The microwave’s persistent hum merged with the dripping condensation on its window, a sticky rhythm against the swamp’s nocturnal chorus. Inside my skull, boiled crawdads danced on frayed wires stretched taut, their pincers clicking like manic metronomes—soft promises of Old Bay and lemon slices curling through the synapses. Humidity wasn’t just in the air; it seeped into the marrow of my rum’s psychoanalysis, listening to the turnips’ monster mash.
Footsteps echoed hollowly from the porch—not a knock, but the slide-scrape-sigh of boots on warped pine boards. Through the screen door’s rusted mesh, Sheriff Dupree’s silhouette blurred against the moonlit haze, his badge tilted crooked like a drunk’s grin. “Heard you been squeezin’ hoodoo gin,” he twaddled a grin, doffing his chapeau.
The microwave shuddered into silence, leaving the smell of ozone and burnt chili-frog dogs as crawdads tumbled off the wire inside my mind’s inner sanctum jubilee as Dupree, boot scooted boogie nudging the door open as the swamp exhaled thick as static in Tupperware.
A crawdad landed splat behind Dupree’s bloodshot eyes when I poured him rum—”Must be the humidity,” he mumbled, tongue wrestling consonants, like gators on my Harley’s mudflaps.
