Free Larger Than Life (Novella) by Jodi Picoult

skinning my knee as he rolls
     me beneath him. His shirt comes off and then mine; my legs tangle with his as we push
     away the stiff canvas of our shorts. We are a family, and this is what has been missing.
    I cannot stop staring at the seam between our skin, silhouette and shadow. As Neo
     moves in me, I look out the window, at the stars sewn like sequins on velvet. I think
     about the moon, which is always in the sky, but only comes to life when she is wrappedin the arms of the night.

    The Hindi word for intoxicated is
musth
. This is also the term used to describe the heightened sexual state a bull elephant
     comes into once a year for an average of three months. During this period, the bull
     is driving by hormones, not brains. He doesn’t think. He acts—and then reacts—when
     he realizes what he’s done.
    When I was working on my doctorate in South Africa, there was an elephant-back safari
     at a game reserve not far from Madikwe. Each of the elephants was trained and ridden
     by a mahout, a person who had grown up with and worked with that particular animal
     for years. They had one young bull in the group who came into premature musth. During
     one of the bush walks with the elephants, the mahout must have done something to set
     the animal off. The previously placid bull went wild, grabbing the mahout with his
     trunk and smacking the man against the ground as if he weighed no more than a twig.
     He did not stop until the mahout’s spine was shattered. The female elephants knew
     immediately that something was grievously wrong. By the time the bull could control
     himself, and looked down to see the dead body at his feet, the females were dusting
     the mahout. They covered him with broken branches. They stood guard over him till
     the owners of the elephant-back safari arrived to find the mahout who had never returned
     to camp.
    When it comes to musth behavior, a male elephant is like a guy who wakes up in Vegas
     with no recollection of the previous night, looking down at the lipstick on his collar
     and the tattoo on his arm and the Mardi Gras beads around his neck as if to say,
What the hell happened?
    The female elephants would never find themselves in that situation—they know better,
     all along.

    I wake up to the sound of scratching.
    Leaping out of bed, I throw open the door to find Lesego shuffling on the porch. The
     gash on her forehead is still raw and red, but it is no longer bleeding. And as she
     reaches out her trunk to touch my face, I stroke her trunk. “I won’t leave you behind,”
     I promise, thinking of the wide hips of Mpho as she swayed over the hill, her herd
     in tow. From what I have gleaned of the memory of elephants, I know that Lesego can
     recall those bulls charging her. The question is: Will it make her shy away from attempting
     to blend with any other herd, or will it be buried so deep that she forgets it ever
     happened?
    “Neo,” I say over my shoulder. “She’s up.” Just the taste of his name in my throat
     feels like I have swallowed sunlight. I turn when he doesn’t respond and realize that
     the narrow bed is empty. At some point, while I slept, he abandoned me.
    Better get used to it
.
    The thought hits me like a sucker punch, and then another bursts into my mind:
He thinks this was a mistake
.
    A third fear blooms, like a Hydra:
He is afraid he will lose his job
.
    And a fourth:
He thinks I’ll be embarrassed
.
    Shaking my head to clear it, I force myself to focus like a scientist would, instead
     of relying on gut instinct. It is possible that Neo did not leave me. That perhaps
     he only went to get coffee or to shower and is returning. It is possible that Neo
     is waiting for me to make the first move, out of courtesy.
    When I weigh all these other possibilities, I feel much less threatened. I look at
     Lesego and smile. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s go find him.”
    The calf lags behind me, dragging a stick through the dirt as if she is leaving a