We all know the feeling.

Something fills the room. Something that everyone can see and no one is naming. The conversation moves around it, carefully, the way water moves around a stone. We talk about everything except the thing that matters most.

In this world even the elephants are made of the things we use to express ourselves, stone and guitar and the instruments that measure pressure. Their eyes are gauges. They are always reading. Always taking in how much is built up, how much is contained, how close things are to the point where something has to give.

The speech bubbles are empty. Not because they have nothing to say. Because some things are so large, so present, so obvious to everyone in the room that the words haven't been built yet to contain them.

The televisions fly past. The balloon drifts on. And the elephants stand in the field, gauges turning, waiting for someone to say the thing that everyone already knows.