Alligator Pickles
/Xenia Sylvia Dylag
The tiny alligator wasn’t so tiny anymore. Its leathery face was smushed up against the sixteen-
ounce pickle jar.
The alligator first appeared in Agata’s homemade pickle brine a few months ago. She
transferred it into tap water, and it puffed up until its eyeballs burst out of its sockets. Frightened
by the sight (and the unfortunate lack of for the alligator), Agata placed it back into the jar of
brine before it grew any bigger. It shrunk a bit, but the poor alligator had no eyes.
Agata kept the tiny alligator in a jar with her homemade pickle brine, and after the
alligator adjusted to blindly navigating around the jar, it swam around and around and around.
Each time she put the alligator in a new batch of brine though, it grew a little. Bigger. And
bigger.
Now Agata tapped the glass jar with her dirty fingernail to see if it would move. But it
was stuck in the smushed, spherical position against the glass.
Was it still alive? Agata wondered.
She dumped her homemade pickles and brine into the bathtub in the basement and placed
the limp alligator in the liquid. The alligator instantly grew twice its size. It slapped its stout
paws in the brine and stuck its fat, grainy tongue out. It tossed a pickle up in the air and caught it
in its mouth. The blind alligator sat in the tub eating pickle after pickle. It grew bigger and bigger
right before Agata’s eyes.
I have alligator in tub and afraid it grow bigger and bigger and too big, big, big, Agata
finally whispered to her neighbor Rodrigo when she went out to get her mail later that afternoon.
Rodrigo told her that he wrestled an alligator once, and if he needed to, he would do it again. For
her, he would. Agata blushed and told him she’d let him know.
After sorting her mail, Agata went back down into the basement, but the alligator wasn’t
in the tub. She followed the puddles of brine into her pickle closet. The alligator stood on its hind
legs with shattered glass all around it and half eaten cucumbers on the ground. When the
alligator smelled Agata, it jumped up and down and squawked like a baby bird excited for its
mother.
Agata ran upstairs and bolted the basement door shut.
She called Rodrigo right away.
Rodrigo came with extra jars of pickles. They chopped them up and squeezed them in
through the bottom sliver of the basement door. They listened to the alligator slurp each sliver
into its mouth. After emptying six jars of pickles, the alligator finally flopped down the steps.
They heard it splash and thud into the tub. Rodrigo and Agata waited a few hours staring at the
basement door before they decided it had been long enough and should be safe to go down. They
tip-toed down the staircase and into the bathroom, and the alligator was lounging on its belly in
the tub. Rodrigo gently stroked its head, and the alligator didn’t move. Rodrigo lifted its paw up
and down. And up and down again. Rodrigo even sat on its back.
Go get my fishing pole next door, Rodrigo told Agata.
And so, in the middle of the night with the full moon hovering up above them, Rodrigo
and Agata sat on the alligator’s back, and Rodrigo held a fishing pole with a pickle dangling
about two feet from the eyeless reptile’s face. They crawled up to the edge of the lagoon in the
park down the street.
Agata poured several jars of pickles into the lagoon. Rodrigo led the alligator into the
water with the last pickle. They watched the alligator eat the pickle and then swim off until it
disappeared into the depths of the lagoon.
They never saw the alligator again, but every full moon night, Rodrigo and Agata walked
down to the park at midnight and poured a jar of her pickles into the lagoon.
Author’s Note: This story was inspired by my love for pickles and an actual alligator lurking in the lagoon in Humboldt Park in Chicago. The alligator was named "Chance the Snapper" and was eventually captured by a reptile expert flown in from Florida. "Alligator Pickles" is part of a longer story in my collection of linked short stories about Polish-Americans in Chicago that I am currently polishing up and hoping to publish.
Xenia Sylvia Dylag is a Polish-American writer and educator from Chicago. She received her MA from Jagiellonian University and MFA from the Mississippi University for Women. Her flash fiction has appeared in Mortar Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Coffin Bell, Ligeia Magazine, and Dead Skunk Mag. She currently lives in Texas and teaches English.
