I.
Her arm is a lantern post, arching toward a crossroads in the chiaroscuro of the caravan lamps. There’s something vaguely narcotic about us now, as if some minor mental faculty has been lobotomised by our comorbid consciousness. Her lipless mouth is petalled with silver scales, more cold-blooded than ever. ‘Naked men have trespassed on our island,’ she says with a voice unnatural as Death Valley rocks rotating on their low and level sands. Our children are sleeping fitfully nearby. Their little egg bodies, sacks of steaming air, are still suckling and puffing in the present fog. She takes my hand with a slick, chicken-wing grip and we go beyond the caravans and campfires, to the high mansion with doors of bruised smoke, and the pulsing curtains that sweep miniature reptilians into the darkness. ‘Our earthworm mass-migration caravan has come’, she says, her dragon’s breath ghosting along the watery glass staircase. ‘Here, they will be golden again,’ she announces to the cue-ball crowd suddenly assembled behind me in their dimpled, torchlit nakedness. They watch her climb the crystalline steps in fanatic awe. Then they follow, shoving me aside with bare shoulders. On and on, they ascend the spiral stairs that lead to oblivious murmur. ‘They’re babies, see?’ she winks at me, as they transmute to infancy, and suddenly there’s something of the pure serpentine about her – becoming pythonic with her gargantuan eyes and crenelled jaw detachments, shedding ivory seashells along the polished stone as she slithers, and swallows whole.
II.
There’s a tin ferry to beat you back against the endless tide. This boat bobs and bends along a lonely riverbank with a clink and dip. ‘We’ll have to walk,’ my attorney declares, as he sinks under the tittering surface, in suit and breeches, bubbling down like a witchy pot. ‘How can a river go up them mountains?’ Dolly Parton wants to know, shining blondely in the dark with her pink fascinator swelling up like an oozy ghoul. My mouth has scabbed shut, years back. ‘In my country,’ our public defender returns from the waters to clarify, ‘Women’ll cut the hands and feet off transients, and they call it peak civility.’ He is talking in tongues, of course, and at my ankle is a very watery woman, a splendid siren leshy, tattooed with butter knife obscenities she’s carved into her radiation-purpled skin. I am a lone mollusc by sea when she’s finished with me, sealed eternally to a deepening shelf.
III.
When my father was young, he said, ‘snails be having a thousand teeth’. He was a snail himself, he said. ‘You expect me to brush all that?’ He asked God for the answer. God spoke one alarming reply-to-all: ‘I am Amphibian Rex.’ Out of watery sacks, my victims spore, renaissance like, in the muddy, six-feet-dirt under the Mount Pritchard swamps where we used to kill and breed. I weigh the risks of going home again, uncovering the evidence, like the paperback you lost somewhere with the dogeared gills and doggerel marginalia. Their little spines are yellowed as cheap chardonnay, rimmed with buttermilk toffee. Will the forensic fae-folk understand my obscurantist M.O.? I’m confessing to serial murder, but aren’t crime memoirs cliché, detective? For now, my son has arrived, like chimes at midnight from the county fair, wearing a baseball cap adorned with horns and canonical heresies. ‘I have dreamt, father,’ he says with eyes you meet in broken favella mist. ‘I look down on the earth from bunk-beds angels do not dare.’ An old sermon thunders from his foghorn gob, plagiarised, while his disciples drag sacks of moist horse meat. ‘Do you think you’ll be pardoned in the morning?’ he asks me, in parenthesis. I answer him in parable: I am a toad, covered in blisters, weeping, like some whale’s breaching cyst, heart-sick on the open sea, a thousand fathomless nights from home.
Worried by my erratic breathing, Linda woke me the other night to ask if I was OK. My response: I'm fine, just folding socks and undies to put into each aquarium I have acquired for various people.