Pachyderms (wildcat)

A pack of elephants lived in the city fringed with veldt on all sides, an entire tribe of elephants, but each one was invisible. Amongst the rickshaws and the molting, sweating automobiles, the elephants could only be discerned by tension between objects and what seemed like empty spaces. A hint of bulk that brushes against your face, or the swish of a tail against your face. Each invisible elephant wore transparent jewelled headdresses, unseen silk brocades, and clear beads that jangled on those July days when wind poured through the city like sand. The air deepened with the clash of elephantine finery invisible but voluminous like thousands of wind chimes, or dinner bells, or soft sirens. Despite their mass, the elephants learned to step like flamingoes between mosques, broken buses, and irrate taximen. They lingered on hind legs between bazaar carts and speared mud-caked vegetables from market stands with their curled tusks. They sniffed out water barrels with their trunks. No elephant roared, because that would expose them; they quibbled with each other, from across the entire city at times, in a radar language known only to them and certainly never recorded. At night, once the elder elephants laid down to sleep and the city's peoples dropped into dreams, the youngest invisible elephants trundled out to the edge of the city to pluck fermenting amarula fruit from the trees. Drunk on it, they slumbered until morning sunlight mixed with the liquor inside their stomachs and each one became a voluptuous stone outcropping while the other invisible elephants would huff and scoff at the foolish young.