Gator In A Bar

You call it killing but it’s really just fighting till one of us dies. So I fight and I kill. And I’m a gator so you call it hunting because I eat what I kill. Would you feel better about yourselves if you ate what you killed?

But humans are family, so one of your brothers kills it or invents something that kills it and then gives it to another brother who gives it to another and another until you eat it and so you don’t think “you” hunt.

I don’t hunt anymore. Not since you took me from the swamp. Put me here in this bar. In the pit. In the middle. And you wrestle me. Thinking you’re tough. That wrestling a wild animal when you’re drunk enough, out with your buddies or your bitch, makes you a man. From the sounds of things, that’s something to be proud of. Doesn’t really count when you’ve ripped all my teeth out.

I’m an animal so I don’t know if I’m capable of hate but if I am, then I hate you. You have become more than food to me. And I’ve noticed in the fractals of your behaviour, the way you slouch against the bar, eyes like a cows, that you are lazy in the short term and in the long term. I smiled even though you wouldn’t have noticed it, even if you’d looked. I smiled because I felt what could’ve been some miracle new tooth growing or maybe it’s just bone rubbed free and clear from my featureless gums.

But it’s there. My tongue knew it was there.

Which is why, now, while you clown around, putting your neck in my mouth, I’m getting ready to draw that sharpness, that last tiny spark of me still alive, across your throat. Then as you die, I will die. Shots ringing out will be the last thing I hear, your blood will be the last thing I taste and then I will be back in the swamp. Beneath the water. Forever.