so hard that he felt chenille threads catching and pulling on sharp flakes of dry skin. Suddenly, tires crunched on the stones of the driveway and a wave of headlights washed into the room. He stood and dropped the pillow, turning his face from the bright light. By the time he heard Elaine’s key in the lock, her heels on the floor of the foyer, he was sitting again at the elephant’s feet, back resting on the throw pillow, fingers-crossed that his wife hadn’t seen him standing over the elephant but knowing, somehow, that she had. He looked down the couch at his sniffling companion, wasting away as they sat, and her sunken face told him, Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell, I wish she’d come home a few minutes from now.

*A modified version of this story was published in the print journal, Words! Words! Words!