It's Always Good To Run Here At

It’s always good to run here at 
the end of a bad day and find 
her, absent-mindedly twirling
the end of her once-long, sawn-off 
tail and pretending to read. It’s
always good to see her smile and
offer me a hug and a beer.
Even though it’s winter, she wears
a sleeveless dress like the Queen’s, pale
yellow, sequinned, and velvet gloves 
that go over her elbows. The 
gloves make her fumble with her beer,
but fumbling makes her fetching and 
many of the locals eye her
hopefully. Sure enough, one of 
them walks up with swagger and a 
grin and he says Aw shucks, as though 
she’d started a conversation. 
Please please please ignore him, I think. 
But Miss Crocodile can’t resist
attention and when he says she’s 
enigmatic, then waits for her 
to reply, she falls right into
the trap and lowers her heavy 
lidded eyes, black-lined and swept with 
irridescent blue. ‘How’d you get 
to be so smart, sweet heart,’ he says, 
turning her book over to squint
at the title. ‘I always go 
for the ones who make me think.’ Well,
I think he makes me squirm, and not 
in a good way. ‘Excuse me,’ I 
say, grabbing Miss Crocodile by 
her gloved arm. We get up so fast 
her pearls swing round and whup Mr.
Multisyllables in the face. He turns
red and says ‘Stupid bitches.’ I
guide us to the ladies’ and hope 
she didn’t hear that. Sometimes it 
hurts a lot to have your heart kept 
safe. I dare say mine has known some 
awful pounding. ‘I’ll never be 
hurt again,’ I remind her, ‘But 
it won’t stop some from trying.’ At
first I think I see tears in her 
eyes, but then I realise it’s smoke 
curling up from her nostrils and 
the corners of her mouth. ‘You don’t
worry about me, darlin’,’ she 
says. ‘I’m part dragon, mama’s side
of the family.’ Her fingers are 
smoking too, blue-tipped like her eyes.
I laugh harder than I ever
have, until my sides ache. But we 
wait an hour and twenty seven
minutes before we leave the room.

It's The Saltwater Ones You Have

“It’s the saltwater ones you have
to watch out for. They feed on tears,
even if they’ve been dry for years,”
says Miss Crocodile. She drains her
glass, orders two more and pushes
one across to me. “They have good
memories.” I tell her I made
a serious mistake, thinking
I was supposed to steer clear of
hunters, the clumsy ones with bad
vision and good guns. No one warned
me about crocodiles, about
camouflage. I try to hug my
tail, then remember it’s gone. I’m
stupid, I say. She puts her long
snout against my cheek. “You’ll never
be safe once they come sniffing,” she
says. “They know where you live.” She claims
she once knew one: near-bright, ill-bred
and good at hiding everything
from booze to the tryst of the day.
I’ve listened to the story a
dozen times and never tire
of hearing her triumph, the way
she changes the ending each time
so her escape looks better and
smarter. She is no fool, not at
all. She came close to being turned
into a handbag, almost wound
up as a pair of boots. My bruised
ego is nothing compared to
that. Her eyes are shining. I am
her triumph, too. That’s why I’m here.
She has another lager in
front of me and urges me to
drink up. “The night is long, but so
is the road ahead of us.” She
slips something sharp-edged into my
pocket and hoists herself from the
barstool. “I gave him back the part
of his brain I’d excised and soon
after, we split. Enough’s enough.
Come, let’s blow this popsicle stand.”