Skip to content

Brainlephant

21 min

a story about a guy obsessed with elephants and fortune cookies

As a kid, Felix Futzbucker dreamed of being an elephant. These animals had always aroused his imagination - stark grey boulders, eared icebreakers cutting through a sea of grass, rattling the earth and watering each other with pulverizer hoses. Their brains, Felix read with his face sunk into the encyclopaedia, were several times larger than those of humans, making them, as Felix thought, the most intelligent of animals. They had an unimaginable number of neurons in their brains. Two hundred and fifty billion, a number only more unimaginable given Felix had yet to learn how much the number represented. "Two hundred and fifty billion," he wandered around his grandmother's flat in awe and muttered under his breath, dreaming of a brain he could only describe as big, infinitely more massive than his own.

"Treacherous nature rewarded me with universal injustice", thought Felix. Just imagine: how many things he could've learned, how many encyclopaedias he could've read, how smart he could've been if he had a brain like elephants? But then, his parents told him he could never become an elephant and it was all nonsense – and he had to stay Just Felix. The only thing he could dream of - and never discarded this possibility - was that maybe he was actually an elephant who dreamed he was a little boy dreaming to become an elephant.

This content is for Members

Subscribe for free

Already have an account? Log in

Next

Subscribe to receive the latest posts in your inbox.