The Alligator Story

The first thing you learn growing up near the glades is that stillness is a kind of power. Not quiet. Not hiding. Just the stillness of an alligator, belly pressed into the mud, eyes watching without ever blinking.

They don’t have to flinch. They know they own the land.

When I was six, Mama took me to the levee behind our trailer, pointed at the water like it was church. A fat gator rested on the bank, jaws slack, flies buzzing its nostrils. “You see that?” she whispered. “He sees you too. Don’t move till I say.”

We waited. Heat rippled the air. Cicadas screamed like rusty hinges. The gator didn’t so much as twitch. After a while, it eased itself into the water, vanishing without a ripple.

“Now you know how to stay safe,” Mama said. “If you stay still, they don’t bite. If you run, they chase.”

I nodded, even though my legs had started to shake. That lesson stuck deeper than anything she taught me with words.

We lived on the far edge of the Everglades, where sugarcane gave way to sawgrass and frogs shrieked so loud at night. The air was heavy with the smell of muck and molasses from the cane fields, a sweetness that turned sour after rain. Our trailer tilted on cement blocks that sank a little more each year, and the AC rattled like it wanted out.

I shared the back room with my little brother, Mateo, whose crib got replaced with a mattress on the floor after his fifth birthday. He had big eyes and a habit of chewing his shirt collars until they stretched into ropes. That summer he turned seven, I started teaching him stillness.

I made it a game. “Pretend we’re gators,” I told him. “Don’t blink. Don’t move.”

At first he giggled, shaking so hard he toppled sideways. But then I showed him how to breathe through his nose, how to go soft in his arms and legs, how to watch without reacting.

“Why do we have to learn this?” he asked.

I didn’t tell him it was because of the letter Mama got in the mail that week. The one with bold black ink and the words: Notice to Appear. I’d found it folded inside the Bible she kept on the nightstand. Instead, I said, “Because gators are the kings of the swamp. Nobody messes with them.”

He tried again, still as a statue, chest rising slow. “Like this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly like that.”

Mama worked cleaning motels along Highway 27. Some days she came home smelling like bleach, her knuckles raw. Other days she’d bring leftover toiletries in her bag—tiny soaps, plastic combs, bottles of lotion the color of lemon pudding. She lined them up on the counter like they were treasure.

At night, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her murmuring on the phone in Spanish, her voice low and strained. Sometimes she cried. Other times she snapped the phone shut and lit a cigarette, the smoke curling through the slats in our bedroom door.

One night she sat me down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. “You look after your brother,” she said. “Always. If anything happens—” She stopped, twisting her wedding ring that wasn’t a wedding ring at all but a gold band she’d found in a pawn shop.

“If anything happens, you be still. You remember the gator.”

I nodded. I wanted to ask what was going to happen, but her face had gone stone.

The night ICE came, the frogs stopped screaming. That’s what I remember first. That eerie quiet outside the window, the kind that made my skin tighten. Then the knock. Loud. Demanding.

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” someone shouted.

Mama didn’t open the door. She stood in the kitchen with her hands on the counter, knuckles white. She didn’t even turn her head. The knock came again, harder.

“Don’t run,” she said. “Go get your brother.”

I didn’t ask questions. I found Mateo curled on his mattress, arms tucked around his stuffed armadillo. “Get up,” I said. “Be a gator.”

His eyes widened, but he nodded. We went behind the couch and flattened ourselves to the floor, the way I’d shown him. Arms loose. Mouths closed. Breathing slow. We didn’t blink.

The door broke open with a crack like thunder. Boots on linoleum. Papers shuffling. Voices barking out questions.

“Name?”

“Country of origin?”

“Anyone else here?”

I heard Mama answer in clipped English, then silence.

They searched the trailer. Every room. Every closet. A man stood over us for a long second, flashlight beam hovering. My legs itched. Mateo’s breath hitched once, then steadied. I whispered in my head, Still, still, still.

Eventually the man turned away. “Nothing back here,” he called.

They left with Mama in handcuffs. She didn’t look at us when they led her out. Or maybe she did and I just couldn’t see past the glare of the flashlight.

We went to stay with Tía Sandra after that. Her duplex smelled like oil and lavender, and her walls were covered in framed certificates and plastic ivy. She hugged us too tight, as if she could squeeze out the silence. Every night that week she made arroz con leche, setting the bowls in front of us with a smile that begged for approval.

Mateo wouldn’t talk. He just stared out the window, chewing his collar until it frayed into strings.

“You have to help him,” Sandra told me one afternoon when he wouldn’t come to the table. “He looks at me like I’m nobody.”

I didn’t tell her what he’d seen. What I’d made him do.

Instead, I took him out back and crouched beside the canal behind her building. The water shimmered green in the sunset. A pair of eyes rose from the surface.

“There,” I said. “See that one?”

“Yeah.”

“He sees you too. Don’t move.”

We crouched for a long time.

“Do you think Mama’s scared?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “She’s just being still. Like the gator. Waiting.”

He didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either. But it was something to hold.

In school, they called us “at risk.” The counselor said it like a label that explained everything, like a sticker slapped across my forehead. She asked if I wanted to “share” about my feelings, but I knew what stillness required.

So, I shrugged, kept my eyes on the carpet. She scribbled notes.

At recess, other kids whispered. One girl said, “Your mama’s locked up.” I stared at her until she fidgeted and turned away. Alligator stillness. It worked better than shouting.

But some nights the stillness cracked. Mateo would climb into my bed, whispering, “Tell me a story.”

So, I made one up. About a girl and her brother who lived in the swamp and rode an airboat with an old alligator named Domingo. Every night they patrolled the waters. Every night they kept the bad men away.

Mateo would smile in his sleep, his fingers tangled in my shirt like roots.

Two years passed. Mama called when she could, her voice always too far away. Sometimes the line cut out before she finished a sentence. Other times she asked about school, about Mateo’s grades, about whether Sandra was treating us well.

The last call was different.

“They’ve given me a date, mija,” she said. Her voice cracked. “I might come back.”

I didn’t ask how. I didn’t say what it would cost.

Instead, I told her, “We’re okay. Mateo’s doing better in math.”

I didn’t tell her that I still watch the window when it gets too quiet. That I still press my palms to the floor and go soft, just in case.

I just said, “We’re still. Like you taught us.”

She laughed, a little broken. “Still and strong,” she said.

“Still and strong,” I echoed.

The next morning, Mateo and I walked to the canal before school. Mist hovered low over the water.

We crouched by the edge. A ripple broke the surface, then another. A broad snout appeared, eyes unblinking, watching us from the green.

“See him?” I asked.

Mateo nodded. “He sees us too.”

We stayed like that, still as stone, while the day brightened around us.

For the first time in a long while, I didn’t feel chased.

I didn’t blink.

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Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her writing has appeared in more than seventy literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, The Huffington Post, The MacGuffin, McSweeney’s, and 3Elements Review. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.