Diary of an Alligator Queen Read online

  Diary of an Alligator Queen

  Winter Reid

  Diary of an Alligator Queen © 2017 Winter Reid

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  Don’t be that guy.

  This e-book/book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 Winter Reid

  Cover Design by Winter Reid. All stock purchased.

  Proofed by Picky Cat Proofreading

  www.winterreid.com

  Created with Vellum

  Dedication

  For my beloved Bona Dea.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  A Note from Winter

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  My Dear Nadine,

  Our city is strange enough without the gifts the river brings, but it brings them just the same. Most often in the spring when snowmelt from up north races toward the Gulf of Mexico, and the Arkansas River jumps its banks. When it rains like the sky is an open fire hydrant, flooding fields and roads and taking out bridges, this is when the river delivers her flotsam: trees, garbage, and the occasional car.

  We met the year it brought visitors from the South, as well as the detritus; the alligators that worked their way up hundreds of miles of swollen river veins, up from the Gulf to the Mississippi, and through sloughs and bayous to the Amadahy Preserve.

  I remember how they ate the goslings in the park, and how the familiar call of the Canada geese that overwintered there became a different sound, frantic and sad.

  I remember the arguments over how to handle the beasts. The back and forth over whether they should be hunted or allowed to stay. I always saw the issue from both sides, understanding why keeping unrestrained alligators in a park heavily visited by children might be unwise. But I believe in natural selection, even though it is often cruel, even though I have fought it my entire professional career. I believe dark and different things deserve to find their place with equal freedom as things that are good and light. That sometimes light exists in darkness, and good in the different.

  In the end, those creatures most capable of adaptation are the ones that thrive. They are the true kings and queens of nature.

  With Love and Gratitude,

  Remy Renfield

  Chapter One

  The First Dream

  I’m always running when he finds me, just past the footbridge where the trail is too narrow and the underbrush claws at my sneakers. Where the cypress trees make a canopy as dark as dusk at noon, and black roots rise up from the dank water in snarls. An old oak lies on its side by the edge of the path, its massive root ball caked with orange clay, the thin fibers broken and frayed like snapped hairs. Beneath it is a cavity—a gaping wound in the earth that bleeds small worms and grubs. I see only darkness inside it. For some reason, I almost turn around and run back the other way, but it’s nearly sundown, and I can’t afford the extra mile if I do. It was foolish to add an unknown loop to my route so late in the day.

  I push through the uneasiness that haunts me every time I run these trails. Push through the sense that there’s something here that won’t respect my pepper spray and has more in store for me than a flash of an old, wrinkled penis behind a trench coat. I reach deep into myself for a sprint, keeping as far as possible from the opposite side of the path.

  Even so, I don’t see the monster coming, his arm too quick when it shoots out from the hole to grab me, locking tight around my ankle. I go down hard, scraping my bare thigh raw on the paved pathway, broken pebbles digging into my skin.

  He pulls me closer. I kick and fight, but I can’t scream, not with the wind knocked out of me. He wrestles me down into the hole and I can smell the fresh soil, alive and dank. I claw at vines and small trees, but I can’t stop him. He hits me, and the world goes black.

  When I blink awake again, it’s dark and my back is wedged against the earth. I look up and see the mouth of the hole above me, the roots a black silhouette against cypresses, the dim light beyond making me squint.

  I can feel the monster pressed against me; the cold hardness of his body, his bare skin. It smells exactly like the dirt around us. He catches my jaw in his hand, yanking it up before he bites me, and ‘bite’ is too gentle a word for what he does. He hurts me, and it isn’t erotic or beautiful or tender, but brutal, and he muffles my scream with his palm.

  Chapter Two

  I jackknifed up in bed, gasping. Hot bile burned a hole in the back of my throat. My bathroom was a scant twenty feet away and I fell off the bed scrambling for it, Granny’s quilt tangled around my legs. I slammed into the doorjamb with my hip, slapping at the wall for the light switch. The compact fluorescents overhead stuttered on. I squinted against their brightness, but couldn’t stop moving to the mirror. My hips touched the cold porcelain of the sink and I reached up, putting my fingers against the glass. Lining them up with the fingerprints I’d left there the night before.

  And the night before that.

  And every night for three months.

  The glass was cool and grounding. My pulse beat against it through my fingertips, and the steady thump told me I wasn’t dreaming anymore.

  I counted off my points of contact: hand on the mirror, hips on the sink, feet on the floor.

  I listened to the city outside my apartment: the sirens and car horns.

  I took a breath and concentrated on the air moving in my lungs.

  Only when I’d accepted that I was truly awake did I bring my gaze up from the pink tiles under my toes to the rose-colored wall.

  From the wall to the metal edge of the mirror.

  From the edge of the mirror to the reflection of my chest.

  I found a spot where my skin met the strap of my tank top and followed it in the glass up to my collarbone. From my collarbone, I scanned up to my neck and the rope of scars there where he’d savaged it, where he’d torn my skin to ribbon. Tears came, as they always did, landing on my hand as I reached up to touch the damage, the scar tissue smooth and tight under my fingers.

  Dropping my hand from the mirror, I leaned against the sink, letting it take my weight as I sank to the floor. The urge to vomit ebbed, but my br
eath was still choppy. I stayed in that position, curled up like a pill bug, until my chest didn’t feel so tight. By the time I got to my feet, my nausea had resolved, my heart rate back to normal.

  I kept rubbing my scar. I don’t know why it comforted me. Maybe because it was evidence I had healed. That I was not currently bleeding or hurt. That I’d survived.

  My cellphone was in the sink where I must have dropped it, the locked display reading two-thirty in bright aqua digits.

  For years my typical sleep pattern consisted of lying comatose from ten at night to six in the morning. I almost never even got up to pee, but I’d been waking in the middle of the night—every night—for months. At first it was easy to fall back to sleep, but as my memories-turned-night-terrors became more and more vivid, the less my mind seemed inclined to settle down after one.

  A string of notifications ran across the top of my screen when I unlocked it—four texts and a voicemail. The voicemail came in last. I put the phone on speaker, laying it on top of the toilet tank before I studied my scar again in the mirror. I listened to Jackson’s recorded voice as I ran cool water over my wrists.

  “You gotta be kidding me, Nadine! This is my only night off for the next two weeks and you’re not even home!”

  I sighed.

  “Nadine! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Introducing my boyfriend, Doctor Hyde. Yes, I mean Doctor. He screamed at someone else, presumably a random stranger.

  “Hey, fuck you, buddy! What do you think you’re looking at? You wanna go? I said, ‘You want to go?’ No, I didn’t think so.”

  Voicemail Jackson ranted some more, said something about my mother he’s pretty lucky I couldn’t make out, and fell down. I knew he fell because there was a deafening clatter followed by some bad language and a muffled sound I took to be him putting the phone in his pocket, still on speaker. An angry car horn blared, way too fucking close by the sound of it, coming and going on the recording with a whoosh.

  Over the course of the previous decade, I’d come to suspect all doctors were required to take a secret class in med school on how to become tyrannical infants whenever things didn’t go exactly their way. Doctoring is a high-stress job, I get it. But damn.

  Luckily, I only got visits from Doctor Hyde on the rarest occasions. Or did, before I’d morphed from a totally reliable, steady, sure-I’ll-do-your-laundry, quasi-live-in girlfriend to an erratic nut job in record time. Which is to say it wasn’t the first time since the attack that I’d left him hanging.

  But I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. When Jackson said it was his only night off for two weeks, he wasn’t being melodramatic. He meant it. And while I loved meeting up with him and making out in closets on his occasional breaks, or in the bathroom at the laundromat on Sunday mornings, I loved waking up next to him more. I was hoping to wake up next to him for the rest of my life. So, no, passing out sitting upright on the toilet lid—mascara wand in hand—before five o’clock was not my plan.

  When I’d woken up at ten, it was all I could do to crawl into my bedroom. There could have been a mass alien invasion since then, and I would have slept through it. There’s no way I would have heard my phone all the way in the bathroom. Hell, my door buzzer would have been white noise.

  I walked over to my desk in the living room and opened the top drawer, pulling my secret notebook out from underneath a stack of bills. It was white with a swirling red motif all over the cover. Sketches fell out from between the ruled pages, quick studies of a face I’d barely seen in the darkness, scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper. I’d left the fangs out of all of them. First, because I hadn’t actually seen his teeth, and second, because I couldn’t bear to draw them in. Not just because it hurt to think about the fact that they’d been on me, but because the whole idea that they could have been makes me straightjacket-worthy.

  Three months earlier, I’d been attacked. According to my hospital record, the culprit was presumably a dog, although I’d never said so. Instead, I’d made the mistake of insisting it had been a man with a Dracula complex. Just on the off chance they wanted to test me for HIV, Hepatitis, or any other deadly communicable human diseases. They didn’t, but my attending physician made me meet with a psychologist as a condition of my release.

  Dr. Kallen was beautiful, with dark red hair and freckles all over her pale, pale skin. She wore a crisp, white coat over a tan pantsuit and used words like post-traumatic stress disorder and emotional trauma. I would have been more inclined to listen to the rest of what she was saying had I not despised the way she looked at me. She didn’t even try to believe me. Instead, she’d said we often make up images or false realities to help us cope when an actual event is too damaging for our minds to work through. I’d asked her how having your throat nearly ripped out by some kind of vampire worshipper on meth is less traumatic than a dog bite. She’d suggested I might have a fondness for dogs that I didn’t want to taint. My reply was that I have a greater fondness for naked men. She’d said the workings of the mind were often too complex for us to understand. She’d also told me I needed to write things down as they came to me, and that doing so would make it easier for me to piece everything back together. Hence my notebook.

  Collapsing into my computer chair, I opened the front cover. The first page was blank, but I filled it with black ink in minutes, filled it with my slanted, sober script that lost all the curlicues it had when I was younger. I wrote everything I remembered about the dream. When I’d finished purging, I shoved all my loose pictures in between the back pages and snapped my notebook shut, wrapping a rubber band around it to keep the sketches inside. I slipped it back into its hiding space under some files but that didn’t feel hidden enough, so I moved it into my closet and wedged it underneath my suitcase in the back corner. That felt better so I left it there and went to my dresser, pulling out jeans and a dark tank top. Dressed, I slipped on a Hogs cap Jonathan had left, feeding my ponytail through the opening at the back.

  The thing about insomnia is, past a certain point, you know there’s no way you’re getting back to sleep. At least not until ten minutes before you have to be up. Lying in bed doesn’t help; it’s torture. And technically, I’d already gotten a solid nine hours.

  My overdue library books sat where they had for weeks, on the table by the door. As coma-inducing as nineteenth century river commerce research could be, it wasn’t helping me sleep through the night. Snatching the books up, I blew a kiss at Olive, my nine-year-old gray and white kitty, and left, locking my apartment behind me. The floorboards of the hall groaned under my feet, and I tiptoed down the stairs, trading the building’s relative silence for the noisy city outside.

  The hot, rubbery smell of sunbaked asphalt rose in the night air. Traces of sweet honeysuckle mixed with the more invasive stench of the river bank; a constant taint of rotting fish and wet wood. All the scents around me came together in a cocktail of perfume as unique as a snowflake, as unique as the city herself.

  Drizzle painted the night, sketching orange halos around street lamps. The sodium bulbs quietly hummed as I stepped away from my building, tilting the bill of my hat down so it hid my face.

  Downtown, I passed packed piano bars and nightclubs oozing boys in polo shirts and girls in turquoise, sequined halter tops. Everyone reeked of bad beer and drunk sex. Six months before, I’d loved St. Catherine Street. Like so many other things that had changed since the attack, I didn’t love it anymore. It was too loud; too crowded.

  The Historic District was quieter, as it always was after five. I took a left at Locke Cabin and passed the Old Assembly House to get to the library, climbing wide, white marble steps to the overnight drop. I slipped the books in through the slot and they hit the bottom of the padded box with a soft thud.

  The rapid tap of too-high heels on pavement—sharp and unsteady—broke the quiet, echoing down the street. A woman in a glittering, purple minidress rushed down the sidewalk, thighs pumping, the thin strap of her matching clu
tch slung over her shoulder.

  Southern pageant princesses spend a shit-ton of time in the gym but they don’t typically go for leisurely strolls alone after midnight in their partywear. Not unless they’re packing. It’s not that southern girls are scaredy-cats. They’re not. They will take your fucking eye out with the two-hundred-dollar cross pendant they got for graduation, but on the off chance they do end up in the hospital or the morgue, nobody wants their momma to see them in a dress with their hoo-hah hanging out.

  She glanced behind her and bit her lip, tucking a thick curl of blonde hair behind her ear, and nearly tripping over a man huddled on the sidewalk, sleeping under a tattered trench coat. The city had its fair share of homeless folks, but seeing a man like that in the Historic District after business hours was about as common as seeing last year’s prom queen strolling alone in hooker heels at three in the morning.

  She didn’t look back at him, but he looked at her. And something about the way he looked at her felt all kinds of wrong. He got to his feet when she was about twenty feet away, taking a couple steps in her direction.