The Elephant in the Room

   It was a dream. Of course it was: how else could a large elephant have gotten upstairs in the house.  I was trying to get to sleep with my young daughter when the elephant entered from another room, and began nosing around. I was not in favor of this so I roughly swatted its trunk away, realizing right away that I shouldn't have.  It only made the elephant more aggressive in its persistence.   The animal eventually went into the other bedroom, and I felt relieved, but only until I heard it throwing up. I went to check, and saw that it had vomited in the next room. Then it came into the room which I had just come from and performed an even worse bodily function; an elephant can deposit a pile of residue about two feet wide and three feet high.  I had no idea even how to begin to clean up the double messes, so I did the only thing I could do---I went to find my mother.  She and her sister had moved the furniture away from the walls in a downstairs room and were re-plastering the worn areas.  I told her that the elephant was sick and had disgraced itself upstairs, twice, and that I was sorry but I couldn't overcome the smell enough to try to clean it up.  She said she'd take care of it later.  I felt somewhat guilty about pawning the disgusting task off on her, but it wasn't my elephant.