Folks hate the swamp.

They don’t understand the things that choose to live there, but what they don’t realize is that the creatures that dwell in the swamp couldn’t possibly live anywhere else — they have adapted to life in the mud. Some people don’t think life in the mud is worth living, but I disagree.

Living on a smoothly-paved cul-de-sac in a cookie cutter house — that’s easy. Not only surviving but thriving in the mud — that’s a feat. That’s something worth doing.

That very mud clings to my legs clear up to my knees, thick as tar. I pause to take a breath, rubbing at the trickle of sweat that runs down the side of my neck. My ratty sneakers slowly fill with wet, brackish slime that soaks through my socks. My feet ache. I can feel my pulse in the beds of my toenails.

The sun set ages ago, but it’s still hot enough to liquify concrete. I clutch Dad’s shotgun against my chest as I pause to listen for the sound of anyone following me.

It’s unlikely — they’re much slower than I am, and they don’t know the land like I do. Dogs might be a problem, but I crossed enough creeks and put enough distance between us that I should have a good head start. For now, at least.

It’s slow going, navigating around the knobby cypress knees and bouncing from dry patch to dry patch, trying to avoid the worst of the mud. But even in the dark, I’ve been out here enough times to walk it with my eyes closed. I can find my way to the chickee on memory alone, like a child stumbling their way into their parent’s bed after waking from a nightmare.

I pick my way through the brush, passing the hollowed out remains of an ancient water oak. The sight of it stirs up old memories like a trolling motor stirs up the riverbed. Back when we were kids, my sister and I dubbed it the Fort. I should keep moving, but I can’t resist ducking inside one last time. She’d want me to.

It’s a tighter squeeze than it used to be. The space that used to fit both of us hardly fits my shoulders now. The earth and rot coat my tongue, worming their way into me until I’m convinced if I stay there long enough, maybe I’ll rot away too. It sounds like a peaceful enough proposition. I could just sit here until this land takes me back, give myself over to the place I was born in and never really managed to find my way out of. My home left a mark on me from birth, a trailer trash stigmata, and it seems like a fitting end to just give myself back to it. Complete the life cycle.

No.

I force my eyes open and face the other little girl squeezed into the stump with me. She wears a crown of cattails and ferns. Instead of a rusty shotgun, she wields a sword hewn from a dry palmetto frond. Her sharp face is filthy, her sugar-spun hair thick with snarls. The knees of her jeans are worn thin enough to see milk-pale skin peeking through, and the smiling cartoon character on her t-shirt has warped and cracked under the strain of too many bouts with a washing machine. She stares back at me in the shadows, mud swiped under each eye like war paint. Her bony chest heaves as she points at me, dirt caking the nails on her tiny hand.

* * *

The day we found the Fort, I was sent home early from school. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence by any means, but that day was special. I had been sent home with a note.

I was in the third grade and I could hardly read print, never mind my teacher’s loopy handwriting, so I gave it to my sister.

“It says you’re suspended,” she told me, her eyes wide. “Daddy’s gonna be pissed.”

“I don’t care,” I replied, tugging my laces tight. We had to move after our last landlord evicted us, and so I was shoved into a new classroom halfway through the school year like a mismatched puzzle piece stuck in the wrong box. I don’t remember what I had done to get myself suspended, but I do remember that when my sister read the note, she let out a short, angry laugh and crumpled it in her hand.

She was a few years older than me and had passed from the whimsical days of elementary playgrounds into the slimy grasp of middle school. The new grown-up way she talked was an alien language I didn’t understand. The week before she got grounded because she and her friends pierced their belly buttons with an ice cube and a sewing needle out behind the 7-Eleven.

We stood on the edge of the swamp, just a few dozen yards behind our new home. There was a rusted-out pickup in the backyard that the old tenant had left behind. Daddy told us not to climb on it because we might get tetanus, but I had seen my sister perch on the hood like a queen on a throne, a stolen cigarette languishing between her fingers. The swamp was still uncharted land at that point, as intimidating as it was unspeakably exciting.

“Wanna go explore?” she asked. I nodded, simply excited by the prospect that she wanted to do anything at all with me. She took my hand and led me past the tree line. It was cooler in the shade, but not by much. We walked for a long time, sometimes in silence, sometimes while she rattled off the names of classmates and their various relationship melodramas. Middle school already sounded like more trouble than it was worth.

“Look,” she whispered, pointing. “A gator.” I followed her finger with my eyes and spotted the creature sunning itself on a mossy log jutting out of the green water. It was probably six feet long, but to me looked like an honest-to-God dinosaur.

“Should we run?” I asked breathlessly.

“Nah. An alligator will only bite you if you poke it with a stick.” She spoke with enough confidence that I believed her. I always did. Regardless though, I held my breath as we walked past it. Sure enough, the gator didn’t do anything. It just gave me a long, slow blink as it observed us creeping away into the brush.

We kept walking, away from the water, and eventually we found the Fort.

“Come on, we can both fit in here!” I exclaimed, immediately crawling inside. My sister held back a bit.

“Are there any bugs?” she asked. She could handle some bugs — like crickets and spiders — but palmetto bugs and centipedes sent her screaming.

“Nope!” I said, even though I hadn’t really checked. Brushing her crooked bangs out of her face, she crawled in with me. We sat there, shoulder to shoulder, watching the swamp as the dappled sunlight flitted back and forth across the patchy grass.

It felt safe, at the time. A cool refuge from the oppressive heat, a shelter from the occasional rolling thunderstorm that caught us unaware while we were out exploring.

* * *

It still feels that way now. If I close my eyes and rest the cool steel barrel of the shotgun against my cheek, I am invisible. My pursuers will just pass me by, and I will be safe, because I am in the Fort. Nothing can hurt us in the Fort.

Nothing can hurt my sister at all anymore, but I am not so lucky. As much as it pains me, I push myself up and out, not bothering to shake the soft black dirt from my thighs as I continue my trek. The night is long, but not long enough for me to waste time. They’ll find me eventually, of that much I’m sure, and I have a long way to go before that happens.

A mosquito lands on my arm, but I swat it away before it can bite. The lemongrass I stuffed in my pockets is wearing off. I reach the edge of the water and yank the bundle of weeds out, tossing them on the ground. If anything, they’ll confuse the dogs.

I watch the dark water for movement. If I’d had the foresight to grab a flashlight, I could have scanned the shore for the flashing red eyes of lurking gators. But I ran out the back door as soon as the cops pulled up, shotgun in my hands and my shoes untied. All I can do is pray that they’ve decided to patrol a different stretch of river tonight.

Crossing the sluggish river that snakes its way through the swamp will throw them off for hours. No sane person would attempt it, especially not in the dead of night.

I am still very sane. Sane enough to know I don’t have many options left.

I feel my way along the slippery shore until I locate the old rope swing. When we were children, we had played on the swing almost every day until the summer that June Clarkson got dragged under. After that, the swing was left abandoned.

I reach up and grab what’s left of the frayed rope. It’s gone green with mold and is dotted with mushrooms, the slow and diligent digesters of the forest. I heard there were mushrooms growing on June Clarkson’s body when they finally found it. Mushrooms will consume anything, from fraying rope to wet cardboard to the bloated body of a twelve-year-old girl who had the misfortune of being the next off the rope swing just as a hungry gator swam by.

That was the summer Dad built the chickee, and the summer we started hunting together. I was twelve. The town had an insatiable hunger for dead gators after what happened to June. Every gator head mounted on their wall was one less out in the swamp, hunting their children. We got tags from the state to cull dozens of them, but when the tags ran out, we kept going. The cops turned a blind eye, because they had children of their own to protect. Who could blame us for doing what needed to be done?

Dad and I headed out every morning before dawn on his rusted jon boat. He sat in the back by the motor, and I perched on the bow with a shotgun. We made a good team; by the start of eighth grade I could tag a gator in the eye from thirty yards away.

Seven years later, here I am standing on the same shore with the same shotgun on my shoulder, but this time I’m the one being hunted. Dad was forgiving when I missed a shot, but today I can’t afford to make mistakes. A dozen paces past the rope swing I find the shallow part of the river. I hold my breath as I step off the bank, but there isn’t time to hesitate.

Dark water fills my shoes, sloshing around my knees as I wade into the middle. The current tugs at my waist as I reach the deepest point, trying to push me further downstream. With every careful step I anticipate the snap of jaws on my leg, or the rush of something huge and scaly swimming between my feet. It’s inevitable; the only logical conclusion to this journey is that this place finally takes its revenge on me for all the blood I’ve spilled and drags me down into the muck.

A little over half-way across my foot catches on a submerged stump, sending me careening off balance. The river is slow but strong, and the second my feet leave the riverbed I’m sucked off the sandbar and out into the current. I thrust the shotgun over my head as I scramble for purchase on the sandy bottom, my legs tangling in old fishing line and garbage as I fight to keep my head above water.

Pain flashes up my leg. It’s not the quick snap of primordial jaws, but something sharp and jagged. Probably an old boat propeller, or the edge of a chunk of twisted metal. Either way, I can tell even without seeing it that my blood is spilling hot and fast into the river, and if the gators weren’t aware of me before, they certainly are now.

I fight my way to the shore as the briny taste of the swamp fills my mouth and nose. It claws its way under my nails and drips into my ears, swirling through my brain and soaking through straight down to my bone marrow. By the time I haul myself through the sawgrass and onto the shore, there’s nearly as much swamp within me as there is around me.

I toss the gun down, mercifully dry, and turn my attention to my leg. In the dark I can’t see much, but I can feel a gash about the length of my hand, and probably deep enough to need stitches. I press my palm over it to try and slow the bleeding, but it comes away sticky and wet.

Biting back tears, I wipe my hand on my shirt. This is not the time to cry. I repeat it to myself over and over until the words run together, like a prayer that has long since lost its meaning. This is not the time to cry, this is not the time to cry, thisisnotthetimeto —

But the tears find me anyway. There’s never time to cry. There wasn’t time to cry after Mom left, because Dad was three months behind on paying the rent and the landlord didn’t give a shit that he had two little girls at home.

There wasn’t time to cry when we hit every Christmas charity event we could find, smiling as we received gifts we knew Dad would turn around and resell unopened. When they figured it out, we caught a lifetime ban from the Salvation Army. They accused Dad of scamming them; they said it was such a shame he was stealing from his little girls.

They painted him as the villain and my sister and I as the innocent victims. But at eight years old I knew that having a roof over my head was better than getting a dollar store Barbie from some lady who got off on my excitement over the second-rate presents that weren't good enough for her own kids.

There wasn’t time to cry when the landlord did eventually kick us out, and we had to throw our shit into pillowcases and stuff them in the trunk of the car before he came through with the cleaning crew.

There wasn’t time to cry when we lived out of that car for three months, wiping ourselves down with baby wipes in the dimly lit Wal-mart bathroom before school so our teachers wouldn’t call CPS.

There wasn’t time to cry when my sister came home in the back of a cop car with a bloody lip, a black eye, and the officer’s pointed questions about why she had been out so late in the first place.

There was never time to cry.

But I can’t stop it. I sit and sob on the riverbank until I feel like my insides have been scooped out like jack-o-lantern guts and tossed aside. My chest aches and my throat burns from tears and salt and mud as I look down pitifully at the cut on my leg. The dull ache of sadness and exhaustion is replaced by a tightening garrote of anxiety as I realize I can see it more clearly now. The sun has started to rise, and there is no more time to cry.

I stagger to my feet and grab the shotgun from the dirt. My leg throbs when I put weight on it, not enough to stop me, just enough to slow me down. Turning away from the river, I hobble on.

The path only gets thicker and more overgrown as I move away from the shore. It’s hardly a path at all anymore. Back in the summers of gator hunting and rope-swinging, the path to the chickee was always clear, maintained by trampling feet and scaly bodies being dragged through the undergrowth.

Now the woods have forgotten those summers, and the brush has grown thick and close over where we used to play. Spanish moss sways above me, catching golden light that leaches through the tree branches. The edges of the boughs are tinged blood-red as the woods rustle to life. The hiding creatures emerge and the hunting creatures find rest, and I am strung somewhere in the middle — both hunting and hiding — as I stagger toward my hidden refuge. The gun drags behind me now. My arms ache too deeply to carry it any further, but I have to.

Steam rises from the ground around me as the climbing sun begins to bake the swamp with its brutal heat. Sweat, blood, and swamp-river-slime dry tacky across my skin as I snake my way around the sweeping oaks, ducking under writhing branches and stepping over the twisting roots.

I pass the rotting corpse of a tree that had been struck by lightning years ago, and I know I’m almost there.

* * *

My sister leaned against the tree, watching me with her arms crossed across her chest as I planted my feet. Frowning around the swelling on her lip, she walked over to adjust my stance.

“Put more weight on your back foot, then follow through,” she instructed me. I swung at the empty air, and she shook her head. “Put your weight in it, come on.” I tried again and stumbled, my momentum pushing me forward. She crouched down in front of me, taking my face in her hands. The bruising on her cheekbone had started to fade, but the welts were still sickly yellow.

“One day, they’re going to tell you that trailer park girls are easy and it’s all your fault. So you gotta kick and scratch and bite until you make it not worth their while, got it?”

I nodded. I wasn’t entirely sure of her meaning at the time, but the dead straight certainty in her tone told me I had better listen. That phrase would follow me through middle and high school, through a maze of wandering hands and sneaky glances.

I didn’t ask her what happened to her face. I didn’t ask when her boyfriend stopped coming around. I didn’t ask when he was replaced by a newer model — a twenty-something guy named Ted who drove a motorcycle and worked at the jiffy store on the corner. I never asked because I didn’t know how. I was just a kid; I couldn’t save her — but I carried the guilt with me all the same.

Trailer park girls are easy.

It was a dare and a death sentence all rolled into one. All of my actions carried a second meaning because of where we lived. In one quick summer the neckline of my shirt became a marker of my morality, roving eyes became my responsibility, and I finally understood what my sister had been trying to tell me. From then on, I always kept my thumb on the outside of my fist.

* * *

The chickee is a little more slumped than it used to be, but still standing. The posts of the platform have been worn white, blanched by the sun from the lumber-yard yellow I remember. Water laps at the legs of the platform where they disappear into the dark water. The bleached gator skull we nailed up over the door has gone green with lichen but it’s there, staring out blindly over the scrub brush as I approach.

I smile at it as I pass under it, into my sanctuary. In my child’s mind, I had decided that gator was the one that had killed June. It was the biggest we caught all summer, the biggest we would ever catch. Its skull would have earned a decent amount, but Dad let me tack it up on the wall instead. He knew then what I know now — that in order for people to feel safe, someone has to die.

Nearly a hundred gators died by my hand in one summer. I had nearly cleared the swamp of them myself, and every night I slept a little better. I was so focused on gators that I almost missed the real enemy. I hunted gators in the early morning fog, while my sister fought off classmates and cat-callers. I measured hides by the inch, while every inch of my sister’s skin was added up and tallied against her.

I stagger through the sun-bleached tarp that serves as the door, and all sorts of creatures skitter away into the shadows. Three walls are still half-enclosed up to my shoulders with warped plywood. Dad had done it after the third time I fell over the edge trying to haul in a gator twice my size. The pallets of bottled water we got from FEMA after Hurricane Irma are still stashed in the corner, covered in dust but unopened. Dropping the shotgun, I rip through the warped plastic with my fingernails and grab a bottle. I gulp down my first one in one go, reaching for another as I let the empty one fall to the floor. The water is stale and warm as piss, but it’s still the most refreshing thing I’ve ever tasted.

I drain two bottles, then still and listen to the sounds of the woods. A helicopter putters overhead, but it sounds far off. I still have a while before they find me to reign punishment down on me for the crimes they think I’ve committed.

I don’t think they’re crimes at all — I see it as simple retribution. A balancing of the scales. When June died, the entire town roiled with an insatiable bloodlust for an entire summer, screaming for the skin of the creature that might have hurt her. We’ll never know for sure if we got it, no matter what my child’s mind believed. But people wanted vengeance, so we gave it to them.

It turns out they’re less forgiving when the predator isn’t a scaly prehistoric beast, and the victim isn’t a blameless sacrificial lamb. In that case, horror and outrage vanish and they say things like “oh, it’s complicated,” or “well, we don’t really know what happened.”

But I do. I know what happened. What happened was my sister was mean and rough around the edges because she had to be to survive. She came from a place people didn’t understand because they could hardly stand to look at it.

People want the swamp to be drained and paved over so they can forget about the untidy ugliness of it. It’s messy and sticky and dark, and there are evil things out here. They think that if they can wipe this place out, the evil things will go away.

But they’re wrong. The gators have already moved on to the retention ponds behind their manicured little league fields. They’re swimming closer than they think: in their backyards, their classrooms, their malls, their grocery stores, their daycares, their family barbecues, their police stations, and their pulpits. I was the only one who had the guts to do what needed to be done and put the beast down, regardless of the incorruptibility of his victim.

When the helicopter fades into the distance, I take the first-aid kit out onto the steps and sit on the stoop to dress my wounds in the cool light of dawn. Wincing, I dump an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide on my shin and watch my blood boil. When it settles, I pat it dry and wrap my leg in tight gauze. It needs stitches, there’s no doubt about that now. It’ll probably get infected too, but sepsis is a problem that’s too far away to pay any mind to.

The real problem is what to do when they find me — and they will, eventually. Like a rabbit being pursued by a hound, I have bolted for my burrow; but they’ll smoke me out at some point. If they have to burn the forest down to find me, they’ll do it.

But when that day finally does come, I’ll hold my ground until the end. I have more buckshot than they have men and better aim than any of them. Let them come by the dozens; they’ll drag me out in a body bag. I’ll be the proof, living or dead, that trailer park girls ain’t easy.