The alligator gnawed upon the stray shreds of flesh flapping along the boy’s femur. The boy’s pallid face had long melted into the joyless hearth of the dead. Not a face the alligator would recognize, much less the police upon discovering the chewed up body weeks later. The boy would never know the pleasant furrows that thickened in middle age, the initial panic upon discovering the disappearing hairline, the giddy shock that came from losing virginity, the many mistakes to be made and made again, and the happy realization that came from knowing nothing. The alligator had known some of this in her twenty-two years, loosening many eggs and watching tiny tails spiral away after a mere year. The alligator, however, was not sentient enough to understand the intricate workings of the Judeo-Christian calendar. She could not understand holidays, weekends, or even the two dollar Tuesdays that had been erected ignorantly in her honor (“Grab a Gator beer before seven!” shouted a wet bartender a hundred miles away), and certainly didn’t waste her scalar energies worshiping a god. But she remembered the pokes and prods from the farm and had been actuated by some primal vengeance directed towards any intruders in the glades, whether human, lower on the food chain, or perfunctory nuisances that great jaws could reduce and transmute into acceptable nutritional value. The alligator only consorted with humans from these tertiary vantage points. But the boy and the alligator occupied the same natural realm, shared more in common than they could ever confess to each other. Even if this duo could somehow work out an interspecies communicative conduit. Even if the boy could walk away like a Dickensian cripple, hopping proudly on one good leg while hailing a hackney, and passing along a tale decades later beginning, “Let me tell you about the morning in which I met the alligator.” All the boy and the alligator had at this present moment was crazed conjecture. Sometimes, this was enough to get by when there weren’t any explanations.
Alligator
– July 23, 2008Posted in: Uncategorized
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
How can a face melt into a “joyless hearth of the dead”–or even a joyful one?