It\u2019s often that I hear him that I\u2019m already awake, but just so, teased across the membrane of sleep with a toe or two, with the sheets damp and my head a nub above them, withdrawn, when I hear him.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe I smell him first, and that\u2019s what wakes me, the sulfur, the factory run-off he\u2019s slicked up out of, is still dripping with when he\u2019s made it here, creaking across the floorboards, clicking his talons, dragging his tail, closing the distance between us over who knows how many miles, driven up over embankments and through empty intersections by the drone of all-night manufacture, by ceaseless by-production, vibrations felt out in the swamps.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He\u2019s disturbed; I can feel it and almost empathize; it\u2019s a long way he\u2019s come to be up on his hindquarters, stabbing for purchase with the probing-end of the cane he\u2019s hobbled himself to carry, to be now doffing his stovepipe hat in appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this inferred by shadow, let me say, the shape of him as it struggles to stand on the other side of the blanket, the mass of him moving as it does, with an ever-present sway.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLet me in,\u201d he could be saying, \u201cit looks nice in there, and warm. Snug, like the nest of my youth. Shielded from aerial predators by reeds. The blankets seem to me like reeds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the sound produced is hostile, guttural, in all ways alien, and I am afraid, afraid that even the slightest motion, my breathing beneath the sheet might be interpreted as invitation, as anything at all, when interpretation seems all the alligator is after, intoning as he is through serrated jaws; when giving in to the desires of an alligator, any serrated-jaw-possessor in one\u2019s own bedroom, seems ill-advised, even foolish, connected, as it were, by tearable sinew, to any number of other antecedent needs, wants, namely hunger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But he knows that I\u2019m there, has deduced as much from the shape of me as I have him and peers, patiently nictitating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know he\u2019s an alligator, as he knows I\u2019m not-alligator, knows little of from where I\u2019ve risen, knows the factory, the coating stink of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He knows the narrow network he\u2019s traced to get here, the carved course of his nightly visitation; that much is clear in bent brush and claw-marks in dried mud, in the parted sawgrass and decorative median-strip flower beds between the swamp and this room; unless, and I\u2019d ask him if I could, there\u2019s a scent, some chemical cast-off I\u2019m not consciously producing that he\u2019s able to detect beneath the suffocating miasma of the factory\u2019s smokestacks and must heed, for unknowable alligator reasons, on the most expeditious path available, which is still wending, circuitous, accounting for the fence-cuts and gaps in topiary that make traversal even at all possible, plus the coast\u2019s near-constant wind changes; the scent is wafting after all, subject to redirections, especially along what I know to be a fairly busy shipping corridor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a non-discountable possibility it\u2019s a sound he\u2019s hearing, not a scent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m known to talk in my sleep and can\u2019t be counted on to comment on content or volume. I could be singing \u201cCome All Ye Alligators,\u201d or screaming, and he\u2019s here to help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All this to say, it\u2019s probably not his fault that he\u2019s here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It says more about me than it does about him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How I conduct myself in ways both conscious and not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Certainly more about that than the Alligator Agenda, than occasionally spotlit slit-eyed searching on the side of the interstate, though who\u2019s to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
________<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Don Television is an American writer. His fiction has been featured in or is forthcoming from <\/em>Angel Rust, <\/em>Apocalypse Confidential, and <\/em>Identity Theory. Reach out:\u00a0www.donatello.vision<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"