Yolanda

I met a Creole woman named Yolanda who had hairy legs and wore a red hibiscus in her hair. She told me she had a pet alligator ("halligator" she said) and she talked to him every day. When she said "hah" the alligator said "hah". The alligator was not very big and he lived in a five gallon bucket and ate small fish called sprat.

Yolanda smoked a pipe and lived in a cave near the lagoon with ocelot, deer and margay skins for rugs. She had a ghetto blaster but the batteries were dead. She painted pictures--sometimes of imagined tropical worlds with volcanoes and huge idols. But more often she painted pictures of herself. She told me she was once a model in New York City. She was, in fact, quite beautiful.

Yolanda liked to keep things of other people--I don't know why. She even had the bones of a long dead Mayan Indian taken from a catacomb in an almost forgotten cave in the hills. She had some ribs, an ulna and pieces of the skull and jaw. She kept them in a very old pot which had orange and black inscriptions around the outside. In a ziplock bag she kept finger bones and teeth. They looked like candy.

One night we walked along the shore of the lagoon. there was no moon and the water was filled with bioluminescence, millions of tiny organism which ignite to every movement of every wave or animal. Yolanda said the water was "burning", but the light was bluer, like the blue of a dashboard Jesus. I waded into the water and my feet and ankles ignited a swirling trail of light. Small fish, crabs and stingrays exploded like silent fireworks. As I walked away from the shore I could see the embers of Yolanda's pipe in the darkness. I swam out into deeper water; its blackness felt like velvet on my skin. Lazily I drifted further and further. In the depths beneath me I noticed a large faint glow. Slowly it moved as if alive; it rose to a huge pulsating light beneath my feet; then veered and dove again into the dark of the lagoon.

I returned to shore and stood in the darkness, cold and dripping. Yolanda was gone.

--Chris Augusta