Talk Vomit

By Anastasia Jill

We Givens girls weren’t given very much — a hysteric mama, each other, and the gator-filled swamps of humid Central Florida. Mama was sick, so most of the time, it was just me and my sister, Selene, the two girls with mix-and-match daddies who didn’t look related but were sisters all the same. 

Selene didn’t like me that much because I was weak and slow. My given name was Apella, but my sister called me Impala, like the beasts we watched on National Geographic Wild. Selene pointed to the screen, to the scrawny little prey and said, “When an impala comes on screen, you know they’re going to die. Just like you, one day, I bet.”

I moved close to the television as a brown hide reached the water, the pull of dehydration stronger than fear. He dipped his nose into the water, taking slow, cautious sips.

I screamed, “Run, impala! Run!”

A television second separated the impala from life and death as gator teeth twisted him, his head bobbing in the soup of his blood as it spilled into the pristine Lake Victoria. All that was left were bones and black-tinted horns. 

“See,” Selene said. “And the same would happen to you. in that stupid impala’s place.” 

The camera panned to the gator exiting the rich lake. From that angle, he looked harmless; eighty teeth carving the smile into his face.

“He looks kind of cute,” I said foolishly.

Selene punched my arm, lines of red appearing where her knuckles hit. “Gators aren’t cute, they lash out at whatever they can.”

I rubbed the sore spot and scooted away, in case she tried to strike again. There was no point in calling Selene out — she would just tell me I provoked her. 

That didn’t stop me from arguing. “Even a gator can’t be scary all the time.”

She peeled skin from her cuticle, shedding like a snake before continuing the lecture. “Those jaws were made for ripping out throats.” The tips of her ears were anaconda red. “You’re too young to get it. A gator will kill anyone if given the chance.”

I’d seen just as many of these shows as Selene and knew for a fact she was lying. But I didn’t want to get hit again, and I couldn’t win a fight against my sister’s fears. The only thing she hated more than me were gators. Since she was older, and mama was too sick to be a mama, our entire lives were spent hiding from the imaginary worst.

I was the only girl in the whole third grade who would spend her summer at home, even though my friends invited me out all the time. Today, most of our neighbors were at the nearby lake for a swim. Selene made me stay home. She didn’t want us near fresh water, on account of brain-eating amoeba, disease-filled duck dung, and most of all, alligators. Even at my age, I knew she was overreacting, but like the ocean and moon, I followed her fears like a tide, falling and drowning in the waves of what a doctor called “compulsive neurosis.” 

This day was like yesterday, and the yesterday before; we ate our dinner, zoned out in front of our true mother, the television, and a program titled “The Wild Congo.” Selene had made us sandwiches — turkey and provolone, topping it with a mess of runny condiments. Selene ate first and sloppily, ketchup topping running down her chin, looking slick as baby hippo blood.

“When can I eat?” I asked.

Through a full mouth, she said, “When I’m done.” 

She wasn’t done for a while. 

“I have to eat until I’m full,” she said, as if that meant something. As if she needed the food. Selene was mostly gut these days. She ate when she was scared, which was all the time. 

All I could do was take small jabs at her while I waited for my turn at the scraps. I said, “I can’t believe you would ruin a perfectly good sandwich with ketchup.” 

She flipped back the top layer of bread and dumped three more clumps of red ooze onto the mound. “I don’t like provolone,” she said. “I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to taste it, I don’t want to know I’m eating provolone. It’s nasty.”

“Why do you eat it?” I said. “And leave none for me.’

“Because it’s there, and I need something to eat,” was her response, just as the television went to black, and Lake Victoria was shrouded in night. The gator king sat, mouth ajar, waiting for fish to jump. Selene said, “Bet that gator wishes it had an impala now.” She took the last bite of sandwich, discarding the plate to me with the remains; crusts and turkey flakes and tomato puddles full of vinegar.

I ate her meager offerings while she coughed over a hunk of bread too big for her mouth. Her hiccups came loudly, a hyena’s laugh in our empty living room.

When done, I pulled knobby knees to my chest and said, “I’m bored.” 

Still choking, she found the space in her for a yell and snapped, “That’s not my problem.” Once the food was down, she reached over and shoved me, hard. “Look, ‘Wild New Zealand’ is coming on. Shut up and pay attention and learn something.”

I didn’t want to watch ‘Wild New Zealand.’ I was sick of nature shows. I wanted to watch ‘My Little Pony.’

“I’m not watching those little kid shows,” Selene said, practically projecting me off the couch and down the hall. “Here’s an idea; why don’t you go bug mama?”

I had no intentions of visiting mama, not later, and definitely not now. After her last stay in the hospital, she came back with a drug that made her sleepy; to me, she was just a carcass of our former mama. But I was too little to go anywhere alone, and Selene didn’t want to go anywhere. 

I sat back on the couch and watched ‘Wild New Zealand.’ 

Selene went to the kitchen and poured herself a drink without asking if I wanted one. She returned with a grin on her face as she watched a montage of fur seals and blue ducks. She almost seemed relaxed, her nerves settling into the equator of her stomach.  “I wish I could live somewhere like that,” she said. “New Zealanders don’t have to worry about alligators.”

“There are other animals you’d be scared of,” I said, but my voice wasn’t loud enough for her to hear me.

She was too busy sucking down a glass of water, her lips chafed and folded as she smacked them three times. She had to do things in threes. It made her feel better. When pressed, she swore it was because she was Catholic. But we weren’t church folks.

And Selene only prayed when she was broke down.

Selene kept moving her lips, running her finger over the volume button on the remote control. In intervals of three, she turned it up, down, up, down, up and down again. The show’s narrator screamed, then said nothing at all, submerged in my sister’s weird ritual.

“Stop that,” I said, snatching the remote and setting it at level 32.

Selene’s leg bobbed in place, shaking the whole couch.

“It’s even,” she said after a minute.

I shrugged. “So what?”

“I want it at an odd number.”

“Why?”

“Because I do, and I’m older. Now put it back.”

I sat on the remote, smothering it with my whole form. “I like the sound where it is, and you’re not the queen of the castle.”

When I didn’t budge, she overpowered my small frame, a flash of her pale arm pressing to my toasted throat.

“Get off me!” I croaked, but to no avail.

She choked desperately until I released the beloved control. All two-hundred pounds of her plunked to the other end of the couch. As I struggled to catch my breath and sit up, she relaxed, with thighs spreading like cat vomit on the fabric, as if she hadn’t just tried to hurt me.

“You’re crazy,” I choked out.

She didn’t respond.

“I don’t want to be in this stupid house anyway.” My voice raised to a shout. “I want to be at the lake with my friends! But you’re ruining everything. You’re no better than mama.”

Selene tapped her toe three times, a blob with a toenail spilling over her blue sandals. If she heard a word I said, she didn’t care one way or the other. She only cared about her show and her rituals of three.

Leaving her in the living room, I stomped past mama’s closed door to the room I shared with Selene and located my bathing suit, which Selene had hidden in the back of the closet, under her old swimming supplies. In addition to the suit, I took some goggles and a snorkel, and a pair of old plastic flippers, which made it harder to walk than normal. Still, I slid them on my feet and waded to the living room.

I blocked the television and told Selene, “I’m going swimming.”

She simply said, “You’re not strong enough to swim on your own.”

The goggles blurred my vision as I set them on my head, securing the rubber band. “Anything’s better than being here than you.”

Selene must have thought I was joking. “It’s almost sundown,” she said. “You won’t make it far.” She touched her nose three times. “You’ll go out the door and make it down to the corner, get scared and come running back here.”

I was determined to prove her wrong. It didn’t matter how hard it was, I would make it to the lake. After getting out the door, I would be free: there were water holes everywhere between here and the bigger lake. Selene talked big, but wouldn’t even go near one.

Walking was more difficult with the flippers on my feet, and my eyelids were fogged and exhausted with my vision restricted by the goggles. Still, I pressed on as the hot asphalt went soft with sunset. The sky boiled then simmered, neon pink turning to grey twilight. The wind soon picked up, shaking the trunks of trees to their brown, sturdy bones. There were no streetlights on our block, only the shadows of lamps from open windows.

It was stupid, and I knew that. My friends were probably gearing to go, if they hadn’t left already. It was principal — I was going to go in the water.

It took a short while to get to the lake, and as expected, my friends had already gone. The nearby dirt was dried, little bumps on the skin of the earth, but the shore closest to water was slick with mud. I dipped my toes in and out. Once. Twice. Stopping short of a third time.

Slowly, I made it to ankle-deep, then knee-deep. Soon, I was swimming, kind of. My motions were jerky and uneven, like a baby antelope learning to trust the ground under his feet. I was uncertain of the water, but it had a warm grip on my skin, pulling me into its steady control.

I was having fun for the first time in a while.

So much fun, I didn’t hear a growl until it emerged from the shrubs. 

I stopped to pull up my goggles at a corner near some saw grass that was trembling. Over the top appeared two alligator eyes, bobbing in the dark like fireflies.

I didn’t know it was coming until the gator barreled over a small hump of dirt, sliding onto the murky waters and lunging. I held tight to my goggles, but the gator kept his distance, eyeing me with the same caution as the impala’s tongue over the water. The gator submerged himself in the lake, eyes and nostrils piercing the surface. 

I was cautious, at first, Selene’s fears hovering in the atmosphere.

 But the gator wanted no part of me. And so I leaned forward to pet him. He sniffed but didn’t bite. I felt courageous, poking and prodding his weathered skin. My fingers pinched his horn-like scales. I bothered his forehead as I would a stray cat.

He unhinged his jaw like Selene eating her sandwich. The gator wasn’t hungry, he was cooling off — a fact I learned from the TV. Acting mighty brave, I stuck my arm in and out of his mouth, grabbing and yanking at the soft bits of his gum.

“Stupid old gator,” I said. “Like Selene, you’re all bark.”

I pushed my luck. The gator snarled and groaned, by my words and more likely, my prodding. The space he had granted me vanished down his throat.

The goggles fell into the lake, a reflective screen for my terror and all I could think was:

Run. Impala.

Run.

But I was not fast enough to outrun a gator, especially on his home turf. He was on me in an instant, teeth clamped onto an arm and began to pull. My lower arm sank onto his tongue, a grainy surface processing the roll of my skin. My blood coated his teeth, which turned from a milky yellow to a rancid, spoiled red. I thrashed. The seconds stretched like the tendons on my arm and I saw in the gator’s eyes, like the weak beasts of the television, I was not the perfect meal but I was there. 

The gator began to turn.

He locked me in his death row, and that was it.

I was going to die.

But then, my arm rocked free, and I was thrust backward into the water. My gnawed arm fell limp to my side like a dislocated shoulder. Through the moonlight, I saw Selene beating the gator between his eyes with the sharp end of a stick.

The gator then lunged for her. She screamed and stabbed him again, howling and barking and blindly hitting the massive beast until he retreated under the water. Selene picked me up. She struggled, but she ran.

We were blocks away before she set me down and collapsed beside me on the sidewalk. It was dark, with only houses on either side of us.

Between gulps of breath, she said, “Did you really think I was going to let you go down there alone.”

My arm seared and stung with fresh blood and festering bacteria. I remembered from one of those nature shows that a gator’s mouth is full of disease. I told Selene this much, but she bitterly laughed and said, “Kid, you’re damn near lucky to be alive right now. Didn’t get the best look, but that gator was probably young. A runt of his own kind who doesn’t know to let the king do the hunting and the work.” She looked to my arm, limp like cheese falling from the breadth of my arm. Selene leaned over and kissed my forehead three times. “Don’t worry, Impala. You’ll be alright.”

She helped me to my feet and we walked back towards our home, where Selene would set me down with an ice pack, three washcloths, and call for someone to come take us to the hospital. 

I walked behind her, cradling my arm in its fleshy sling, counting the stars as they disappeared behind Selene’s head. My pupils filled my eyes like foam eclipsing the tides; the same beautiful tides that held dangerous creatures like a gum does a tooth. Selene kept me closer in her own way and gave me direction. She didn’t want to, but I was there, like provolone; she would fight so the apex predator would not get another bite.