This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print and chosen as the Fiction Winner by Julia Phillips.
Illustration by Ashley Yung
Elise and I sat draped over the sea wall at half past four and the sound of the dock buzzing around us reminded me of bugs. It was painfully humid. The full force of a Florida summer was pressing the city between its palms and the whole of St. Augustine languished.
We were watching the two ghosts that waltzed through the flower bed outside the Castillo, trampling the last little wiltings that had made it to August. At least — I was watching them. Elise had an arm thrown over her eyes and might have been asleep.
The ghosts were dressed in formalwear from sometime over a century ago and were not a part of the tourist attraction. They were an amenity. But as sweat-foreheaded and pinched looking tourists handed over their entry fee to the Castillo de San Marcos, none of them even looked over at the ghosts. Instead, they hurried inside the old Spanish fortress as fast as they could, more excited about the prospect of air conditioning than learning about conquistadors and 16th century defensive architecture.
I shifted my attention from the ghosts to the ticket booth. I tried to estimate the amount of money the place was making by the minute just by romanticizing the city’s colonialist history of displacing and murdering the Timucua tribe. I figured that every 9 minutes, it was enough money to pay my monthly rent. Every 15 minutes, it would be enough to pay my rent and buy Elise and I the thing we’d been coveting all summer: the giant preserved alligator head at the antique shop up on Flagler.
“Hey,” I nudged Elise. “You think there’s any chance we could sneak in behind a family and get inside?”
Elise groaned. “Why would you even want to go in there?”
“I’m so sweaty I think I’m going to die.”
“Let’s go to the beach then,” she said, still not bothering to move her arm from over her eyes.
“That makes things even worse, you end up salty and sweaty,” I complained. The ocean was gross this time of year anyway...all brown, tepid, and curdled from sunscreen and skin slough and not even cold enough to feel good. “Plus, my car still has a flat tire and I’m sure as hell not walking that far in the heat.”
“Then fuck off and leave me alone. I’m trying to meditate.”
I frowned. Elise took up meditating about once a year, usually right before she was about to do something drastic and likely perilous. Elise’s meditation was portent of doom. I’d learned this the hard way during the past few years. One day she would try to get me to do mindful breathing or sun salutations with her and then the next week I would get a call from her at 3 in the morning asking if I could pick her up from the waterfront and to make sure my headlights stayed off in case anyone was watching for lights.
One fated time Elise had climbed the fence to the “Fountain of Youth Archeological Park” where it was advertised you could drink from “Ponce de Leon’s Spring of Eternal Hope, flowing forth for centuries!!” She had been caught by security and was forced to run from the area, falling and ripping her knees open in the process.
When I had inevitably picked her up, I asked her why she did it. She responded, “I wanted to know if it was real.” I had been incredulous. “Tourists go in there every day and none of them come out changed. You think if it was real, you could get in for a $30 ticket?” She didn’t even realize I was making fun of her as she solemnly bandaged her own knees, smearing blood and crusted Fountain of Youth dirt all over the inside of my old Ford Escort. “I kind of do feel different though.” She had said looking up at me, eyes wide and bloodshot with a post-adrenaline-high and laughing, “I bet I won’t even age now! You’ll get old without me.”
While I was caught in reverie, the two ghosts I’d been watching stopped dancing and drifted around the edge of the fortress, out of view. This was depressing, I needed to get up.
“C’mon,” I tried again, trying to rouse Elise. “Let’s go to Minnie’s.” Minnie’s was the antique shop up on Flagler, on the way out of old town. It was the purveyor of the giant dead alligator head that I absolutely needed to have.
Elise didn’t budge. “We were just there yesterday, the head was still there.”
“Yes, but what if someone bought it today? Please, I have to know that it’s still available, I’ll die without it.”
“You just said you’d die of sweating too much.”
“Yeah, well I guess I’m just fragile and wilting. Please please please.” That’s how it was with Elise, I felt like a kid around her, pleading for her attention, for her to bestow me with her time and approval.
She shifted onto an elbow and winked one eye open at me. “Fine. But then afterwards you’re going to do some restorative poses with me to relax. You’re too stressed out all the time.”
I jumped up, energy restored at the idea of going to Minnie’s to see the alligator head.
“I don’t even know what you like about the thing.” Elise grumbled as she reluctantly got up.
This was the thing about the alligator head: it was sublime. I’d seen taxidermied alligators before, little shriveled ones that looked like prehistoric raisins. But this one was easily five times the size, from skull to maw at least four and half feet long. All the teeth were still intact in the jaw, pried open in perpetual fury, and the dried out husky skin had retained an almost luminescent shade of green. It was so ridiculously big I could only imagine the size of the body that had once been attached to it. And it was even more ridiculous that his disembodied head was there, preserved for all time in a dusty antique store filled to the brim with Disney novelty mugs and dead people’s decorative silverware.
I had gotten this feeling when I had first seen the head, that it was meant to come with me. I mean, I got feelings like that a lot, funny little instincts that stopped me where I was and held me captive. I became obsessed with the head. I felt that if I took it with me back to our dingy two room apartment, it would turn our lives around. Maybe it wouldn’t find me a better job (working nights at a hotel desk was fine) or even help Elise prevent more meditation phases, but I had the very strong conviction that the alligator would help us. It would save us. I figured these instincts were like the ghosts by the Castillo, most people didn’t even look for them or try to look for them, so they assumed they weren’t there at all. It was up to me to make sure I listened.
It took twenty minutes to walk to the store and when we pushed the door open, the cool wave of air almost brought tears to my eyes. Minnie, the namesake of the antique store, had died sometime in the 70s from a jetski accident and now the owner of the shop was a bald, glossy- eyed guy named Antony. I hated him because he wouldn’t sell me the alligator head on discount. He wanted $500 for it.
“Hi Tony!” Elise called as we walked in the shop, letting the door bang behind us out of spite. Tony looked at us as if we had crawled up from hell to torment him. To be fair, it was probably annoying of us to come in here every day, wandering around ready to glare at anyone who got near the alligator so as to scare off prospective buyers. But at the same time, we weren’t really disrupting business because there was hardly ever anyone else in there but us.
I started towards the back of the shop.
“I sold it,” Tony said, saying the words with obvious satisfaction. A dull shock went through my body, my brain took a few extra minutes to catch up.
Elise also looked shocked. “The alligator head is gone?”
“Sold it a half hour ago to a couple from New York,” Tony confirmed.
That made it even worse. “You sold it to snowbirds? My...my head?”
He snorted, “Hardly call it yours. You couldn’t even afford it if it was half off.”
That was a low blow. Sure, the money I made on minimum wage (which remained pitifully low in the South) at the hotel didn’t go much further than paying my half of rent and I needed to buy a new tire before I could think about buying an expensive antique. But Tony had no right in pointing that out like it was a sin. There were plenty of people in Florida like Elise and me. We weren’t rich enough to enjoy the good parts about the state, but it was hard to care because everything was just so passably decent all the time. Even the oppressive heat felt like home. It was easy for us to have nothing permanent, to just keep living until we died from skin cancer or just faded into the background like the other ghosts.
I walked forward, dazed, towards the place where the head had been. There was now a crudely etched icon of St. Augustine of Hippo. A plaque beneath it claimed it was an antique from the original church the Spanish had built dedicated to the town’s namesake.
The head was really gone. I felt the loss deeply, a gulf in my chest. I sensed Elise start to get angry. Like me, she felt that we had a claim on the gator. We thought there’d been a sort of understanding with Tony that eventually we’d come back and actually get it. He knew we weren’t some fly-by-night tourist customers. Elise clenched her fists and opened her mouth to let Tony have it, but then her shoulders stiffened. She took a forced breath and I could see her mentally reprimanding herself to be mindful and karmic, part of her meditation practice.
“Okay, let’s go, come on.” She grasped my arm and her hand was sticky with dried sweat. Tony’s face was rapturous as we left.
In disbelief, I stumbled out the door and stood facing the street. Across the intersection, two ghosts wearing 1920s swimsuit attire puzzled around like they were lost. On the other side, a group of teenagers stood attracting mosquitos under a tree half-buried in Spanish moss.
“I can’t believe this,” Elise said. I didn’t have the words to respond so we started walking back towards old town. When the streets turned into bricked cobblestone again, I cursed.
“I’ve got work tonight.”
“When do you go in?” Elise asked.
“Seven. I’m supposed to cover for someone.”
We walked towards the main street. We usually came here for fun to watch the tourist scams, or just to wander around when it was hot because all the shops had AC and our apartment didn’t.
“I want to get a drink first,” I declared, “the Greek place.”
Elise waited while I went into the gift shop on the end of the street attached to an old Greek Orthodox Shrine. We had discovered it was the cheapest place to purchase a soda and I needed the caffeine for my shift. To get to the sodas, I had to maneuver through a small chapel with lighted prayer candles and avoid with the dozens of saints that were engraved everywhere on souvenirs.
I paid the old Greek lady at the register and glanced out the storefront idly, only to see that Elise was talking to a couple in the parking lot, using her hands to gesture wildly. Curious, I thanked the old lady, walked outside, and went to see what was happening. Elise was talking to the couple in front of their car. And then I saw why. In their backseat, clearly visible through the non-tinted windows of their rental car, was the alligator head.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Elise was saying as I approached, “but that alligator uh, means a lot to us and we would really love to have it back.” I was horrified. Not only had the alligator crossed paths with us here, fatedly, but Elise had decided to talk to the couple without even consulting me first. I wasn’t sure if I would have chosen the same approach. The couple seemed like typical tourist fare — 70s, wealthy, ready to be catered to.
“I don’t understand!” The wife was saying. “We didn’t take this from you, we just purchased this at an antique shop! It’s a souvenir!”
Elise stayed stolid. “No, I mean, it wasn’t ever supposed to be in the shop. It was stolen from us, and it must have ended up there. I just saw it in your car and had to stop you when I saw you getting into it. Please, you must have a price.”
It was bold of Elise to even mention a price, because it assumed that we could pay it. I’d barely had 40 dollars to begin with and I’d just spent some of it on soda.
“No, I ... we just bought it! And it’s the perfect thing to capture our time here...” the wife trailed off, and I could tell she was displeased, verging on hysterical.
Elise changed gears. “What if I told you I could give you a better souvenir? Maybe we could trade?”
My throat felt dry. Elise was planning something horrible, and I was about to be dragged into it.
“What are you talking about?” The husband cut in, he was wearing a fishing hat that looked out of place on him.
“I’m talking about actual antiques, from the original Conquistadors.” The couple raised their eyebrows in distrust, but Elise plowed on. “Look, we live here.” She gestured towards me as if I was proof of something. “We have insider knowledge. For example, I know that original silver items from the Spanish Era go in museums, they’re worth a lot. Especially Spanish silver that was stolen by pirates and then stolen back by slaves. I have some.” From her pockets, Elise produced three silver spoons. I stared at them. They were most definitely spoons from Minnie’s Antique shop. The place had a million old spoons, mostly from the 1970s, definitely not Spanish silver. And I hadn’t seen Elise pay for them which meant she’d probably swiped them.
It was harebrained and manic, even for Elise’s standards, but the couple looked hooked. Maybe it was the heat, eradicating their brain cells, or maybe it was Elise’s magnetism. She was good at getting away with things.
“How do we know it’s real?” The husband said, trying to pretend he wasn’t obsessed with the idea of pirate spoons.
“I’ll go with you to the antique store right now and you can see what Tony up at Minnie’s Antique says. He knows all about them, he’s the one that appraised them!”
This was obviously a giant bluff, but Elise had them in her pocket. The wife nudged her husband, “Yeah, Tony, that was him, the guy who ran the antique store...” She looked uncertain, glancing between Elise, me, and the alligator head in the backseat of the car.
“Look, this is desperate,” Elise continued, “and I can’t believe I’m even making this offer, but that alligator head belonged to the... gator that killed my uncle and it helps us remember him. He was mauled right after he got home from the Vietnam War.” She was laying it on thick. “Anyway it also killed his newborn child who he was holding at the time. My baby cousin was the last thing that gator ever ate before the cops shot it and we took the head.”
The wife was horrified. The quirky charm of having a taxidermied Florida souvenir, ruined by the idea that the gator was a baby killer.
“Alright, we’ll trade you,” the man said suddenly. He seemed like he wanted to get rid of us more than anything. I couldn’t believe that Elise’s lies had really worked. He clicked a button on his key fob to open the back door. The massive gator head faced us, and a feeling of potential energy filled me again like it had when I’d first seen it. The momentum of centuries was held within this prehistoric creature’s preserved spirit, ready to guide ours forward.
I lunged to pick it up before the couple changed their mind. Elise handed the man the spoons.
“Thank you so much you two, have a great vacation.” Elise added, coming around to help me. “Oh and also the restaurant up on the corner has Mexican beers for $3 during happy hour.” The wife looked shellshocked.
Together, Elise and I lugged the head back to our place. Seventeen blocks, and I had to keep shifting my grip because my hands were sweating. But nothing could put a tinge on the joy welling in me from the acquisition of the gator. I didn’t even know how to start thanking Elise yet. She didn’t look like she was expecting thanks, she just looked stoic. As if she carried alligator heads around every day.
“Don’t you have to go to work?” Elise asked when we finally got to our street.
“I’m not going in today, I’ll call out,” I responded. I couldn’t even dream of going to work. Not when something this momentous had happened. When the gator head was finally mine. It was too hot to go inside the apartment yet, so we sat in my car with the engine on and let the AC blast. The gator head sat in the seat between us, magnificent.
“It’s perfect,” Elise said in exultation, running her hand over its scales. “It has such an energy.”
I grinned and picked it up, turning it over in my hands to admire it.
That was when I saw a blemish on the bottom side of the jaw. The green color looked like it had flecked away and there was a yellow glob of paint peeking out. I frowned and looked at it closer, realizing that one of the scales was peeling away. Curious to see what taxidermy looked like on the inside, I peeled it back further until I revealed a hollow inside frame of wires. Confused, I peeled off the loosened scale next to it.
The car’s AC sputtered and let out a puff of dust. I let out a hoarse laugh.
“What is it?” Elise asked.
So I turned the head to show her. Under the gator’s skin, there was a tag reading “STAGE PROP — Fountain of Youth Archeological Park.”
Elise and I looked at each other for several moments as we mulled over this new information. The head was not real. When the silence got too heavy, I started the car and backed out of the parking space. I drove us back through old town. Outside the Castillo, the ghosts were were still waltzing over the flowerbeds. We passed over the Bridge of Lions, the car lopsided and listing sideways on three tires.
“You want to go to the beach?” I asked.
Elise picked up the gator head and put it over her own head, her neck fitting between the hole in its lower jaw. She wore it like a crown, her face just visible between the teeth. “Yeah,” she sighed. “Let’s go.”
Christiana (she/her) is a senior at Columbia College studying poetry and literature. She spends a lot of time looking for bugs in Riverside Park, making overly-specific music playlists, and watching especially wretched horror movies. She is from Southern Oregon, but also recently lived in Florida for a few humid years.