STORIES ON THE PROWL
Gabriel Orgrease

During daylight hours Dawn Key is a mellow and happy place on the surface. The occasional lost tourist who comes over on the steamer will say it is the central inspiration of his life but as with all literary endeavors of substance, there is a slightly subaqueous undercurrent of reptilian terror. Writers have been known to lose their heads here.

Gator Springs, the only town on Dawn Key, is not so much a storied gulag, an ending place, a repository for the abused imagination, as it is a hotbed where the Muse occasionally blows through on the backside of a hurricane. (If you have ever wondered where the alt-names for hurricanes come from, then seek no further: Alaboombaster, Boogeyduorno, Carumba, Dickie, Erenkrantz, Fagoosh!)

Radiant hair thrown back in the turgid atmosphere, the Muse mimics the blaze of a shooting star, the gaseous rapture of a comet. She wafts behind a bittersweet scent of garlic and stale beer mixed with a perfume of lavender and strawberries. Her saturnine arms glow crimson and strain against the reins of braided platinum and shiny purple sequins... but that is another story best told when the gators are stone deaf; a condition not often encountered and best met with potions of exotic verbalism.

The stories of Gator Springs walk and hop and skip and jump about generally unmolested (except when they annoy the gators). The stories propagate and have babies like pygmy rabbits. They are free range, like all-natural bantam chickens. If you go to the local grocery you can see them there, as casual as anyone, thumping honeydew melons or snipping with their tingly fingers at the bins of oil-cured olives. Some are short, some are tall, and some sport Kundabuffer tails (a sort of back-story extension). It is amazing how many olive pits a gaggle of good stories will leave behind, spit out upon the floor amidst peanut shells. In your bare feet, the customary habit for the natives, you go crunch, crunch then Ouch! as you step on a pit. Caution is a word often overheard.

If you ever have the opportunity to follow a story at Gator Springs, or a herd of stories, you will find that they have many oddities and quirks. It is almost as if they were made that way on purpose just to keep your curiosity alive. Some of them limp or go thud thud with a wooden (usually Formosan termite-infested) leg and mumble "Yarrr me blazes where's the bloody Parrot Pollywog?" and some of them in a spasm of yada yada bliss shoot flames and sparkles into the sky. The air rains down with all sorts of confetti, full of words from shredded remainders. All of the stories at one time or another can be caught blabbering among themselves, and quite a few to themselves like mad homeless urchins. It is partly a fault of the humidity and heat. It does not help that the writers empower the stories to be so unruly, but then, there is little to do for the southern latitudes but pretend a fabulous exuberance.

On a Saturday night the street corners of Gator Springs are full of stories. They like to congregate in groups and to show off their latest fashions. A few prefer raw nudity, stripped of all pretence. A story without a brown paper wrapper showed up just last week dressed with nothing short of a false diamond stuck into its navel. Last season there was the story that sported two navels! And then there are the contortionists, of whom everyone says, "We do not understand. This CANNOT be a story! Cease mocking us!"

There is a time to tell stories but in Gator Springs stories like to do the telling for themselves. Often stories tell at night with bourbon in hand, but hardly ever in the morning when the cold showers are running. There have been some shocking results to untimely telling. Somniferous storytelling is a dangerous game, for gators have been known to storm a summer porch to rip the leg off a sleeping story. There is nothing more horrendous than the bloody screams of a story so awakened.

But there is further cause for warning. The quicksand here glows like pure gold, and when the more affluent stories of Gator Springs come upon an alligator in their swimming pools, the best advice given is for them to use very short sentences, to announce them in rapid succession as if the very words are magic titanium bullets. Sentences cut short and minimal, like this: "Run!"

It is upsetting to see a story cut in half in the prime of inspiration. Likewise, it is not good practice to sneak up on a story in Gator Springs as, unbeknownst to the unwary, that story may be the quite shy and reclusive type. The stories here do not wear badges. One can be misled by the labels on their clothes, when they wear any at all (highly permissive of the publishing class to permit such audacity). To approach a story without causing it to skitter away, it is recommended that you move in slowly, but deliberately, from the front.

Do not look a story straight in the eyes (particularly one with multiple points of view); turn your head slightly until you are just up to it. When you feel its tepid breath upon the top of your head, then turn swiftly, jump up on your tippy toes, and give it a kiss upon the cheek. But be careful. Make sure it has not caught on to your stalking game and turned to its other lower cheek—readers never like to be the butt of a story, but a story always wants to get the upper end of an engagement. They are smart, these stories; otherwise they would not have survived as well or as long as they have.

The hungry gators are always keeping eye and watching for stragglers.

P. S.

The earliest dated archeological finds in Gator Springs are of writing implements abandoned at great-white gator and plastic pink-flamingo inspiration sites between one hundred and fifty and two hundred years ago, long before the appearance of unidentified flying objects. In this regard we believe from anecdotal abduction information that aliens found out that the ancient stories were endangered and arrived on earth in order to save them. The recording devices they inserted into the stories, the probes, left small impressions of three dots in a perfect equilateral triangle on their bellies. It reminds one of old postage stamps with small holes punched through them. When several such imprinted stories are left to entertain themselves at a balcony cabaret on a sultry afternoon, with a margarita and happy-hour raw oysters, they have been found to form with a combination of their dot-triangles and soft belly flesh a perfect Fibonacci curve. This information has been calibrated with the Great Pyramid and the ruins of Tiwanaku to lead our monkish scholars conclusively to the conclusion that the Royal Library of Alexandria resides entombed beneath Dawn Key.

© Gabriel Orgrease — column/Dawn Key postcard (click card to see legend)

© Sue O'Neill — Gator Springs Feeding Times photo

Gabriel Orgrease often leaves good writing in strange places for inquisitive readers to find. Carved on stones in riverbeds, scratched on the backs of matchbook covers, plastered on placards of trams, fingered in the dust of old windows, he maintains pride in a compulsive obscurity and the pursuit of an independent vision of the written arts. In addition to his column in Gator Springs Gazette, GO's work has been published in Bonfire, FRiGG, Magazine Minima, Opium, In Posse Review, Stoney Lonesome, Stile and Insolent Rudder.

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