The paddle slipped in my clammy grip, sending a shudder through the rickety old canoe. Mist swirled around us, cloaking the cypress trees in ghostly tendrils and blurring the edges of the swamp. Above, the sky bled from bruise-purple to a sickly gray, mirroring the turmoil in my gut. We were doing it. We were following Peter's wishes, literally paddling him into the afterlife along the murky ribbon of Bayou Lafitte.
Rita, her face pinched with disapproval, dug her paddle deeper into the water. "He wouldn't have wanted this, John. Peter hated boats."
I winced. Rita was right, mostly. Peter preferred terra firma, his sneakers perpetually scuffed from scrambling over abandoned buildings and forgotten trails. But his instructions had been clear, scrawled across a crumpled bar napkin in that loopy handwriting of his: "Cremate me, scatter me in the swamp where the gators sing like angels. Paddle me out myself, you bunch of chuckleheads."
Dad, perched precariously in the bow, chuckled humorlessly. His lucky coin, a worn silver dollar with a chipped eagle's head, winked from his calloused palm. Tails. We were bound by Peter's morbid whims, by the flip of a coin, by the unsettling silence that now hung heavy between us.
The swamp orchestra, as Peter called it, played a discordant symphony. Bullfrogs bellowed, insects trilled, and somewhere in the distance, a gator truly did let out a guttural croak that sent shivers down my spine. It sounded eerily mournful, the kind of song you'd expect at a wake not held in a dingy bar with stale peanuts and a jukebox playing Hank Williams on repeat.
We paddled deeper, the bayou narrowing until the cypress knees formed a gnarled tunnel overhead. Sunlight, already weak, sputtered through the dense foliage, casting dappled patterns on the water like broken mosaics. It felt like we were entering another world, a realm of dripping moss and secrets kept by ancient, watchful trees.
Suddenly, Rita gasped. "John, look!"
She pointed to a clearing ahead, where the bayou widened into a small lagoon. In the center, like a skeletal island, rose a lone cypress, its branches draped in Spanish moss that looked like tattered beards. And perched on one of those beard-like strands, silhouetted against the fading light, was a gator.
But this wasn't any ordinary gator. It was enormous, its body thick as a tree trunk, its eyes glowing like embers in the gloom. It turned its head towards us, and for a moment, I swear it let out a low, rumbling chuckle.
A primal fear prickled my skin. Was this part of the plan? Some swamp god summoned by Peter's twisted joke? Or was it just a hungry reptile guarding its territory?
Whatever it was, it focused its gaze on the metal canister clutched in Dad's shaking hand. Peter's ashes.
"Time to send him home," Dad rasped, his voice thin and tight. He uncorked the canister, and a fine cloud of dust, the faintest whisper of Peter, danced on the wind.
As the ashes scattered, settling on the gator's scaly back, the air shifted. The swamp orchestra fell silent, replaced by an eerie stillness. The shadows deepened, and for a fleeting moment, I could have sworn I saw a flicker of amusement in the gator's glowing eyes.
Then, with a flick of its tail, the giant beast plunged back into the murky depths, taking a piece of Peter with it. The bayou sighed, the silence returning, thick and heavy.
We sat there, a family adrift in a canoe of grief, surrounded by the whispers of the swamp. In that moment, I couldn't tell if we'd honored Peter's wishes or sealed our own fates. But one thing was certain: this wasn't the end. It was just the beginning of a story far stranger, far more unsettling, than any of us could have imagined.
The paddle, slick with sweat and swamp water, felt heavy in my hands. We had a long way back, and the shadows were growing longer. The sun was setting on Peter's final joke, and the real game, the one played not with coins and canoes but with life and death, had just begun.
Source: bard.google.com
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