The Alligator in the Sewers

Aubrey Lynch

There's an alligator in the sewers.

Scales, the color of deep dark mud, blend into the black.

Eyes, beady and ebony, reflect the dim light in the sewers.

It sits, starving, in brown water and wants for brave souls to wander down.

When they do, the alligator will eat them and be full--

but it wasn't always this way.

The alligator didn’t always live in the sewers.

Someone had fed it, cared for it.

It had been warm, and smaller than it is now.

But before its owner realized, it had grown big, a threat to all around it

and cast into the unknown, with waste and shadows.

There's an alligator in the sewers.

We all have one down there.

Something we shouldn’t have said.

A person we left behind.

We had once cared for our mistakes too,

given them the time and opportunity to grow

until they were so big, we let them go

and left them until we forgot.

They linger under our beds,

in our closets,

and in our heads.

There's an alligator in the sewers.

Aubrey Lynch is a junior writing and environmental conservation major at Cedar Crest College. She is from Levittown, Pennsylvania.