Alligator

The reptile brain has been debunked, but for a long time, I didn’t know that. I thought that when I drank, I peeled back the layers: skin to fur, fur to scales, and by 3 am my primordial urges would overwrite any remaining humanity. I’d grasp in the dark at my ugliest desires, in a moldy kitchen, oysters left on the counter until morning, eggs splattered and dried between the blinds. I want you, like the flesh on a stick dangling off a pontoon of ogling tourists, the fifth time a woman with claws like mine has shrieked at my existence. I’m only looking for a meal.

When I met you, you were in a lunchbox, neatly packed and wrapped around yourself. Missing your head but otherwise intact, as if you were lightly steamed, or maybe raw, but it didn’t occur to Dream Me, on a field trip to the Oakland Zoo, that there was anything amiss. I woke up just before slicing into your thigh. I woke up salivating.

When I finally ate you, you tasted familiar. Like coming home or chicken. A red, too-sweet dipping sauce masked the foreign and unnameable. I could hear your struggle in the silence on our side of the table. A baby in a barrel, looking like a snack; it felt worse than I remembered, doubt dragging me back into the swamp. I’ve always loved a mixed metaphor, but I couldn’t find the right one until I stared into eyes like ancient marbles, wondering whose nature was the more evil, exonerating myself through pseudo-psychology and the romantic smell of mud. But some things are redacted before I say them, and some things I will leave on the boat.