Don't Go Into the Swamp

. . .

The last person to go into the swamp had carved three words into a cypress trunk before they stopped carving anything at all.

SHE WATCHES

That was in 1987. The letters had darkened with sap and age. Moss was filling them in, soft green fingers pressing into each groove, and in another ten years the bark would close over them completely and the warning would be gone. Nobody has ever listened to the warnings.

Before dawn, the swamp was quiet. The wrong kind of quiet. Not empty. Held. The kind of silence that happens when every living thing in a half mile has stopped breathing at once and is listening to something you can’t hear yet.

Mist drifted low across the black water, threading between cypress trunks, settling into the roots. No wind. No frogs. No insects sawing in the dark. Just the swamp, and the smell of it: rich black mud, and underneath that something sweeter, something that didn’t belong in a place where things rotted. The sweetness of something alive, breathing out, slow and patient.

Then the animals came.

Not the way animals come to water at dawn. Not to drink, not to hunt. They came the way people file into a viewing. Quiet, single-file, nobody making eye contact. Ducks first, gliding out of the fog in a silent line. Muskrats next, climbing onto roots without a splash. Rabbits. A heron. A possum. All converging toward the same place: a clearing in the deep canopy where a low wooden structure sat on a patch of dry ground, its door hanging on a single hinge.

A chicken coop. Old enough that the wood had turned the color of bone.

Inside, on a rough feeding table, a leather-bound book sat closed. Its cover was darkened with age, the leather worn smooth at the corners the way leather gets after a hundred years of handling. But it wasn’t cracked. It wasn’t rotting.

It sat in the middle of a swamp, in a building with walls that didn’t keep out water, and it was dry. It had always been dry. The swamp didn’t touch it. The damp didn’t reach it.

As if the book and the water had an understanding.

The water at the edge of the clearing rippled. Once. The way water moves when something large shifts its weight beneath the surface. Then it went flat. Perfectly, impossibly flat. Not still. Flat. As if the surface had been pressed smooth by a hand from below.

A faint green glow drifted between the trees. Not a reflection. Not swamp gas. A light. Weaving through the trunks, low over the water, tracing the same patient route it had been tracing since before the fence existed, since before the road existed, since before the houses pushed up against the edge of something they should have left alone.

On the sagging roof, four black chickens sat motionless. Their dark eyes were fixed on the place where the glow had been. They didn’t cluck. They didn’t shift. They had been sitting there when the last kids came through. And the kids before that. And the ones before that. The same four chickens, on the same roof, in the same positions, for longer than any chicken lives.