john bennett | the man elephants step on

The Man Elephants Step On

His thought patterns were different after the elephant stepped on his head. Behind his back people snickered and joked that he must have found God, but the Catholic Church took him seriously and excommunicated him. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on his behalf, even tho he wasn’t Catholic, and just like that he was headline news. Next thing you know he’s on a late-night talk show.

“So,” the talk-show host says. “An elephant stepped on your head?”

The laugh light begins flashing, and the studio audience roars.

“Yes,” he says, once the laughter has subsided.

“Off on a safari were we?”

More cued laughter.

“No.”

“An elephant just came prancing down the street and stepped on your head?”

No response.

“How did you wind up close enough to an elephant so that it could step on your head? Are you a zoo keeper?”

Nervous laughter, the audience is becoming uneasy.

“No.”

“Well what then?” The talk-show host is becoming irritated.

“I was lying on the grass in a park. At night. The elephant stepped on my head.”

Commercial break.

No one ever found out how it happened, but there was a deep indentation on the right side of his skull that elephant experts agreed was compatible with a bull elephant’s foot. People who knew him agreed that if anyone was going to get stepped on by an elephant, it was him. He was mauled by a tiger when he was twelve, and a leopard seal chewed off his left hand when he was sixteen. He’d had three head-on collisions by the time he was thirty, and after the third collision they revoked his license. That’s when he started roaming the streets at night and sleeping in parks.

Timothy O’Brien, an obscure journalist writing for one of the last print newspapers in the country, began researching the Elephant Man’s life, and after accumulating a mountain of material, he wrote his book: The Man Elephants Step On.

In the first week the book sold 500,000 copies in paperback and had over a million Kindle downloads. Disenchanted Tea Party members formed a new party, The Elephant Party, which caused an uproar in the ranks of the Republican Party. And then, before the 2012 campaign was over, a spokesperson for the Elephant Party announced that Sam Klopf (the Elephant Man’s Christian name) would run for President in 2016 with Timothy O’Brien as his running mate.

Karl Rove sank eight million dollars into a smear campaign that backfired and put Mitt Romney nine points behind in the polls, and Barack Obama quietly added Klopf’s name to his secret assassination list.

Such are the vagaries of politics in a free society.

click the Hcolom Press logo to visit the web page...HCOLOM PRESS is the heir to Vagabond Press, which began as a main player in the Mimeo Revolution of the Sixties and continued publishing right into the jaws of the new millennium. HCOLOM PRESS embodies the spirit of Vagabond Press, retooled for the times we live in.

Hcolom is Moloch spelled backwards. Moloch is an Old Testament deity to which children were sacrificed, a practice society still engages in with increased enthusiasm. Consumerism is the new Moloch, manifesting itself like cancer in war, politics, the arts and religion, in every nook and cranny of human endeavor, draining the intrinsic beauty out of life and mutilating the innocence and magic of childhood with its commercial meat hook. HCOLOM PRESS intends to publish books that by their nature repudiate this pernicious force–novels, poetry, children’s books and books that transcend genre.

Our launch book, in June of 2006, was John Bennett’s novel, Tire Grabbers, a fable of sorts, a reality book rooted in the fantasy of our times, the story of the coming of Moloch and the children who rise up in rebellion against it.

Books of kindred spirit will follow close on its heels. Go for it by clicking here… or hit the Hcolom logo above… or just hit any of the following covers…

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