Kumari Kandam Trailer Park (The Sunken Kingdom)

The screen door banged like a shotgun behind her

and she clomped down the wooden stairs of the trailer

the moment she heard our tires crunch on the gravel.

As soon as I stepped from the car into the moat

-displacing hundreds of larval warrior mosquitoes

with one thick splash- I knew that peril was close.

But I was merely the page, the squire, the Sancho

to this trailer-tilting psycho, my pal I’d accompanied

these thousand miles, squeaking through speed

traps and cutting off truckers, this maniacal hunter

crushing caffeine pills and littering the floor of the Pinto

with cellophane and the spent shells of energy drinks.

Maybe it was just the hot, slimy air making my hair

want to slither from my scalp, making me gulp for breath.

He’d met her on a family vacation in Key West.

When he’d returned to Pennsylvania they’d kept in touch

over the fledgling internet, and now he was back to scoop her up,

torpedoing south to rescue her from the sawgrass nest,

deliver her from the soggy prison deep in the gator-infested

swampland of Florida. And I was the madman's backup, my legs

buckling beneath me in fear at the prospect

of getting lost, of being accosted by back-woods perverts,

subjected to their toothless twang, their barefoot justice.

I watched his lit-up face go dim 
as her rubbery lips stretched into a grin,

revealing sweet-corn teeth pressed into the rim

of the pink reef of her gums. Freckles dusted her face

like cayenne sprinkled on mayonnaise,

like creeping rust. But that wasn’t the worst.

Behind her thudded the trunks of a toad

as the oblong blob of her mother descended the planks.

Chinless and squinting, her jowls jiggling as she hugged us.

Then the father emerged, a stoic, pop-eyed manfrog,

a beer barrel propped up on scrawny legs.

They gave us the tour of the manor, pointing out the room 
where we were to spend the weekend, the greasy sleeping bags.

I pulled my captain aside and he staggered beside me in a stupor

between the aluminum hulls of the submerged wrecks.

Collapsed lighthouses, fallen towers.

We can’t stay here, I hissed. He nodded. Behind us an engine revved

and a black four-wheel-drive behemoth sidled up beside us.

Two ghouls sat behind the wheel of the leviathan

staring at us with the crab-eaten, eel-riddled eyes

of drowned mariners. We raced back to the car

and didn’t stop driving until we hit dry land in Savannah,

where we spent a speechless night staring at the motel television.

We took to the road the next morning, the sun risen

over the sea to our right. I should probably stop

and give her a call from one of these diners, he said,

but never even slowed down. Just kept on driving.