TᖇIᔕ ᗪI ᖴᗩᑎTᗩᔕIE (TᕼE ᗩᒪᒪIGᗩTOᖇ)

The night the Alligator crawled out of the swamps to visit the city, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. At some point in that hazy evening he put his arm around me. I turned myself tiny underneath him, repulsed by my disloyal reaction to his skin on mine and the familiar stink cocooning me completely. I was dissolving in there and afraid of what I’d pupate into if I stayed for too long. Later that night apropos of nothing he announced that he didn’t spend time with me because he wanted to fuck me, but because I was the most interesting girl in the world. It bruised, but only briefly. Any resulting disappointment didn’t linger because there was tantalizing potential in what he said, and in wondering why he said it in the first place.

He was bolder than I thought possible in this day and age, casual and wanting like a midcentury Italian movie star. He didn’t waste time maneuvering our conversations into something teasing and flirtatious. The teasing made it fun enough to be dangerous. I liked being called names, being challenged and having my buttons pushed. I liked it so much I had no faculties to stop him or what he was doing to me. I had no training for this sort of assault, no established protocols to repel it or surrender to it.

I behaved scrupulously, or thought I did, dodging his provocations as dextrously as I could. He didn’t seem to notice these acrobatics and took no hints from them, either. His comments remained palpably charged with some modern thing resembling desire, but I could point to none that crossed any lines, not really. If he crossed any lines they were drawn in the sand. He was just the encroaching tide lapping blindly at the shore, erasing them before either of us could memorize their positions.

As much as I told myself I was in control and could stop any time, I myself opened the gates of risk, thoughtlessly, by bringing up a trending article about internet porn. I realized my mistake a second too late and prayed the article was highbrow enough on its own to save me.

The Alligator replied in seconds, and not as if he totally absorbed the intellectual substance of my message. He said he’d been watching a lot of porn lately.

I was not disgusted by his coarseness. Instead I wanted to ask what he’d been watching. I tried once more to neuter the conversation. This time by saying I haven’t watched porn since I was seventeen. He called that iconic tbh, and that was the end of it.

Killing the conversation didn’t stifle my curiosities. I wondered what kind of porn the Alligator watched for the next three days. I spent more time on Pornhub than I had in a decade.

“Stepdaddies, what is anal sex?” Penelope’s Big Ass Finally Gets Destroyed

The neighbor plays with my cock with her mouth and hands until I cum

The dentist doctor fucked the patient in the dental office! Cowgirl, Doggy, BJ

A Skinny Asian Teen Fucks a Plump Russian Girl in The Ass ! 11 min full in profile (the thumbnail showed the presumed Russian girl in stocks, no Skinny Asian Teens to be found)

British slut gargles huge cumload from fat cock (Gal Ritchie x GIRTHMASTERR)

My stepmother and I ended up fucking before her husband arrived. I read this and said aloud, “isn’t that just your dad?”

I’m the fucking mistress of handjob and sucking, my tight horny pussy

I met a strange girl in the forest again and she fucked me again! Why does this always happen?

Everything was too normal despite the increasingly dreamy, half-lucid language in the titles. If I were serious about this as an intellectual pursuit I would have simply asked the Alligator where to look, or what he liked, but that was not an option I would ever avail myself of.

While researching I was plagued by an image I created and could not let go of: the Alligator in a dark room, lit from below by cool bluish LCD’s, his face twisted into an expression like an Yupik mask while furiously masturbating to something on the monitor. He’s barely moving, save for his hand convulsing so fast the contours of his body even wobble a little. I became obsessed with this mirage of him in the dark, gritting his teeth, hissing through them, whimpering with abandon, curled in a gamer chair with a headset dangling from his neck.

I could not completely understand why such a comical image made me rub my knees together like that. I played it in my head over and over, changing nothing but the video he was watching in the hopes my research would reveal one that fit the scene so perfectly it had to be what turned him on. This fantasy only ever includes me as an astral-projected voyeur, but in it I eventually get sick of the imagining and become a woman more concerned with the doing. It always ends with me texting him at four in the morning to confirm my hypothesis.

Weeks later the Alligator sent another message. He wanted to teach me how to shoot a gun. That gave me the liberty to conjure yet another scene. This one even involved me directly.

It’s nighttime, always nighttime. I have no memory of what his face looks like in the sun. We’re alone at a shooting range. The rubber floor is sticky. He curls his lithe, muscular body around mine. He breathes heat in my ear and it stinks of cornbread. He presses himself so close his pectoral muscles slot between my shoulderblades. I become aware of how small he is. He cocoons me like that, adjusting my arms and shoulders and hips with directions from his fingertips and palm. His lips brush against my earlobe as he tells me to squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it. Because if you jerk, it won’t work.

This particular fantasy comes in two different flavors. They both begin the same way, diverging the moment he tells me to pull the trigger. In the first scenario I fire. He squeezes my shoulders in approval, and I smile. In the second fantasy, instead of firing I hesitate. He hardens against my back. I am unable to decide if it excites or repulses me. To discover which, I turn to face him, only for the fantasy to end because there is no way for me to imagine any more of that story while still maintaining my innocence.

Months later I dreamed I knelt before the Alligator and asked if he’d like to rub his cock on the hole I ripped in my foot. Earlier that night I peeled a pear-shaped chunk of calloused skin off my heel, and thought he might enjoy the soft pink interior I exposed. In the dream he just looked amused and put his hands on his hips. I could not tell if he was naked or clothed, soft or hard, interested or not.

None of it was erotic enough to compel me to shove my fingers inside myself in the shower, none of it was dangerous enough to assign as my vibrator’s accompanist. But it was enough. I held these fantasies close, turning them over and manipulating them in my hands like stones collected at the beach. They were warm, and salty if I licked them.

TᕼE ᗰᗩᖇE Oᖴ ᗰᗩᑎᕼᗩTTᗩᑎ

I am a horse, and I live on an island full of silver trees. I was once a foal and lived elsewhere, but there were far fewer smells about. I stay here because this island is full of odors. Full of lessons and things to do.

For instance I have learned the dances of the people here. I know when to stop and when to go. I know which parts of the ground to walk, the lines they follow. They even color the hard gray soil so everyone knows where to move. The people often stare at me in awe or hand me food. I wonder if this is because they believe I am their leader. I am much larger than all of them. Some creatures show deference to size and power, but I was always under the impression that was a matter of internal politics. I don’t understand why I’d be included.

Perhaps it is because I am different from the other horses on this island. They cannot eat the milky, salty-sweet triangles I find everywhere, nor can they eat the soft, grainy, seed-coated rings I also find everywhere. They cannot see or smell the river and the heady, delirious odor of the floating stones on its banks. They cannot join me on walks down the path with the faceless stone effigies or help discover what they are made of. I tried to lick these once but was met with ice that tasted just the same as the silver trees. Like pollen, rain, and blood. That day I discovered the effigies were not outside but inside the silver trees, a place as-yet forbidden to me. I am not usually interested, because there is so much to smell everywhere else, but when the silver tree’s bark cracks open with a gust of cool wind in the summer and warm wind in the winter, I smell meadows.

I am herdless. But I am not lonely.

There is a family of fifty rats I visit on the west side of the island. They smell of aromatic bark and mint leaves. They are chatty, always talking about the old country. The plants and terraced hills of yore. They live in an abandoned garden between two restaurants, or so they say. I have never visited, because they have never invited me. But I am told they live in the lap of luxury.

The pigeons call me Horse. They smell like all kinds of things but mostly smell familiar. Whatever a pigeon’s odor, it’s always one I’ve met before under different, pleasant circumstances. I am visited almost daily by a small flock led by one called Sesame Seed. Sesame Seed is more intelligent than anything, even the people. He once told me, “Yes, the two-legged creatures are great builders, great producers of noises and smells and things. But they move through this world like your cousins on the south side of the central pasture. They see nothing but what’s ahead.”

Sesame Seed and his flock also speak incessantly of the old country and the past, though their story is sadder. They told me of their once-symbiotic companionship with the two-legged creatures; its sudden, inexplicable demise, the lonely generations forced to learn to live smaller lives. But they also spoke of a future paradise granted by the two-legged ones who live atop the silver trees. Sesame Seed promised his flock they would find that paradise in this lifetime, that a day would come when they’d have purpose, when seed would not be plucked for but tossed liberally, nests would be windproof and all eggs would hatch. I always shut up during Sesame Seed’s sermons. If the flock did find their salvation, if they took residence in the sky, they wouldn’t have time— between the seed and their chicks and their flight paths— to come find me and tell me about it. I would never know if the gods in the sky were real.

I do not have such a fraught relationship with the two-legged creatures. Once every few days when I am northeast of the central pasture, I am found by the man with a curly mane. He wears colored skins like the rest of them, but never the right skins for the weather. Still he always finds me and feeds me small carrots from a sack. He giggles like a baby as I chew. I play along and eat with less grace than I ordinarily might. Seems to rile him up like tapping hooves near a dog does.

The man who does my shoes appears like the rain or the snow. He is very nice to look at and touch with my lips, because there is so much of him and it all contains a delightful diversity of textures. He smells good, too, like boozy rotten fruit and the last autumn flowers before the freeze. I have tried to make clear that I can handle my own grooming just fine, but still he does me this favor, and I let him because if my grooming is taken care of I have more time to smell and explore. He hoots and barks and sings in the language of his kind while he works. I close my eyes when he does this.

Before he leaves, he brushes my hair and pats me on the neck. I like the man who does my shoes. It’s a little sad, because he’s so good at it that I only need to see him once in a full moon.

There is a younger group of people that spends their evenings in the central pasture, lighting small, aromatic sticks on fire and laughing. They laugh so much when they see me. They point shiny black shells.

Then, eventually, they are sent away by the same men I must hide from. These men send all the people in the pasture away at night. I assume they mean to send me away, too, but the central pasture is my home. I hide in thickets and on hills until they are gone.

Several days pass without a visit from Sesame Seed’s flock. I visit the rats instead, walk among the people, enjoy their attentions, hide from the men at night, get my shoes replaced. The sun warms the air. The sky empties out once, twice. The clovers bloom at dinnertime. While I eat at dusk a familiar bird lands on my back. Her name is Rice Grain, she fledged with Sesame Seed. She doesn’t say much. Remarks on the rain, the summertime. She preens there for some time, smelling like something new.

Giulia Àlvarez-Katz is a writer and video producer based in Queens, New York, where she is doing her very best. giulia-ak.com.