Swamp Love (Flash Fiction)

                                                       Art By Laurie Lail

Laurie Lail

   I seldom leave the swamp to see my kind, and they seldom come to see me. They like to move along the earth, upsetting lovers, inspiring artist, playing with lives. I don’t seek out humans. I wait, and they come to me. For centuries, truly as long as I can remember, I have had only the alligators and the ghost of alligators for companions. I adore my scrumptious cypress dripping with moss and my elegant alligators that bath beneath them, but I long for someone to say to me, “Swim with me. Let’s watch the alligators play in the sunset.”And I think I’ve found him.

   The alligators don’t migrate like birds or drift in and then away like the mortals do. Of course the ghost of the mortals who met their demise here stay in the swamp, but they are terrible company. They’re always whining and wallowing in what they lost. Why do they do this? After all, they asked for it? If they come to the swamp to kill something, don’t they know that they take the risk that something might kill them?

   Mortals. Most of them look over my swamp with thieving eyes, and slay what they can only see as beast and luggage.

   Then I saw him.

   I was lying on a limb, enjoying the cool and watching the gentle fog lifting from the swamp at dusk when the mortals came drifting through. He sat in the back of the boat. He paid no mind to the ones searching the mud for my pets. He looked up lovingly into the limbs and moss. He could see the magnificence of the swamp. I could tell. When the other ones took out their clubs to strike the alligator, this one had to turn his head away.

He winced for the alligator, with every dying twitch. He was so rare. He belonged here with me, and my scaly loves and the fog and the moss. I had to have him, the one with the cypress reflections in his eyes.

   The alligator that was newly made ghost lifted to the limb to be beside me. The mortals pulled the boat to the bank beneath me. He did not get out to inspect the body. He stayed in the boat and looked away into the swamp. As the others bagged the alligator’s lifeless corpse, I sank from the branch and quickly pulled him deep into the warmth of the murky waters. He fought, as mortals will. He raged against the water, against me, but I understood. I felt moved by this as the mica he kicked up and sparkled all around him, so I helped him. I pushed out his last breath, but as I watched the bubbles gurgle against his groping limbs. The bulging of his begging eyes staring with nothing but fear when the swamp gripped his lungs, and I had to wonder if we’d get along.