Page 6 - Demo

She ducked behind the shed. Would it be here again, she thought? It was here just a few nights ago. It was the night she%u2019d discovered it, slithering around in the garden, obviously looking for something. It seemed to her, whatever it sought which had forced it across land instead of hiding in the swamps, was something it had found some or part of in her; very much inside her. Carla had wanted to come every night since, but at seventeen years of age and with very fucked-up, poor parents, if they had caught her, the punishment would not be some little down time like rich kids; it would be a thorough beating from her father%u2019s crocodile belt. Carla had rarely felt gentleness. Life at the edge of the swamps of the Everglades was a rough and basic kind of life for the forgotten inhabitants. Having a father who was crude, a rapist, and an ex-con, and who also was married to her pot-head, alcoholic mother, meant life was violent, unloving, and sad. And yet, she loved the swamp. Not the areas now cultivated by the ever-encroaching real-estate builders putting up ever-more rich people%u2019s houses on the edge of her world, but the parts untouched by such clean and sterile hands.The real swamp, well, it was something she understood; it was a wild thing, like her. It had an easy set of rules to learn. Whatever grew biggest was king. A large, recently emerging snake, a foreigner from the other side of the globe, could easily take an adult alligator%u2014 the Swamp Giant Boa. She had only ever once seen one and it was something to fear and respect. It seemed to her in her bright, untamed and uneducated brain that the swamp absorbed all the living things in the world that were rejected or hunted as revolting creatures. All manner of rejects 6Swamp TrampChapter 1: Carla