Swampy Nightmares

Inspired by the time I spent exploring the Cyprus swamps of South Carolina. this is a fiction story but not far from reality.

He picked at the blisters on the insides of his thumbs.   Soon enough they would turn into calluses, he thought.  He looked up from his hands. The water was eerily still and reflected the setting sun so perfectly that the reflection and the real thing were indistinguishable.  He sat in his dinky green fishing kayak surrounded by Cyprus trees that went up until they summoned the demons in the sky and were so big around that twenty grown men couldn’t stretch there arms around there trunks. 

            He felt lost and scared.  He had adventured to far from home despite all the warnings the adults could give him and was now afraid he would never find his way back home.  He began to paddle in the direction that his intuition told him.

 Growing darker by the minute it was becoming impossible not to ram into the Cyprus knees that stuck out of the water.  He thought it might be faster to swim through the mucky brown water feeling his way among the roots, but the splashes in the distance dared him not to enter the water. 

            Out of frustration he stopped and began to yell and curse the swamp that enveloped him.  An owl in the distance called its familiar song to the tune of “who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all”.  A barred owl, he remembered.

            As he sat listening to the haunting night sounds bubbles rose to the surface surrounding his tiny plastic vessel.  The moons reflective light illuminated the rising head as it broke the surface.  The head seemed as long as his kayak and belonged to an alligator well over thirteen feet in length.  In instant panic the boy flailed in his boat and in turn the gator swung its tail to rush away.  The wave created by the beasts tail lifted the kayak four feet above the water and turned it over dumping the boy out.  He scrambled through the deep mucky water to a tree where he sat, shivering in fear and sopping wet chills, waiting for the daylight of tomorrow.