Alligator Salad

Joanna Theiss

My roommate is cooking alligator when I get home from work. I know it’s alligator from the smell – like the inch of water at the bottom of a canoe – and I know she’s done it herself, with the shotgun resting against the coatrack.

I remind her that I’m a vegetarian.

“But it’s so satisfying,” Sheena says, not turning from the stove, where she uses tongs to flip the sous-vide meat. Her waders leave muddy tracks on the tile.

I have the alligator dream once or twice a month, more frequently in summer. In the dream, the alligator holds a sharp, skinny knife above me while I gulp hard at the air. He sticks the knife under my chin and slices down to my belly, then spreads me open. Removes my bones, rinses me out with salt water.

Sheena spoons butter over the paws, softened for hours in my pressure cooker. She presses down so the fingers splay. The claws scrape the bottom of the skillet.

“Make it a salad, then,” Sheena says. “Vegetarians like salad.”

In the dream, when my juices drip off the cutting board onto his webbed feet, the alligator loses his temper. He tosses the meat of me into the trash because the mess on his feet is my fault. It was my fault, for going home with a man I didn’t know. For drinking that third glass of wine, for saying yes to a kiss.

Sheena sprinkles balsamic vinaigrette over iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, sliced black olives cool as fish eyes. With wooden spoons, she puts half on my plate and half on hers, then settles two paws on each. Sheena has the alligator dream, too. In hers, the alligator holds her in a hug while he feeds from her neck.

I suggest we give thanks for the meal but Sheena’s already eating. The meat has swollen but the skin has shriveled to a leathery, crackly green, the color of seaweed. She sucks the meat from the joint. Tilts her head, considering, then reaches for the salt.

“Don’t let it get cold,” Sheena says.

Despite the weapons curling out from each finger it is not a violent thing anymore, not after Sheena’s attention. I carve a tiny slice from the alligator’s palm and as saliva pools in my mouth, I understand how hungry I’ve been. For this. For more than the empty calories of forgiving and forgetting, of praying for a reptile’s eternal soul. Tossing aside knife and fork, I take the alligator by the wrist and begin to gnaw, shifting the gristle to my back molars, juggling the crispy skin on the tip of my tongue, chewing, grinding, slurping, feeling the vinegar sting of alligator juice smear and glisten on my chin. Across from me, Sheena lets out a soft burp. If we dream tonight, it will be of this, of alligators that can’t hold us down.

Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a former lawyer living in Washington, DC. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Chautauqua, Peatsmoke Journal, Milk Candy Review, and Best Microfiction, among other journals. She serves as an associate editor at Five South. You can find links to her published works and her mosaic collages at www.joannatheiss.com. Bluesky: @joannatheiss.com.