People come to Cannon Hill for two reasons: to die quietly or to watch the gators.
The gator pit is behind the Shell station. There’s a faded lawn chair wedged in the fence and a warped “NO TRESPASSING” sign that everyone ignores. It’s not an attraction in the official sense. The town doesn’t list it on any brochures, but if you ask the guy behind the Shell counter how to get there, he’ll hand you a bag of pork rinds and say, “Walk toward the smell.”
They say three baby gators were dumped there in the 90s by a traveling man who sold fireworks from the trunk of his Pontiac. Some say he still lives in town. Others think the gators gobbled him up.
And the gators, they didn’t die. They adapted. To the years. To the changing climate. These days there are six of them. Or eight. Nobody’s totally sure. A kid once tried to count them and allegedly lost a finger.
My friend Donnie moved here because his second wife wanted “a backyard and a Target.” The truth is, Cannon Hill only had one of those. The other burned down in ’04 and nobody replaced it. The backyard came with the house. It had a tree that leaned so hard to the left it looked like it had political opinions.
Donnie was by far the most nervous guy I’ve ever seen. Always rubbing his temples like he was trying to erase a bad tattoo from the inside. He worked maintenance at the middle school until he saw a dead possum give birth between the ceiling tiles. After that, he said he “couldn’t ignore the miracle,” and quit to help the church.
He got a dog. A fat, floppy-eared thing named Crunchwrap. Took long walks. Read some pamphlets. Told people he was “getting in touch with the basics.”
Then one morning, he bought a net gun off eBay and drove out to the gator pit wearing cargo shorts and a bandana. When the neighbors asked why, he said, “I’ve been having visions.”
When they asked what kind, he said, “The bad kind.”
The first capture was accidental—the gator caught in the fence trying to eat a possum. Donnie knelt beside it like a cowboy meeting his rival. “I see you,” he was rumored to have said to the gator.
By the third day, he’d caught two more gators and was seen trying to teach them sign language. The legend has it one of them bit him on the arm. He laughed like it was a magic trick gone wrong.
The town didn’t stop him. They liked the excitement. A kid from the high school filmed him shirtless on the hood of his Hyundai, saluting the pit while playing “Free Bird” on a kazoo. It went local-viral. The mayor called it a “phase.” The church put him on the prayer list. The whole thing made us feel like we lived somewhere hip people talked about. Like maybe someday a news crew would roll in all of a sudden and ask, “What was he like?”
Then one night, Donnie didn’t come home.
Crunchwrap was found circling the pit at dawn, yowling like a ghost with a sore throat. Donnie’s flip-flops were neatly placed beside the fence. His net gun lay in the mud. There was a note inside a sandwich bag that read, BRB.
To this day, nobody knows what happened to him. Some think he slipped and fell in. Others think he walked into the pit on purpose, arms out like a prophet. The clerk at the Shell store swears she saw him three weeks later in a Buc-ee’s bathroom just off I-65, barefoot and smiling, selling gator tooth necklaces out of a folding table. His wife blames midlife crisis. We blame the economy.
But the gators are still there. Fatter now. Hungrier-looking. One of them limps a little. Another wears a scrap of net like a cape. The folks say if you go there late at night, you can hear them moving in unison, like a choir warming up underwater. And when the wind’s right, you can still hear it—the slap of a wet tail, the gurgle of brackish water, and maybe, just maybe, someone whispering:
“Good boy, Crunchwrap. Good boy.”
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, Hobart, HAD, Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y, and Trampset, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for several anthologies, including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.
Image: reddit.com
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 