The Antics of Mr. O’Neil

In a little town, on a small island, there lived an old man named Mr. O’Neil. He was a typical old man; short, balding, wrinkled and hunched over. He lived in a modest house on a large hill on the far side of the island, with a giant banana tree in his backyard. He was simple by nature, and courteous to strangers as much as he was to his friends and family. He was a typical old man in every way, and like many old men, even more so than most old men, he was very senile.

Mr. O’Neil had a great suspicion that there had been an elephant sneaking around the town’s fish market for quite some time. He tried avoiding going to the seafood market, preferring to substitute fish with bananas from his tree in the backyard. His neighbours thought this illogical, but he did it nonetheless. When he did go to the market, usually on the order of his doctor who dubbed it necessary for Mr. O’Neil to eat fish for its vitamins, he walked around surreptitiously, as if someone was watching him. Nothing is unnoticed in a small town, and this abnormal behaviour was definitely not an excuse. Many of the people he knew thought he was schizophrenic, thinking that he was plagued with insanity to think such bizarre ideas, while others assumed he might have had some horrifying experience at the circus.

The explanation for Mr. O’Neil’s actions arrived one fine summer day. It was during one of those rare occasions when the old man did go to the market at the heart of town. He glanced behind him numerously as he walked through the stalls packed with delicacies of the sea, mostly varieties of fish. The strong, salty stench stirred through the air like the tides from which the sea creatures came from. He walked up to the clerk of a stall with sea urchins. The clerk was a young man in his late teens. He stared at Mr. O’Neil as the old man muttered to himself and glanced behind him a final time. He turned around to face the young clerk.

“M-m-may I have a b-bag of urchins?” he hastily asked.

“Which ones would you like, sir?” said the clerk, for there was a very large variety.

“The bright aubergine ones,” muttered the old man.

The teenager was on his way to grab a bag when he stepped in a puddle of peculiar slime. He looked down at his running shoes, which were covered in muck.

“No!” screamed the worker. “Those were new shoes!”

“You should watch where you step,” whispered Mr. O’Neil. “That elephant tries to get anyone any way he can...”

The worker tried to ignore the comment, but he could not ignore the sounds of screaming and stalls being knocked over at the opposite end of the fish market. He turned around to where the noise came from, and saw a large elephant knocking down tables while a crowd of people ran away in all directions. Once the worker saw this, he dropped the bag and sprinted in the opposite direction.

Everyone evacuated the fish market. They brought in the police, firefighters and animal control to handle the scene. They held down the elephant with ropes, trying to calm it down and get it away from the market. The police searched the entire area for clues on how this could have happened. They found traces of the elephant’s whereabouts everywhere: from traces of its footprints to a small pile of its feces where the base of a running shoe was traced in the centre. By the end of the day, they had figured out the answer to this incident.

“It turns out,” said one of the investigators, “that the elephant, named Dumbo from our sources, had escaped while being brought to the local zoo a couple of years ago, and had hidden in an abandoned storage building close to the fish market.”

The whole town was in shock at the whole ordeal, but even more, they were shocked at the fact that Mr. O’Neil’s suspicions were true. They tried to search for him afterwards, and found him shivering in his banana tree. His neighbours did manage to get him down from the tree and pry away the squished banana that he was anxiously gripping.

Ironically, Mr. O’Neil had been right all along. Everyone who had called him crazy apologized, and had a new-found respect for him. Mr. O’Neil was not afraid of the fish market anymore, and started to go there more often. However, it was only two months after the elephant episode that Mr. O’Neil stopped going to the general store, ranting that a gang of pirates was hiding in the basement...