The Crocodile

Technology comes even to the Australian rural coast. Against all expectation, I've found a net cafe in town, right next to a general store that doubles as a retailer of sheep dip.

It's strange being down here without Megan. I don't think I've ever done it before. The stormclouds keep intermittently dissolving into sweeping rains, whipping the sea into a churning dark monster, and it's so typical of a hundred days of my childhood that I expect to find Megan beside me, or waiting for me down the street, or looking out the windows as I come home.

We scattered the ashes last night, in a brief moment of clear weather. I don't know what I expected to feel, but whatever it was I didn't feel it. The contents of the urn went out into the sea, and it was just like skipping pebbles or kicking dust.

Afterwards I lay awake in one of those thin kid's beds that we keep down here, and I felt the same feeling I had as a child; that something was watching me. Like the night was alive with a single ancient intelligence, and close by my ears its inscrutable brain was pondering upon me.

As a child when this feeling came it terrified me; Megan called it the Crocodile, and said it wasn't scary because it wasn't interested in us. There's an old ship's bell hanging from the wall in the guest bedroom, and Megan once told me I could sleep easily, because she could hear the Crocodile well, and if he came for me, she'd ring the bell.

The bell never rang. And Megan was right anyway; there's nothing out in the night more sinister than the romance of the moon with the sea, and the flickering shadows born of that union. This land dreams on whether I keep vigil or not.