1/1/11

Crocodile Eyes
By Troy Manning


It was a pretty day and Kristi sat at the end of the dock and dangled her feet in the lake. Although she had a healthy fear of crocodiles, sometimes she could be careless. The dock extended far enough across the water that no less than three could fit beneath it without constituting a crowd. By the time her mother called her in for lunch, her feet were like prunes. If one of them were eaten, she thought, the crocodile would have good digestion for a week. Kristi was fond of making morbid jokes, even at her own expense. Kristi’s mother was named Melody Lee and she was quite a character herself. She used to play practical jokes on the crocodiles and she once almost paid the ultimate price for it.

Life on the bayou could get pretty boring. Melody knew this firsthand and she was sympathetic to Kristi’s plight. Sometimes it seemed like crocodiles were the only company one could keep, aside from the gnats anyway. When Melody was just about Kristi’s age--twelve and a half--Joris Lee dared her to wrestle one of the smaller crocodiles that used to look at him funny. Despite Melody’s knowing that Joris tended to be the paranoid-type, she always felt protective of her future husband. And because of the blinding effects love could engender in a hapless soul, such as Melody was at Kristi’s age, she thought the crocodile looked at him funny too.

Melody lured the crocodile out from under the dock with her feet, then pulled them up when its snout was just visible. When nearly the entire length of its body was in view, Melody jumped into the water atop its back. It thrashed its tail and wagged its open mouth and flailed its legs and even emitted funny sounds, but this was all to no avail. Melody had her arms firmly around its neck and her legs wrapped around its torso. She steered the crocodile toward shallower water where she could breathe more easily, but where it was still deep enough for the reptile to experience an unpleasant drowning sensation if she could only keep its head down long enough. In all the excitement, however, she was unable to hear Joris’ shouts that the crocodile’s mother was speeding toward Melody, and that she was looking at her with evil eyes. Before the mother reached her, Melody had lost her grip on the smaller crocodile and had to scramble toward the shore to gain her footing. By the time she was aware of the mother, it was too late for escape. If Melody’s father hadn’t heard the ruckus Joris made and come out with his twelve-gauge, neither she nor Kristi Lee would have been here on a pretty day like today.

Although Melody had sustained some scarring from the spray of buckshot, she was still a looker. And now, as always, Joris Lee liked the way she looked at him.


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Troy Manning is a graduate of Westminster Seminary California. He has recently been taking literature classes at Cal State University, San Marcos where his stories have been published in the creative writing program's Cat Ate My Chapbook, Fierce Notes, and the Spring 2010 issue of Oh, Cat!