Crocodylus Acutus

By Lisette Alonso

Desperate to replace her recently deceased mother, Mari got involved with the first reptile to snap his jaw in her general direction.  A sizeable American Crocodile with a penchant for water fowl and the occasional wandering Chihuahua, she stumbled across him during a half hearted attempt she made to drown herself in the murky canal water that ran adjacent to her house in south Miami.

She never considered herself suicidal really, just lonely since her mother died.  They’d never lived apart in Mari’s 35 years, and in the weeks after her death, the house seemed to swallow up their memories like the dark surface of the canal, the simple image of her mother’s face the first to go.

     She spent the first few nights after the burial slipping out of bed just to stare at her mother’s photograph on the wall, trying to recall her features--the sharp curve of her jaw, the deep color of her mouth.   Gradually moments they shared began to come in to question as well.  Had they gone out to dinner just last week?  Or perhaps that had been a month ago, or longer, or maybe it hadn’t even happened at all? Who could she confirm with?  Her mother had taken their entire history with her and after a while, it seemed to Mari, she couldn’t be sure the woman had ever existed at all.

     It was almost a month later that she waded barefoot into the tepid water, wearing her pink cotton gown and drunk on Seagram’s wine coolers, intending to end her life.  Although she never actually took into account how she would sink to the bottom of the canal, she imagined only that the water would consume her every last inch, the murk embracing her like a lost child.  But instead of drowning her grief, she slipped on the algae covered rocks of the bank and pitched head long into the cluster of reeds where the crocodile had been sleeping.  His instinctive nip at her head was more surprise than aggression really and Mari refused to take it personally.  She could sense his remorse later when she’d chuckled about it the water’s edge, her failed suicide seeming somewhat trivial.

     She talked to him that night until the morning rose behind the mango tree shading the bank.  The silent croc listening to her unravel her past for his benefit, laying it out on the damp grass before them like a grimy tangle of string.  How her father had been a crocodilian, though she’d never actually met him.  How her human mother had hatched her alone after their brief affair, urging her through the egg’s delicate shell, thanking God when she was born more human than reptile.  She was all skin and hair except for her belly where a smooth track of bone-colored scales spread up from her pelvis to her sternum, covering where a mammal’s navel should have been.  Her mother had fashioned her a belly button of sorts with a pair of nail scissors, but the incision never healed as nicely as she expected, and the result was an ugly yawn in her scales where an angry bulge of red tissue pushed out a half inch or so.

     Her aging pediatrician had called her skin condition a rare type of eczema, and while she never made a lot of friends, she managed to escape ridicule during school to go mostly unnoticed.  Her best friend Lourdes had seen her scales once during a sleepover when they were in middle school, but since Lourdes herself had a fuzzy black mole that covered the better part of her left cheek, she’d never mentioned Mari’s unusual affliction. 

     Paralyzed by shyness, she didn’t even kiss a boy until her senior year of high school when she had a short-lived relationship with her Chemistry Lab partner.  When after a month of making out in the school hallways, she finally decided to have sex with him, he’d been ecstatic.  His name was Jorge Estrada and he had bulging frog eyes and a hooked nose.

     She walked home with him on a Friday afternoon when they should’ve been in fifth period, while his parents were still at work.  Awkwardly he led her to his twin bed in the room he shared with his brother, working her blouse off in the doorway.  She remembered how fast he was breathing, how the house smelled like cat litter, how as he fumbled with her buttons he suddenly froze when his fingers slipped between the waist band of her skirt and her bare skin.  He took a step back and stared at her exposed front, the shiny plate that trailed down from beneath her bra reflecting sunlight against his poster of Darth Vader.

     “It’s...” she began, not knowing what to say, crossing her arms across her chest and looking down at her shoes.

     “Is it contagious?” he asked, still staring.

“No,” Mari shouted, then quietly again, “no, it’s not.”

     For what seemed like hours, they stood exactly like that, without saying a word.  Mari stared at her feet, shielding her body against Jorge who with his mouth agape, weighed his options. 

     When he finally decided to have sex with her it was rushed and painful.  The two of them tangled on his brother’s bed, Mari’s shirt and skirt still on, her panties dangling from one ankle.  He didn’t kiss her or even look at her, simply buried his head in her hair, and abruptly made his entrance and his exit in a span of less than a minute.  While Jorge called her occasionally after that, they stopped making out in the hallways, or even sitting together in Chemistry, their off-campus trysts exclusively sexual in nature.

     When later she discovered that Lourdes and Jorge had become an item, Mari was hardly angry, because mostly she realized that some boys just preferred fur to scales.  But Lourdes saw it differently and chose the boy over the friendship, shutting Mari out from her life entirely during their last year in school.

     On the shore of the canal the crocodile blinked two sets of eyelids and yawned.  Everyone has a story, he seemed to say with a deep grunt.  Mari smiled and stroked his back, unbuttoning her night gown, exposing her belly to the sun.

     She moved him in almost immediately.  Truth be told she had waited much too long for the right reptilian to grace her doorstep, and while he was simpler than she would have preferred, she loved to hear the click of his claws against the floor tile.  It reassured her, the way the bed sank to the left whenever he crawled up on her mattress. She dozed to the sound of his tail tapping against the footboard, to the pin-wheeling of his truncated limbs when he dreamt.

     She was surprised at how easily he’d roused her instincts, their improvised mating rituals were a dance she’d always known the steps to.  Yet the human in her lurked just below the shell of her ecstasy.  When Mari stretched her pale neck before the croc’s mighty jaws, it was her brittle human psychology that secretly wished he’d crush her esophagus between his teeth.  When on occasion the crocodile vanished from the canal’s shoreline, it was the woman in Mari that questioned his devotion, that harbored reservations about having to acquiesce to his innate reproductive habits.

     Still she found herself smiling more often than usual.  Frequently while she photocopied invoices at work she would slip her fingers beneath the buttons of her blouse and gently caress the scales on her belly, finding secret pleasures in their electricity.  No longer a source of shame, the smooth plate represented everything she loved about the crocodile, everything she was finally able to accept about herself.

     Her mother’s house had changed as well since he’d arrived.  The vacancy left by her death had been edged out by the crocodile’s wordless presence.  Mari was amazed to find the pulse of her despair had been the absence of her mother’s sounds; her off-key humming, the banging of pots in the kitchen.  While the croc did not speak, he introduced an abundance of rich noises to the silenced home, drowning out the worst of Mari’s sorrow.  Grunts and clicks, coughs and hisses, the purposeful swish of his tail as he made his way across the living room, it gave her renewed substance in the wake of the presumed non-existence incited by her mother’s burial.

     Secretly she longed for a nest of her own, overflowing with snapping hatchlings she could gather into her arms (for want of a larger jaw).  There was something heartening in the prospect of reproduction.  For Mari it had little to do with immortality and more to do with purpose, with curtailing her self-imposed isolation.  Yet the more she anticipated becoming a mother, the longer it seemed to take.

     Truthfully, she did not know whether to expect eggs or embryos.  Mari didn’t think there was a book on the subject.  Although she did run the occasional internet search, she was never very successful, unearthing strange fictions instead of scientific conjecture.  Who else could she consult really?  The uncertainty of the wait made her irritable and her inability to confide in anyone added to her dismay.

     She tried sharing her worries with the crocodile, but his rigid composure needled her impatience.  Seldom deviating from his impassive grunts and indifferent hisses, Mari found it harder every day to interpret his thoughts.  She knew his trust in nature was unwavering, as ingrained as his call to feed, as predetermined as the setting of his teeth. What will come will come, he might say if he could form the words.  Yet it was impossible for her to condition her own faith to follow suit.  What little she had was misguided at best, mimicking that of her mother whose cautious fear of an unyielding celestial deity was more superstition than actual religion.

     What would she be without children of her own?  She wanted to tell him.  Who would mourn her absence?  It was impossible for the crocodile to empathize; his satisfaction would not be found in the potential lament of her un-tethered spirit, but in the joining of body and earth, in the sweet disintegration of vacant flesh.

     More and more the crocodile found solace in the canal.  Blatantly evading Mari’s endless drone, he’d slip beneath the surface as she watched silently from the water’s edge.  Some nights she’d sleep on the shoreline, awaiting his return, nestling her head in the damp grass while the crickets burrowed in her hair.  She would wake up as the sun peered over the horizon and the crocodile would be there, dozing beside her, smelling of marsh.  It was difficult for her to stay angry then, impossible not to forgive him when he returned so faithfully to her side, resisting the almost certain draw of open waters.  

     When Mari finally missed a period, she was hesitant to rejoice.  The possibility was a sacred stone she was reluctant to share even with the crocodile, who seemed to withdraw further in to his armored skin.  Recently he’d become restless, pacing the house absently, knocking over end tables and torch lamps with his muscled tail.  When Mari left for work, he insisted she leave the sliding glass door open so he could slip away into the water undeterred, so he could come and go as he pleased.

     Gradually Mari saw her middle widen, expanding to confirm what she suspected.  Along with her girth, other aspects of her body changed daily.  Aside from being perpetually exhausted, she often felt herself radiating heat.  After work she came home to sleep curled on the bathroom tile, grateful for the cool touch it offered her bare skin.  In the predawn hours she feasted on raw meat in the kitchen, gnawing at it with her back teeth, unaccustomed to the texture but relishing the copper taste it left on her tongue.

     A month and a half later the crocodile was gone.  Mari returned from work to find the house abandoned, the sliding glass door a gaping mouth, the canal desolate and still. For hours she sat on the grassy shore anticipating his return, watching the sun sink as the sky flared tangerine. As night approached, she dozed on the ground, dreaming fitfully of the ocean and overturned cars, of squawking gulls and black sand.  She awoke before sunrise still alone, her stomach hunger clenched.

     It wasn’t until she saw the early morning newscast that it was clear.  The brief report showed the previous day’s struggle, the trappers and their rope, the crocodile pinned and thrashing on dry land, trying to roll uselessly in the dust of the road side.  It took six men to load him into the pick-up bed, with an audience of neighbors clutching their children in the camera’s periphery.  The reporter covering the story proclaimed matter-of-factly how the crocodile would be put down due to the threat he posed, because of its absence of fear.

     Perched on her sofa’s armrest, Mari cried silently, her arms cradling her stomach.  He was gone.  There was no way to reclaim him.  On some level she’d known he would not always be with her, but she had never truly contemplated his departure or its motive.  She expected he would at least see his offspring, although she never imagined them raising it together.  She grieved his loss; it pained her physically to think about his fate.

     Yet she was not as paralyzed as she’d been after her mother’s death, the sadness was not as penetrating.  Turning off the television set, she phoned the factory and said she would not be in for the rest of the week.  Still in her work clothes from the day before, she undressed on the back patio and crept to the canal.  Slipping in to the water, Mari swam into the reeds where she’d first encountered the crocodile and submerged herself.

     Beneath the murky surface, Mari felt at peace for the first time since her mother’s death.  Free of sorrow and conflict, she felt only the water saturating her skin, dampening the noise above, diffusing the growing light. Inside her, the baby shifted, rolling in her womb, the sensation like drowning.  Breaking the surface of the water, Mari gasped for breath, clutching at the slippery bank, the soaked earth coming apart in her fists.  By the time she finally dragged herself out of the water she was certain the crocodile’s spirit had communicated with her.   She could feel him in her teeth, in the vibrations of her bones.

     Later in the kitchen, after devouring her third flank steak, Mari would leave her home for the last time.  Heeding the crocodile’s call, she would drive to the everglades and abandon her car at a deserted rest stop; her keys still in the ignition, a trail of discarded clothes leading into the marsh.  She would disappear naked behind the sawgrass, shedding her previous life like an uncompromising skin.  She would introduce the restless child inside her to the predictable dangers of the protected wetlands, to the comfort of brackish water, to the dependability of the food chain.

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