The Rats

The worst part of the tunnels are the rats.

Rats know danger is close. The males stand and examine the danger. The danger, like a ghost in its many forms of gray, stands and hisses back at the rats.

The males freeze and sniff the air.

The female rats dart away in chaotic fear, avoiding encounters. The gray danger is rolling through the tunnel and 47 miles of subway track is under water.

The subway walls are heaving with water pressure.

Mina’s train plows through the escaping rats. Wheels screech metal on metal, pressing rat flesh into hot steel.

The train does not stop, is not knowing.

Ahead is a crack in the tunnel walls where water gushes.

*

And there is a crash

Of light

Of metal of glass

Of meat

*

O Dark Waters

The Dauphin Island concrete bridge spans three miles of murk and brackish waters. It joins coastal Alabama to a narrow strip of sand and oyster shells some 15 miles long. It’s a barrier island once called Massacre Island.

Ben sits cross-legged in the passenger seat. His bare legs stick to the worn leather seat. He winces and pries his sweaty legs up. He shoves his bare arm out the window, into the hot moist wind. He twists his hand to create a wind channel, flushing his face with driven air. He angles his hand again like an airplane and imagines himself flying. He grins at himself in the side mirror.

Ben’s blue eyes are like the passing sky. They search for something.

There, overhead pelicans flying in v form. Ben points at them and calls them dolphins.

“Dolphins?” asks Papa.

Well, yes dolphins in the sky. That is what they are.

The packed station wagon crosses the causeway, a low-lying road with no banks. They drive at level with the black needle marsh grass and uncollected drift wood. Ben shakes his head at sludge filled plastic bags and cracked yellow water bottle litter.

Somewhere, imagines Ben, in the marsh amidst the human trash, is an alligator. Or a turtle or two, with glassy eyes unblinking.

The station wagon chugs up the first bridge hump. All around are heavy-bottomed thunder clouds, brown water, and white caps.

Unlike New York and its bitter threat of winter air until Memorial Day, coastal Alabama’s spring is hot and wet.

Filled with sudden yet endless drenching, the Spring revives the crying frogs. The rains freshen the murk water for shrimp, oyster and fish.

Critter cat growls in a cage stuffed in the back of the wagon.

Ben leans out the window, cooling his face in the haze.

Claude hunches forward, urging the old wagon to get them over the bridge. She can break down or take a break after their 1200 mile trip south.

At the top of the two-hump bridge is a parked van.

A madman stands there and looks not right at all. His head, too large. His hot eyes bulging crack confusion. He is the black dog. His tight twisted body, gnarled like over spun copper. Clothes hang on him. The west wind wraps his shirt around his bones and he yanks the van‘s back door open. Out spill toddler children. He will show his wife.

Are they his children?

The madman snatches the first child as he tumbles out of the van and touches the pavement with his tiny foot. Then the madman grabs the second child. He squeezes the first under his arm and drags the third to the cement bridge wall.

The winter wind blows over the Mississippi Sound. The brown waters of the five rivers-- mixing in Mobile Bay and the Sound --are a brew begging him to pause and to reconsider.

The madman does stop for an instance, to summon his strength to hurl the three infants free over the cement wall.

The children do not fly. They squeal and tumble to the shallow murk below.

The fourth child hides in the van and the madman wrenches him out and throws him too. He sets him free to join his siblings as birds not as falling stones.

Ben doesn’t see this happen. But he senses something not right when their station wagon reaches the top of the bridge.

In slow motion the wagon descends, and Ben turns back and stares at the line of cars behind them. He looks beyond the impatient fat heads in white monster trucks. They strain to pass their wagon, and he thinks he sees something. A cat?

“You see something boy?” asks Claude.

Ben shrugs, it is trash, plastic blowing. He doesn’t see the four children flying.

He doesn’t see the 80 foot fall of four small bodies. Like sand bags measuring gravity’s fall, making little waves on dark waters.

Olga Alexandra Writes

O Dark Waters