“Gator Days,” by David Saltzman (Fiction ’17)
2017 fiction graduate David Saltzman was recently featured in Parhelion. Read an excerpt of “Gator Days” below:
Gator Days
I’ve always been fascinated by gators—there’s something seductively simple about a life of natural law and rote response, all dead eyes and sinew and death rolls levied upon unsuspecting wildebeest. I consume gator documentaries, have spent hours scouring YouTube for videos of their visceral, primordial force. And I never understood a thing about them until my wife and I, visiting New Orleans for our first real vacation together, decided to take a gator tour.
We drove forty-five minutes west, weaving through the swamplands besieging the city until we reached a rundown shanty that served as the global headquarters of Airboat Adventures, LLC. Stepping out into a wet, gauzy heat, we immediately scurried for the office, passing a middle-aged couple in matching I ♥ Oak Alley Plantation t-shirts; another family, obviously midwestern, extricated themselves from a rented minivan. We creaked open the screen door and entered, air conditioning conspicuously absent.
The office was all gift shop, its shelves sagging with the larval forms of yard sale. People trickled in behind us, making awkward, gator-adjacent small talk until a perky protomillennial slammed inside and herded us all down to the pier, tickets clutched in our sweaty little fists. We grouped up in front of a flat-top, shallow-draft boat, a creature of sheet metal and simple geometry—clearly, I thought, the result of a productive day shopping at Home Depot.
One by one, we twisted gingerly aboard, the boat dipping threateningly whenever our weight shifted, which was approximately always, until the guide had us balanced out like cargo on an airplane and we puttered away from the dock through a mat of flowering lilypads, curving out to join the main channel beyond. Cypress bent to the water’s edge, caterpillars of Spanish moss glowing in spectral catenary curves, palmetto and sawgrass alongshore yielding to a moist, green density beyond.
Read the full piece here: https://parhelionliterary.com/david-saltzman/
