“Croc Mother” by Rebecca Klassen

“Croc Mother” by Rebecca Klassen is an edge-of-your-seat read, a speculative microfiction infused with danger from the opening sentence. But the writer doesn’t rely on mere suspense—instead, she delves immediately into the heart of the matter, yet without overexplaining the issue. Through subtext, the microstory’s narrative tension is expertly, terrifyingly, suspended in time.  —Court Harler

When I was six, I jumped into the crocodile enclosure, compass-point snouts rotating on the water towards me. Mum ran to fetch Dad who I’d last seen hogging a swing in the playground. Not swinging, just scrolling as aggrieved children floated out of swatting distance, like they sensed the things he’d done, things that I never told my nosey teachers and neighbours about, or that social worker who kept steering everything back to Dad whenever I tried to talk about Mum. But the mother croc at the water’s edge was a fantastic listener, smaller than the others who were gliding closer as the zoo goers screamed and filmed me on phones. I told the mother croc about Mum’s delicious meatballs, funny stories about ghosts, feeding the ducks together, and the great raspberries she blew, and how all of it was the best, and she was the best but also the worst.

Mum came back with Dad as zookeepers sprinted with crackly walkie-talkies, and Dad watched me with folded trunk-arms and that look, and Mum stood behind him with that helplessness that cancelled out the meatballs, stories, ducks, and raspberries. I prised open the mother croc’s jaws and climbed inside her gaping mouth and sat on her spongy tongue. The other crocodiles crawled out of the water towards us as I yanked down on her top teeth, ordering her to close her mouth to protect me, to help me, to just do something.

REBECCA KLASSEN is co-editor of The Phare and a Best of the Net nominee from Gloucestershire, England. She won the London Independent Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Alpine Fellowship. Her stories have featured in Fictive Dream, Mslexia, Flash Frontier, Scribeworth, and New Flash Fiction Review.

Featured image by Dan Meyers, courtesy of Unsplash.