The Little Crocodiles

They said she raised crocodiles in her basement, but the crocodiles were never the
important part of the story.

The important part was her fresh sweet smell, thick enough to make the children say she
bathed in perfume, tried to excommunicate the smell of reptile with hours in the bathtub. The important part was the skin she let unfurl from under her extended collars and hems – the way that it was too thick, and her pores too large. The way that her long, silk gloves were ridden with clean bitemarks in serrated shapes, dappling all over like a designer logo.

She barely left her house when the neighbors’ children were old enough to understand she was alive, but too young to understand she was a person, when they would use the few occasions she sat on her porch with a pitcher of iced green drink – crocodile-flavored juice, obviously – to stare at her, imagining what was possibly ravelling and erupting inside of that titanic, too-sweet house. None of them knew exactly why they decided it had to be crocodiles. It probably had something to do with the faint tinge of green that seemed to cover everything about her – the moss in her house’s stone grouting, the unwashed pollen that clung to her like silver dust to a lung. And, of course, the detail they all threw into the air and wore until the words were clear and synonymous with her name, which none of them remember any more: she looked a lot like a crocodile herself, heaving and slow, quiet and sharp.

By the time they started to appreciate things like emotional music in unknown places, and the simmering, heliotrope hue of willing bodies after midnight, she had slowly fallen through the blank spaces of their interest, and was seen outside rarely. When they caught the bright, electric smell of sugar lushness during aimless afternoons, they thanked their luck, the sugar they’d gotten last night.

Her house was the only in the neighborhood that has avoided renovation. It was designed in an older, European way – a testament to a history that had never existed. Slowly, vines had wreathed the house all over. If there was wind in the air, it seemed to plummet and die at the overgrown ficus trees lining both sides of her walkway.

Eventually, the front door stilled completely, and no one could hear the raucous simmering of her kettle. Most importantly, there was something heady and musky and rotten merging into the sweetness they believed descended from the universe, all the time, everywhere, and so their parents sent a small squad of police to break through the overgrowth with machetes, and then again tear into her front door, coerce it.

None of the police were surprised that she was dead, barely beginning to brown and whittle into powder, as though time was a pestle. She was tucked away in the careful fold of her light green bed sheets, as though she were another piece of the ornate, antique decoration. The officers were surprised by everything around the decaying body.

Everything from the natural world seemed to have rooted there: carnations, gazanias, azaleas, delphiniums, butterfly peas, with their names, all of them, transcribed in coiled, opulent handwriting that seemed to breathe with love, the sweetest of all. Their thorns remained intact, as nourished and plentiful as any other feature. The pots and planters and boxes were placed everywhere one would expect them to be, and any other place where she believed they could live. In her death, all of the small lives seemed to droop, swaying, as though there were offerings of green hands and lives for her to take.

When the no-longer-children saw the photos of her house, leaked to a local news network, they cried a little, during moments of privacy. They wanted to call the police and berate them for theft. They wanted to break in and hunt, making sure there were no pairs of yellow eyes glimmering under leaves. They wanted to encounter her soul, reanimated and hulking, beginning to eat them, or for her crocodiles to eat them, or whatever. They wanted to tear the sweetness from her body and floss their teeth with it, rub it into their skin like skin care cream. They went to her wake, head held low, sipping the limeade she loved, mourning the wrong woman who had been the wrong kind of supernatural, their cufflinks burning cold and still into their skin, a constant reminder of where they were.

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Cherry Cheesman is a writer from the Carolinas, with a particular love for their native trees. Her work is published or forthcoming from Bending Genres and Eunoia Review. She is a current undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, where she is given the wonderful opportunity to interface with writing every day. In her free time, she loves to crochet.