Dave Nash

Alligators on icebergs

When I wake up, I feel you're not in our bed before I hear you by the dresser. When you notice me, you tell me “Go back to sleep.. I haven’t made coffee yet. ”


But we don't have time; our children need diapers, pop-tarts, a device charger. I can hear our oldest chomping at the baby gate. “Daddy, Daddy, Gator’s going to eat me,” our overnight bed wetter sreams, “he wants to eat me.” 


I’m like an iceberg, below the surface I’m unprepared for the Titanic sailing towards me. The collision will break me into a thousand pieces and the Titanic will get all the attention


We need to give them clothes, medicine, and school lunches. “Gators in captivity eat frozen rats,” I tell him, “and nobody likes a rattlletale.” 


The morning is gray, the train is gray, the platform below my legs is gray. I avoid my neighbor’s eyes. I'm not ready to converse with my son’s friend’s mother. So I focus on the pale yellow headlights headed towards us until I become one with a crowd. A crowd of costume masks waiving props - smartphone styrofoam coffee vapors - waiting for the arrival. As if to announce the train’s arrival, the wind blows through our genuine leather skin. We bow our heads in gratitude and bristle in acceptance. Not a soul stays on the platform when it departs. 


It takes us behind backyards and backlots, separated by corrugated and chain linked fences, divided by culverts and spillways and highways. In the quiet car we cultivate a library atmosphere. Over our phones and occasional books we glance at the swamps and the dumps and the scrap yards. We blur concrete brick junked car smokestacks together until we go under and through the tunnel. On the other side we are dismissed into the bright bustling station. 


Like a large male alligator, I’m a territorial creature again. I sprawl crawl up the escalator, my belly hovers inches from contact. I rush to mark my desk with Keurig coffee and chewy granola. I begin the ritual clearing of the paper jam to practice appearing invisible and immersed at once. 


But today we have a rogue employee, I am informed. “What do you know about that?” The guy I report to asks me. 


“Maybe we should call HR, notify Compliance,” I say. 


“Nobody likes a rattletale.” 


So I sniff around, go to the men’s room, make more coffee, think creatively. When I come back I tell the truth slant to guy I report to, “The rogue is in the supply closet, I double checked with the custodian.” 


“That’s brilliant! Nobody goes in there…Excellent work.” He pauses as if he could think profoundly. “You know that rogue could be in there making a bomb out of all that Lysol, White-Out, and off-brand non-dairy creamer.”


“That would put us all out of a job!”


“Well, you know what to do then.”


The supply closet isn’t such a bad place. The rogue who occupied it before me was an organizer, but I like my coffee black and I have to stay longer than I’d like. To pass the time, I clean out deprecated printer cartridges and pumpkin spice K-cups. I leave the space better than I found it. 


On the way home I feel part of a new crowd. Otter-like we break through the surface to float back on the ice flows to our abodes. We chill in the nightly current as the conductor announces our neck-of-the-woods. 


When it comes time for me to return to you, you’re on your pad in the living room. I feel the floorboards warp under my feet. You say you hear birds above settling into their chimney nest. “And our little pollywogs?” I ask. You tell me they swam away during the day for bigger fish in larger ponds.


I’m still in one piece. “Let’s have a drink,” you say. Our ice cubes clink. We’re like old strangers meeting for the first time again. Then our tension thaws. Tomorrow I’ll skip the train and we’ll have coffee.

Bio: Dave Nash (he/him) listens to jazz sampled by hip-hop hits while he types in New Jersey. Dave is the Non-Fiction Editor at Five South Magazine and he typed words that can (will) be found in places like Jake, Atlantic Northeast, South Florida Poetry Journal, Hooghly Review, miniMag, Roi Faineant Press, and Boats Against the Current. You can follow him @davenashlit1.