Sardines

A Tale of Floridian Regret

“Where are we again?”

“Devil’s Crest.”

“Uh-huh. And how long did you say we were going to be here?”

Jase’s skin is marinating in the Florida heat. I’ve known him forever, so I can tell.

“As long as it takes,” comes his vague reply.

“As long as what takes?”

“Why can’t we just spend the evening together and enjoy ourselves?” Jase implores. His back is toward me, and his head is angled down, which is the way he sits when he’s pondering something. He’s got one oar balanced across his gangly knees, and I almost feel sorry for him. See, he’s always had a thing for me. It’s hot, muggy, and there are so many mosquitoes swarming the boggy eaves that I can only assume they’ve formed some kind of alliance. Or, at the very least, a “How to Collect Blood from Humans Most Efficiently (Coffee and Snacks Included)” seminar.

“Celeste?”

I can’t answer him. I really don’t want to be in this narrow canoe right now. We’re supposed to be in the Everglades on this private trail as a way to celebrate Jase’s new job as a park ranger, which coincided beautifully with my graduation from Ohio State University. I’d majored in Evolution and Ecology, and Jase had done what he’d always sworn he would do: he’d escaped the little podunk trailer he grew up in, which had also functioned as a meth-lab before his parents were put away.

“Celeste…”

Jase had done something with his life, and he was proud. So I couldn’t exactly have turned him down when he promised me the cozy ‘trip of a lifetime’. Really, I’d accepted because I pitied him more than anything else.

I love Jase, but there will never be any romance between us. Now, while sweat forms in vigorous beads along my collarbone, I’m struggling for a way to tell him.

“Celeste!”

“Hmmm?” I jerk my chin in his direction.

“Have you heard anything I’ve said to you this past three minutes?” Jase pushes his glasses up the brim of his nose, but his face is covered with a sweaty sheen and they keep slipping down. His ranger’s uniform is soaked, but he insisted on wearing it.

“I’m sorry,” I say lamely, plunking my own oar into the bottom of the canoe. “It’s just — I’m sick of holding this thing. And you said this would be ‘charming’, if I remember correctly. Mist, fireflies, a chance to actually talk like we did when we were kids — ”

“Why do you always have to be so god-damned mean?” Jase cuts me a look that would wilt a scorpion, and for a moment I feel guilty.

But I can’t let him know that.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“Like you don’t know,” Jase retorts. “Hell, I even named this canoe after you. It’s not a ship and it’s barely even a boat, but I named it the ‘Celesta Maria’ because I loved you that much. And now… I’m beginning to wonder if I’m just wasting my time.”

For an uncomfortable moment, a swath of silence passes between us. Then, from directly beneath the canoe, comes a surprise jolt that hoists us up into the air.

Something’s hit us.

“What was it? What was that?” I shriek. “It was an alligator, wasn’t it? Dear Jesus, why the hell would I agree to go canoeing at a place called ‘Devil’s Crest’ when even a kindergardner knows the Everglades are swarming with alligators?!”

Jase is visibly shaken, but calm. “Simmer down, Celestie,” he says in a concerning monotone. “That wasn’t an alligator; bumping canoes from the bottom isn’t exactly their modus operandi.”

For reasons I cannot articulate, I’m suddenly freezing. “What was it then? Jase, you said this place was safe!”

“It is.” His face says otherwise.

“Jase, alligators overturn canoes all the time. We were just attacked!”

“No, we weren’t.”

I bury my face in my hands. The sky has slipped from a cornflower hue into the timbres of an evening musk. I could have been home streaming Netflix with an avocado bisque, but no. I’d just had to agree to this, repeating my childish habit of going along with anything Jase ever suggested because I never wanted to see him cry. Now, we are going to die. I don’t see Jason Voorhees near the river bank or any hungry bull sharks, but this situation is bad.

I don’t know how I know. But I know.

Jase opens his mouth to say something and is silenced again by the second jolt, which sends us both scrambling for the edges of the canoe as it abruptly lists from side to side. Dark, foul smelling water finds its way over the side, soaking my new Vanns. Even the tips of my platinum, Elsa-esque braids are now saturated with fishy-smelling gunk. Those braids took me hours to perfect.

I wonder briefly what’s wrong with the water.

“Jase, is water supposed to smell like that?”

For once, Jase has nothing comforting to say. His white-knuckled hands are still gripping the edges of the Celesta Maria, and he looks absolutely miserable.

I feel the underbelly of my gut fill with sick dread. For the first time, I’ve noticed that even the crickets have gone silent. The bull-frogs have ceased their warbling. Jase, whose eyes have quietly been scanning the algae-coated waters, suddenly fixates on something just beyond me. His mouth is open, but he can’t seem to articulate. All he can do is point a shaking finger.

“Jase, wha — ”

The dark shadow to my right snatches the breath from my lips. Numbly, I look up; I can almost feel my brain tissue scrambling in its attempt to process what’s right next to me. At first, I think the creature is a swan on steroids. There’s a graceful neck easing its way out of the depths, topped with an enormous, serpentine head and two terrifying-looking eyes on either side of it.

But it can’t be a swan, I realize now. Its color is a mottled blend of hershey spots and white marbling… nor does the creature have feathers.

Trembling, I rip the satchel off my back that’s got my Samsung in it and begin to rummage. Cell-phone, cell-phone, I need to get my cell-phone…

“Celeste!” Jase hisses. “Stop moving! You’ll spook it!”

I ignore him. My fumbling hands manage to find the cell-phone and grasp it. When I go to lift it out, though, the adrenaline that’s flooding my nervous system zaps the tendons in my wrist. My phone, and with it the only links to any emergency assistance we could have summoned, slips quietly into the murk.

But I don’t have a chance to react. The swan-that-isn’t has dipped its head to my level and is staring intently. I sit, mute, with my limbs frozen to the canoe like ice-blocks while my mental neuronics fizzle. The curious-looking creature is now so close that its sardine-like odor overwhelmes me.

I can’t help it: I puke. Everywhere.

Jase is on his knees now, sloshing around in the pukey, sardiney mess at the canoe bottom and shouting something at me. I can’t hear him. My abject fear has cancelled everything out except for the cassowary-like thing beside me. But by now, though, I know full well that this animal has nothing to do with ornithology. It’s —

“…a boa! It’s a boa, Celeste!” Jase is screeching now, a flaxen-haired scarecrow come to life.

He’s right. The coloring, the sinuous grace, the shape of the eyes and the head make it very clear that this is a constrictor-like snake, but the proportions are way off.

I make a rough internal calculation: Three-and-a-half. The head alone is about three-and-a-half feet long.

How the fuck long is the rest of it?!

What happens next is too horrific to actually be real. The creature’s eyes, which are luminescent and bigger than baseballs, blink twice in the lazy evening haze. Then the head and neck raise, swiveling over my head and toward Jase’s end of the canoe with an airy ‘swoosh’.

In a motion so deft that my optical nerves can’t trace it, the snake opens its mouth and darts into Jase’s space. There’s a dull, meaty thud as its jaws clamp shut around him. Jase’s glasses clatter into the canoe bed. With my best friend in its maw, the snake dips quietly back into the river and out of sight.

I’m in a fetal position sodden with my own vomit, covering my ears with both hands to shield myself from the wailing I don’t yet realize is coming from me.

Trauma set in.

It set in deep.

I don’t know how many days have passed: two? Three? Could’ve been ten, for what it feels. The shock of seeing Jase yanked into a murky grave plays over and over in my head and across the backs of my eye-lids. The raw, primal fear of having been in the mere presence of a creature whose size should have made it impossible to exist has paralyzed me. When I collapsed into the canoe bed, I stayed that way and haven’t gotten up since.

I’m pickling in an odd brine of vomit, filth, and piss. But even so, if I hug my knees against my chest and squeeze my eyes shut, at least I have the illusion of being safe. If I stay here, curled up in this pathetic lump like a frightened pangolin, then maybe Sardine won’t be able to see me.

Maybe it’ll let me be, swim far away. Look somewhere else for its food. Maybe if I force myself into fitful sleep, I’ll wake up again in my own bed to the sound of Jase’s ringtone twinkling from my battered Samsung phone.

The one he’d fixed for free when I dropped it and cracked the screen.

But I open my eyes to a nightmare just the same.

In sheer desperation, I pound my fists into the canoe floor and howl. That’s when I feel it: a small, velvety box that’s been lodged between two broken canoe planks. Instinctively, my hands close around it and I bring it into my bedraggled vision. Trembling, I force the box open.

It’s an engagement ring.

Jase had been planning to propose to me.

And now, all I have left of him are the words in my head: Celeste, why do you have to be so god-damned mean?

Sniffling, and with salty tears streaking my cheeks, I grasp the ring and manage to slip it onto one shaking finger. Somewhere far above, I can hear the distant pulse of a low-flying helicopter, while the pungent smell of week-old sardines snakes into my nostrils once again.

It’s come back for me, apparently: Jase’s lanky bones must not have been enough for it. I’m thoroughly exhausted and emotionally destroyed. The helicopter means freedom…but if I stay in this canoe — this Celeste Maria that Jase so sweetly named after me — then perhaps I can meet this Sardine face to face.

If I can do that, maybe whatever-it-is will give me a different sort of freedom: the chance to be with Jase again; a chance I’m not sure I even deserve.

So in the canoe I remain. The helicopter comes into sight, dipping low. I make sure I am well out of view. With my face stretched toward the sunshine, I close my eyes.

I’ll never be mean to you again, Jase, I promise.

Just please, whatever you do: forgive me.