The Extra Large Trunk

Written and Illustrated by Casey Gomez and Tatum Polan

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Deep in the African savannah lived an elephant named Ellie. Ellie was unfortunately born with rather a large trunk. Because of her extra large trunk she was teased by the other elephants. All this teasing made her feel gloomy and unhappy. The other elephants told her that her trunk is so long it looks like a giraffe's neck.
One day, Ellie suddenly gets an invitation to attend a birthday party for one of the elephants in her herd. “Mom, I can’t go! All they’ll do is make fun of me!” Ellie nervously said. “Oh Ellie” Ellie’s mom shook her head “Why don’t you just go, you’ll miss out if you don’t.” Ellie thinks to herself, she remembers all the horrible names she got called by last time she attended a party. But she doesn’t want to disappoint her mom, so she looks at her mom with teary eyes and says “Ugh fine I’ll go.”

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The other elephants think that Ellie is weird and funky because she has a longer trunk. It makes her feel repulsive and panicky. She never feels like she can go anywhere without someone staring at her or whispering behind her back. 
Ellie would always ask her mom when she was younger, “ Why do they stare at me like that?”
 Her mom always replied, “ They look at you that way because you are beautiful.” But now she is older and knows that the staring is a bad sign and the whispering means that they think something is wrong with you.

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Finally, she decides to go to the birthday party. When she got to the party she was astonished. The party balloons were the brightest things she had ever seen. She waves goodbye to her mom but is still nervous about getting teased. She sits under a tree by herself until one of the elephants comes up to her. All of the sudden she is shaking knowing that some insult is coming her way. 
But the elephant says, “Hello.” 
She is relieved until another elephant comes over and says, “ Why are you hanging out with her she is the weird one let’s go play with the normal elephants” to the friendly elephant.

The first game at the party is a relay race! Ellie’s nervous but at the same time she is excited. She notices that the elephants from earlier are also running the relay. Soon the race starts, Ellie’s teammates are laughing at her large trunk. Ellie tries her best but when she starts to run she finds herself tripping over her trunk and landing face first into the ground!

The other elephants notice Ellie is lying on the ground, they start laughing. “Ha ha, look at Ellie” one of them shouts. 
“I bet she’s gonna start crying like a baby” another elephants says. She walks it off still feeling upset. She knows that she is not a good runner but now realizes that she will never ever be great at running. Ellie was feeling immense, she never accepted her large trunk but now she really wasn’t too jolly about it.  Ellie felt so sad and embarrassed that all she wanted to do was to crawl into a cave and never come out. 

The elephants start playing catch with each other in a enormous circle. Ellie is good at catch because of her trunk. Her trunk is like a long snake. Unlike a straight stick that doesn’t bend. Her trunk makes it easier for her to get the terrible throws from the other elephants. She can go up, down, and to both sides no problem. Also, she can throw the ball pretty well. None of the elephants knew until now because whenever they played ball at recess she would never get picked. 
The other elephants always told her, “ The teams are full, sorry.” However, they weren’t sorry because even when the teams we small they would tell her to go away.

But now she is happy as a clam to get to play. Even though they aren’t playing the normal game that they usually do at school, Ellie is still glad she can play. Out of nowhere, one of the elephants throws the ball way over Ellie’s head. She spots another elephant right in the way of getting hit. So she runs as fast as she can but doesn’t think she will make it. “DING!” an idea arose in her mind. She knew her body wouldn’t make it but her trunk could. As she reached out, she felt the ball come right in trunk. The elephant who would’ve gotten hit thanked her. She felt like a hero. But only for a moment until she heard that they were going back to teams for the final relay race.

One more relay race! Yay!

Thank you!