You get word that there’s a questionnaire circulating about you. It’s sent via US Postal to one hundred of your friends and acquaintances, asking about your daily rituals, what you eat and drink, how you transport, if you engage in obscene or criminal activities, and whom have you bedded. Some recipients think it a prank and send back all sorts of hilarious hogwash tales. Other friends get nervous and send you word, which you get, and so you flee.
*
You flee to Manchac Swamp with canoe and rice.
*
To list all of the creatures of the swamp that prefer to eat in the night, swaddled in the cooling humidity, meal fluorescent under the lunar lines poking through the clouds, would require a heart capable of breaking, being made cruel, and being repaired by a night in the swamp.
*
See the water black and still, except for minute wake from canoe and paddle cutting through the confetti of green duckweed.
*
You are alone. There are sounds you’ve never heard before, and you will never see the things from which they come. You are scared and you consider going back to your car, putting the canoe back on the trailer, but ignoring that fear, you continue into the feathery cypress trees and their nests of gray moss.
*
You receive updates via carrier nutria. The little guy, tail snaking behind him like a lullaby, brings a note between his orange woofers. You pet the nutria, give the nutria rice, read the note.
*
Years ago, you were in a beautiful Northwest City when a person you loved was lost in an accident. You had done monumental things with this person, like graduating college, evacuating from a southern city during a deadly hurricane, and moving to the beautiful Northwest City where together you pondered a future and feigned fear of pregnancy. You did the day-to-day stuff in unison, like deciding whether to splurge on a trip to Zupan’s Market or just hit up Fred Meyer’s.
*
Now, enough time has passed that you would be unrecognizable to the person lost in the accident. You have turned callous, your conversations are sick with sarcasm, and you have the alcoholic delusion that you are somehow not of this new world.
*
The nutria’s note tells you to venture further into the swamp and trust nobody. You recognize the handwriting as your own, so you listen. You send the carrier nutria on its way.
*
Lost in Manchac Swamp, you see an alligator break the water’s surface, its eyes glowing from the moon. You stop paddling and consider the efficiency of the alligator’s death roll. You hope it’s fast and painless. In your wonderment, the glow of the alligator’s eyes sedates you, and you topple forward into the water.
*
You squeeze your eyes shut and go limp, sinking to the shallow bottom, and you wait. You wait, but nothing happens. So you open your eyes. You see the alligator. Motionless, suspended, the alligator looks at you and then returns to the surface.
*
Another canoe glides in above you, eclipsing the moonlight, and you ask yourself if you should feel embarrassed. And then, you hear something tapping on the surface and you see that there are marshmallows falling from the sky and onto the water. The alligator quietly eats each of the marshmallows. You ascend because what else is there to do when the alligator you threw yourself to is eating marshmallows.
*
In the other canoe, there is a person smiling. The person looks at you. The person is still smiling after looking at you. They extend a marshmallow out to you and place it in your mouth. The dry softness of the marshmallow, sweetening, as it grows wet on your tongue.
*
You are walking down Esplanade Avenue now with the person from the canoe. You have a child together. After all these years, you still look over your shoulder wondering who will come for you and when. Your partner is too beautiful for you. There is not a move your child makes that you don’t adore. They make you so happy that you worry you’ll forget all of the mistakes you had made, and so you worry that you’ll make them again.
*
A man on his porch is sitting at a wrought iron ice cream parlor table, the chairs the kind with their backs twisted into the shape of a heart. He beckons to you, your partner and your child as you walk by his house. He pulls a rose from a bouquet that’s slowly taking its last sips of water from a Krewe du Vieux cup. After snapping the thorns, he offers the rose to your child. Your child is eager to hold the rose, and you have to remind yourself that it’s okay.
*
The man comes closer. “What has brought you here?” he asks. You tell him your whole life story because he seems willing and drunk and maybe you are too. Your partner does the same. Your child smells the rose, and then, being just a toddler, takes a bite from a petal. Everybody laughs. The man says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He has just gotten home from visiting his dying lover at hospice. “It’s been hard, but I’m just grateful I have the capacity to love Richard even more now,” he says. “Out of all the things that dine at night in this swamp, it’s fear that consumes more than anything else.”
*
You think you know what the man is talking about. You wonder what you will say to your child when the time comes to reconcile the happiness salvaged from so much loss. Your child takes another bite of the petal. Chew slowly, you think to yourself.
Peyton Burgess is the author of The Fry Pans Aren’t Sufficing. He lives with his wife and child in New Orleans, where he teaches at Loyola University. This story is part of a novel. You can find more about him here.