Swamp Dreams, Pt. I

ISSUE #169

Welcome to Swamptember! To kick off our celebration of all things swampy—bog witches, gothic flora, big honkin’ lizards—here is the first part of a short story I’ve written for the festivities. I hope you enjoy:

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I was born with a mark in the corner of my left eye which made it appear forever bruised. Sometimes, at dusk, it would grow so purple that darkness swallowed half of my face. I tore myself an eyepatch of moss, but my father forbade me to wear it.

“No reason to divide life into two worlds, this one light and that dark,” he’d say, gently peeling it away. “It’s in that eye I see your mother, and all the good things you’ll come to be.”

Shortly after this conversation, my father would keep some moss in the cabin, in a cupboard next to the jar of fishing crickets. Used to be that I’d sneak from my cot, dodging lightly the floorboards’ squeaks as I crossed the cabin’s single room, just to watch those little legs scrape against the glass. I would pick up the jar and bring it to the porch, bent on showing them the moon. They’d erupt in song when they saw her face, like scratchy lunar metronomes.

I’d made a habit of letting some go, but quickly learned the better when I was made to catch more. When I cried, my father made me a deal. “Tell you what—you get to let one go on each and every night you feel. But every Sunday, after prayer, we go and teach you how to catch.”

So it was that my father showed me how to stalk and shoot the birds, bears, and deer. Even with thunderclouds sliding overhead, we still paddled into the swamp on every Sunday night. We had a guide—a snowy egret, who showed us where to paddle on our creaky, split canoes.

My father liked to narrate each kill by fabricating that animal’s swamp story. There was Old Sewell, the voracious bear, who was born so sweet until the lumberman’s ax felled dogwood on his den. There was Candy, the broken-winged owl, who sheltered eggs on the charred yellow birch. If my father was going to exercise will through destruction, he felt it only fair to replace it with creation.

He would tell tales with themes I knew not how to parse. Once, he talked of the Mammoth of Georgia, a prehistoric beast which had gotten the instinct—whether born with a defect or warped along the way—that its skin was too heavy to live in freezing climes.

“Long, long she traveled,” he would say. “She could not bear a life in the frozen North.”

“Those bones are somewhere out here?” I’d ask, knowing what he wanted to hear. He’d nod and turn so I’d see him smile, an upturned corner as he paddled ahead.

Mother’d been one of many scientists always making their field trips here—usually joined by reporter escorts from some Atlanta Constitution or Journal. On nights without game, my father’d tell her story: how pretty he’d found the way she would stare, the slightest nods while he jabbered on and how she’d look away to speak.

“She was grabbing those words from some deep, inner fog,” he would always say, “flitting through words like fish through the reeds till she came to the one that was perfectly right.”

One story rarely told but forever hanging like Spanish moss was the tale of how we lost her. I remember the day he paddled me down to the muddy island where our first home had burned—the jellied film from dried water on my wrists, the stink of camphor as we approached, sharp rocks and twigs mixed in with the mud when my father had us kneel at the site. All that was left was a charred, gray outline of the house they’d built by hand.