Swamp Dreams, Pt. II

ISSUE #170

Swamptember marches on, dragging its scaly feet down the canal of time, and our widely-recognized celebration of all things swampy—chokemoss, ancient hooch, sweatflies the size of quarters—has become quite the rage around the world. Here’s more fiction:

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I stole my mother’s field journals when I left for Atlanta. I hadn’t the heart to ask my father, so I slipped them from his bag before I left for the train. There were five books in all, wrapped in thin leather and filled with pencil sketches. I’d sit in the breeze at my Emory window and leaf through their brittle pages.

The oldest book was smaller and made by hand, bound with stiff yarn while the others were glued. These sketches were outlines in shaky hand compared to the fullness of the others—bears and serpents of all shapes and sizes, oversized eyes and mismatched legs—the scribblings of a very young girl, just as I’d been during the fire.

Drawings in later books were filled with details only possible from observing real flesh. The thousands of dots that shaded her panther must have taken her hours. She’d used these books when the swamp was her lab, not her home—observations of rigor and discipline, the sketches of a new scientist.

Her work kept me afloat on my sleepless nights. For a time, I tried to make sketches like hers, but my pencil lacked her grace. Resigned to looking out the window, I got to know a cat whose nightly prowl would take her through the quad. She’d stop if I made even the slightest sound. Her expression I recognized from my mother’s panther—a searcher who needed nor gave any answers.

That cat was all that would hold my attention until I raised my gaze. I saw a light in the window across the way, and in it, a face as forlorn as mine. A watcher with the same unwavering gaze.

She only moved to shamble out of bed, crossing back and forth with an absent gait and coming back with a robe or a cracker and cheese. She watched with compassion and understanding—true attention, as I had found it. Her waving fan told me she was Northern, so I named her M. for Mammoth.

Whenever we would watch together, the distance between buildings would fold. It was a night with M. that I had my first dream. I melted into a twilit garden, lit by electric bulbs sprouting from trees and steady fireflies who blinked a soft green. I ran up a hill around a kidney-shaped pond and up to the vine-soaked, pillared home like the ones I saw when I first came to the city. In the middle of the parlor on dark wooden floors was a bathtub angled against a wall.

M. was bathing, and she did not cover up. I kept my eyes on hers. I knew we would never speak through ordinary means, but, consciously or not, I felt I had someone I could count on that passed temporal or spatial limits. I wondered if she knew she was visiting me.

It was dark, pre-dawn when I awoke to a scraping sound outside. I thought this scuffle might be the cat, but soon I heard bedraggled breath. I stood up without wrapping and went over to the window.

Something was digging at the dead loblolly pine, some shroud of white with tangled hair. It was M., clawing the ground beneath the roots.