Did you know Amazon delivers to the sewer? It’s true. I would know, being the Alligator Man and all. Crocodile-Human hybrid to be specific, but no one is interested in details. Not the tabloids who print grainy pictures of me skedaddling away after I’ve finished eating a rat or two. Not the kids who dare each other to look for me down here. Not my wife Deborah, either, but I suppose ex-wife is more appropriate now since she stopped putting money in my account. I surmise she feels partially responsible for all the missing people.
My hands are mostly reptilian now so it’s more difficult to write down my thoughts. Luckily, I used the remainder of my funds to procure a speech-to-text doohickey and I’m enjoying that greatly, though my poems have devolved into repetitive dreck about tearing flesh apart. To think, I used to write about dancing daffodils in the billowy breeze of spring.
My voice remains a delectable countertenor, but I’m sure that will change, too. My teachers used to say I had the voice of an angel longing to be human and I hope if they heard me today, perhaps blindfolded, they would feel similarly.
I didn’t want to admit what was happening at first. My cat ran off into the sewers so I chased after him into the depths, slipping on a mucky mess of god knows what and fell into the rivers of bile flowing underneath the city. In my attempt to escape its foul clutches, I inadvertently ingested some of the sewer sludge. Moments after, I cornered my cat, then ate him in three bites. Oddly, it felt natural and correct to do so. I used to dress Monsieur Whiskers in holiday sweaters that I knit myself, for god’s sake, so the thought of eating him, let alone harming him, was non-existent. It was after I started to peel the skin off my legs and arms like a ripe orange and felt pleased – proud, even – to caress the leathery scales that were now my own, it became impossible to ignore the quickly accelerating changes.
I still have my hair, and for that I am grateful. My grandfather had nary a bald spot to his dying day and the mortician made sure to follow the family’s instructions to comb and style it to his liking. One of my eyes fell out last year, but it’s not so bad. What grew in its place helps me see in the dark, and down here, you hold onto any asset you can scrounge.
I don’t plan to go to the surface and attempt to rejoin society – keeping to myself is what I desire. But life always gets in the way of good planning, my mother used to say, and what I may want is secondary. Hunger. Hunger is what I think about. There aren’t any funds left in my account to order meat (thank you Deborah) so, naturally, evolution took the wheel. Vagrants are often full of disease and upset my stomach. Rats are filthier than the drug addicts but at least they are plentiful. It’s the children I can’t stop dreaming about. When the children come down here on a dare to find the Alligator Man, I want to run away and gnaw on enough rodents to keep the fantasy of chewing on their succulent flesh at bay.
That method worked for a time, but lately, very often, I succumb to nature. My ‘Keep Out’ signs near my things do not deter them. I yell at them to leave but they get too scared and can’t move, turning to stone in the face of their urban legend in the flesh, or scales, more accurately. At least when it happens, what’s left of my humanity goes to sleep and I seem to drift off to a fugue state, awakening later, fully satiated.
Waking up next to little jeans and sweatshirts without a child to fill them used to disturb me. Lately, though, the more I change, the more scutes and armored scales I grow, and the more I dream of warm water kissing the mangroves, the less I care about who wore those clothes.
I’m compelled to sit still in the water for hours, awake but not quite, patiently waiting for the next person to make a poor decision and come down here. I don’t take pleasure in it; I’m not a sadist, I’m simply adhering to nature. Any attempt to dissuade invaders into my nest is an echo of learned morality when I was fully human. I know I should have ran away when my son came down here because it was the ‘right’ thing to do, but ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are concepts that no longer make sense to me. I knew it was ‘wrong’ what I did to him, but I was hungry.
When my son was born, he cried and screamed for help, holding onto my fingers with all the strength he could muster. He wouldn’t open his eyes, and shivered in the cold, sterile room; a world foreign to the womb’s warmth. Witnessing his fresh essence transformed my soul. Seeing the beautiful life my wife and I produced made me feel more human than anything else before or after. I knew at that moment I would protect my son at any cost as long as I lived. When he cried down here in the sewer, screaming for help, becoming the same helpless thing I saw seconds after he entered the world, I felt nothing but the saliva pooling in my jaws.
When I’m no longer the Alligator Man, and fully transformed into a simple reptile whose cousins roamed the earth millions of years ago, I wonder if any of my humanity will linger like a phantom limb. Perhaps I’ll still be able to sing. Maybe people above me will stop and listen to the countertenor crescendos and know the pain of a beast once capable of love.
Matt Tice is a fiction writer in Duxbury, Massachusetts whose debut novel ‘Seaflower’ is currently in submission to publishers. You can probably find him clamming in the bay with his wife, two young children, and well-meaning dog Zeppelin. Read more of his work at ticewrites.com and follow him @ticewrites on bluesky and instagram.
Published 8/7/26