The last time I saw a woman’s legs that pale, they were floating belly-up in the okefenokee This pair was moving slow, deliberate steps through the sawgrass, bare ankles brushing against the blades like she wasn’t afraid of nothing. “She got legs…dat ain’t no gator, cher,” I muttered to myself, spitting tobacco juice into the murk. The old man next to me didn’t react, his rheumy eyes stayed fixed on the horizon where the sun bled into the bayou. “She never begs, she knows how to choose them,”…if she is a woman at all. “Ain’t seen no woman walk through them reeds since ’89,” The air fizzed with something thicker than humidity, old magic, maybe, or just the swamp gas playing tricks on my nose. She moved like she was lacquering the ground with each step, leaving no prints behind, just the faintest ripple in the water where her toes dipped in.
The old man finally stirred, his voice cracked like cypress bark. “Dem legs ain’t hers to keep.” Some things you don’t wanna know the shape of until they’re already sittin’ in your lap. The woman paused where the water deepened, her toes curling against nothing but black water and older things that didn’t bear naming. She tilted her head like a heron eyeing a fish, and for a heartbeat, the whole swamp held its breath. Then she spoke, soft, syrup-thick, a voice that didn’t so much leave her lips as unspool from the shadows between the trees. “Y’all lookin’ for somethin’ lost,” she said, not a question. The old man’s knuckles whitened on his walking stick. “She got legs.”
