Doughboy

SWAMP MEMORY

SWAMP MEMORYTo be a boy of seven living in a swamp is to be alive to all the sounds and smells that such opportunity affords.

I remember the warbling of the gray-brown birds hiding deep in the leafy Cypress trees. I remember the mosquitoes bumping against my bedroom window as they competed with the flitting dragonflies to gain entrance into our house. I remember also the chittering cicadas that smashed into the walls with carefree abandon, leaving in their wake a dark, sticky residue like greasy rain. As I lay in bed at night, I could hear the rustling grunts of some strange animal as it crawled about in the thick, wet mud, l*****g away the cicadas' remains with their long and efficient tongues. It was a time of great joy to be alive in the swamp with all its humid desires.

Strange, wild flowers droop and sway in the night, growing in abundance next to the familiar Spanish moss and butterfly orchids. Many were the nights that I listened to the joyless loneliness of the frogs as they jumped about. And many were the nights that I heard their strange aborted croaks as something unseen bit deep into their warty bodies, snatching away their lives in an instant. In the morning, stepping into wet clayey muck, I saw heaps of frog legs strewn about in careless abandon next to the old stumps and fallen logs that surrounded our house. Something lived in the hollow trunks, I realized, something that came out to feast only at night. How my heart thrilled at the thought of some creature whose appetite might rival my own.

There is something out there, I thought, something that competes with woodpeckers and warblers, with salamanders and lizards. It is something with an appetite and it's hunger is great. Why did it not eat bobcats and otters, I wondered? They were in profuse abundance. Would that not be a tastier meal…a larger meal?

One night, I lay in bed and watched as large snails crawled in their unhurried manner along my bedroom walls, their slime trails crisscrossing in a pattern that seemed to give new meaning to free form art. It was at that moment, as darkness completely swallowed the swamp, that something scraped against my closed window, as if attempting to gain access. For that one brief moment, I saw a captive bull-frog caught between large splay lips whose width seemed to stretch from ear to ear, although the creature had no ears. Large pop eyes regarded me with unabashed curiosity. I watched in mesmerized glory as those thick lips opened and closed in one quick motion. The creature swallowed and the frog was gone. Four little legs, briefly moving, lay captive between those wide lips.

The next morning, I saw a great accumulation of dismembered legs lying in the muck next to my window. Even now, after all these years, I sometimes see again those tiny movements of something akin to life, as if the frogs' legs are trying to reassemble themselves into something whole again. This knowledge gives renewed hope to my own hunger, which seems even now to rival the creature I saw that night so many years ago.