The Croton Parasite
What would you do for love?
There was little Arthur could do about it, but he was sprawled out drunk on his scratchy orange sofa, and the TV remote was under the coffee table. Table being a generous term for the green, painted door on four stacks of thrift store books his ex had assembled during her ‘rekindling the spark’ phase of their relationship. Her air quotes, not Arthur’s. Arthur really hadn’t noticed that the fire had gone out. Their once weekly, sweaty, grunting coupling had been more than he’d ever expected out of Linda when she’d first served him extra whipped cream on his pancakes at the corner diner. She’d winked. He’d furrowed his brow in perplexity and she had laughed at him. Called him ’naive.’
It wasn’t as good as some other couple’s origin stories, but he’d heard worse. Like Buck, the old man who worked the winch on the trawler, for example. He’d met his wife at the skating rink when they were seniors in high school. He’d run over her fingers and severed three of them with the curved blade on his hockey skates. Her father had declared that he had to provide for her, seeing as how he’d maimed her. His own father had agreed it was fit punishment and they were married before she even got the stitches pulled out of her finger stumps. She’d hung the bloody skates over the fireplace in their first home. And there they remained to this day.
Other thing Linda had bought during her Phase was a plant. It sat on the kitchen window sill, right above the sink. Frankly the only way it would get watered, being so close Arthur could dump a glass in when he remembered to do the dishes. It was a gnarly thing. Narrow, yellow spotted leaves that twisted upward in clumps. The leaves would start out green and then turn orange, then red, then almost black. ‘A bush on fire’ was what Linda had called it. Arthur guessed it was thematically appropriate. And it wasn’t too bad a plant, as far as plants went. Now it was all he had.
That lonely fact had begun to wear on him. He’d cursed Linda many a night for her extra whipped cream. Until she’d given him it, he hadn’t known what he was missing. Now he was drunk and too sad to move from the sofa, despite its chaffing upholstery. He watched the ceiling fan whirl overhead, marveling at how it spun backwards if he looked long enough. Wondering if he looked too long, would it spin back time so he could grab the remote before the drink had sapped his vitality. He wriggled to the edge of the sofa, the fabric rubbing his skin raw as he went, and stretched his arm out. He could just see the black, glinting edge of the offending gadget under the absurd horizontal door. The idea seemed dumber every time he thought about it. And that made him miss Linda all the more, her dumb, crazy ideas had been endearing in a way. Entertaining, at the very least. He’d liked watching her putter around, assembling this, tweaking that. Like watching squirrels in the park.
His finger hit the edge of the remote and spun it deeper under the table.
“Christ.” It was more of a supplication than a curse, Arthur wasn’t much for profanity. He laid his head back on the sofa with a lip-flapping sigh and let his hand slip experimentally in the crack between the sofa back and the seat cushion. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find. Food? A spare remote? Instead his fingers closed around an old magazine. Probably one of Linda’s, she liked to read about what she called ‘cryptids.’ Like Bigfoot and Nessie and something called a goat sucker, the learning of which had made Arthur want to try goat meat for almost a month. Linda would read out loud to him while he tried to nap sometimes. God, he missed her. Fixing one of her frilly sofa pillows under his head, he flipped open the magazine. He’d never actually looked inside. It was a lot of grainy photos taken in low light with big red circles drawn around a lot of nothing as far as Arthur could see.
He skimmed the first story, something called a skunk ape, basically an orange Bigfoot. Arthur considered himself open minded, but the next story, about a man who had been fused with a rabbit during a science experiment, was a bit much to swallow. There were a lot of adds for animal pheromones. He skimmed through a debate about the pitfalls of classifying aliens as cryptids and was beginning to feel his eyelids droop when he read the title of the next story.
The Croton Parasite Strikes Again!
Arthur sat up. Was there another Croton, other than Croton, Massachusetts? At the bottom of the page was a small map. It showed this Croton, Massachusetts. His eyes popped back to the top of the page. The article wasn’t long, and the only picture was of a very confusing artist’s rendering, but dang it, there was a cryptid in his own back yard.
It was supposed to be a fun night of camping and drinking for five teenaged boys in the prime of their lives. School was ending for the year and the summer fishing season was about to begin. Before they went to work on their fathers’ boats, the boys wanted to blow off a little steam. What they got, was a night only one of them would survive.
Arthur looked up. He knew this story. Or he thought he did. It had happened about ten years before. He’d already been out of high school and working on his uncle’s trawler for two years, but he’d known the boys in the story. They had gone up camping just past the old round rock look out. There weren’t campgrounds in any of the areas around here, it was mostly just locals going into the forest to hunt and goof off.
The trip had started like any other, the boys had set up camp, sharing two tents between them. They built a fire and were cooking and drinking, just enjoying this one night of freedom before a summer of hard work on the fishing boats. They hadn’t ever heard of the Croton Parasite. Curiously, no one in Croton had heard of the cryptid lurking in their back yards. And even more curiously, they still don’t know. None of the people I spoke to in the town had ever heard of the monster lurking in their woods. Then again, none of them wanted to talk about the boys, either. Maybe there’s more to this story than the locals will admit.