by Josie Braaten
Five Dollar Dinosaur
I had never seen an alligator before. Not live & in the flesh. Not like you & your mom. There was a picture to recreate from back when you were tiny behind your glasses. In the faux rock reptile gardens of my Great Plains childhood, we had snakes.
I’m not sure what triggered it—the dream I had in the spring. The one where I lost my footing on a set of stone steps & slipped into a surprisingly clean, alligator filled moat. I remember how the steps had stretched taller as we descended. There was no castle involved. Just a lot of well-cut limestone.
You were a half flight ahead of me. I recognized the people between us by their backs. I remember counting the dips of your right shoulder.
I like to think that all the workers (we were at a strip mall style reptile garden) were living out a childhood fantasy. It pleases me to imagine them in their kindergarten photos—dragon printed T-Shirts, green framed glasses. They would have been banned from renewing Nat Geo Chameleons from the school library.
Me. Except menu swap Chameleons for Horses.
I have accordion hands. I hold court behind your dismantled cigarette boxes, paper coasters, garnish, pizza crusts. I deadhead my plants & flick the brown or yellow leaves over your porch railing. When we used to go out, you kept a body count of the straws I bent to un-usability.
On one old date with a medical resident, I bent my paper straw to pulp. I was left watching the ice melt into my cold brew. He lived in a converted asylum. Great ceilings, maybe haunted. He worked nights, primarily. He’d had to buy blackout shades. I threw the coffee away as we left. Its weight pulled the trash bag down—two white wings settling softly over everything that would never be recycled. He didn’t say anything.
I dig small craters out of the mosquito bites on my shins. People who don’t know me ask what happened to my legs. I tell them the mosquitos are bad.
Not anymore, but I used to play a game of gliding on my shopping cart. A few quick steps before stepping up onto the wire running board. Sailing down empty, miscellaneous home goods aisles. I’d always step too fast, catch my shinbones. I bruise leopard—yellowed near the center.
I touch you too hard sometimes.
Peel your white sunburn too early. Hold your dry hand too tightly. Nails between your rib bones as you move inside me. The pull back. My shoulder bites too hard but not hard enough to show on your Florida tan.
You told me about the squids at the aquarium. How the coordinators had to tell the kids to touch gently. Two fingers, like this. You ran yours along my arm. You cup your hand around the back of my head—between it & the bed board when you fuck me & do the same as I lower myself into the low passenger seat of my Jetta. You brush the blood off my lips. Quit picking.
I’m a good behavior show pony.
As a toddler, my mom (an occupational therapist) would bring me along to her appointments to model on-track development. Me on a rubber mat playing age appropriately with colored blocks, threading shoelaces through holes in wooden boards.
I used to ask to run extra laps after junior high track practice. I have excellent credit. I’m good at being someone to be proud of.
The medical resident texted me after. He was polite &, allegedly, not “at a good point” for a relationship. That it was him, not me. That he was mostly nocturnal. That it wasn’t the easiest. He’s the only person I’ve met who hasn’t told me that I’m paranoid for thinking that there might actually be alligators in the riverwalk’s canal.
That the signs aren’t there for show.
You & I—we passed the alligator between us. It was a juvenile. Exploited by the aquarium for the convenience of being the size of an August zucchini. Its little jaws were wrapped in white tape. Cold blood breathed behind its thin lizard skin. The weight of it was still.
I don’t know if it was male or female. I forgot to ask. Neither of us asked. We simply assumed that once it outgrew holding size, it would join all the others in a concrete pond by the entrance—water spotted glass at water level, 360-degree views of their swimming finger claws.
While your mom washed my alligator hands off her phone, we watched them paddle over each other, bump against the glass, & swim back the way they came.
Author Josie Braaten is a recent graduate of the University of South Carolina MFA program. Her work can be found in Allium, a Journal of Poetry and Prose; Pithead Chapel Press; Hobart; and LIT Magazine.
Artist TJ Norris is an award-winning conceptual artist based in Fort Worth. A graduate of MassArt and NSCAD, his photography deconstructs the urban environment to explore social complexity and personal loss. His work is held by the Amon Carter Museum and Harvard University, and he is the author of the monograph Shooting Blanks.
Gulf Stream Magazine 