We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator. Don’t run in a
straight line.… Your chances go up about one percent.
—Donald Trump, July 2025

Alligator Alcatraz: under the white sun of the Everglades, under the white
tents soaked by cloudbursts, under the white LED lights gleaming twenty-
four hours a day, migrants writhe sleeplessly in chain-link cages, thirty-two
men to a cage. From Cuba, from Guatemala, from México they wandered,
house painters and landscapers handcuffed at mealtime, lifting forkfuls
of white rice and maggots to their mouths. Here, an inmate says, there
are more mosquitos than water; here the inmates cry Libertad, Libertad
after the water from the toilets crawls across the floor again, after a man
crawls across the floor, his belly stabbed by kidney stones, then disappears.

Near the gate, on Route 41, an alligator drowses in a drainage ditch, his kind
survivors of the last great extinction, bored by the speeches at the vigil,
by Arianne the tour guide, who walked off her job in Little Havana to stand
in the mangroves and say the name of her father in his chain-link cage: Justo.
Courtney the witness raises up a sign that reads Shame. Like a teacher
in pigtails at the whiteboard teaching the word Shame, she enunciates
the single syllable, taps the sign, gesticulates to the man behind the wheel
every time a car guns through the gate and away from Alligator Alcatraz.

Officer Martínez, guard at Alligator Alcatraz, Special Housing Unit, idles
the car so he can confess to Courtney in her pigtails. I got fired today,
he says, the gashes on his cheek proof of the scuffle with another guard,
a brown-skinned boy in his twenties, mustache struggling to sprout from
his lip. I did it for the money, he says, lamenting all the twenties he flung at
the two-drink minimum or the wriggling strippers of Miami. She asks about
the patch on his sleeve. Officer Martínez tears the Velcro from his shoulder,
handing her the patch like a souvenir postcard of flamingos in the Everglades.

The patch: Alligator Alcatraz on a red banner, the blockbuster movie now
showing at the movie house; the Grim Reaper and his ruby eyes, scythe
harvesting the souls of border-crossing orange-pickers as if they burst
with the boils of the plague; the alligator skeleton, bone stripped of hide,
roaring at his prey the way his ancestors roared eight million years ago;
two skulls, skin peeled away in the swamp, the proclamation You Can’t Hide
strung between them; the backdrop of cages behind the danse macabre.

Officer Martínez rolls away, and the keepers of the vigil wonder if they saw
a New Testament conversion reenacted in the swamp, if he is Saul of Tarsus, if
Route 41 is the road to Damascus, if his sun-struck vision will clear and he will
circle back to hoist the sign that reads Shame at the gate of Alligator Alcatraz.
An hour later he returns, storming through the gate to snarl at his boss about
the job, still in his uniform, another Grim Reaper patch stuck to his shoulder.
Courtney hears in her head his words about the patch: You can just have it.
I have them made, and I give them out. He storms back, still jobless, and Courtney
hops into his car. Are you wearing a wire? he snaps. She lifts her T-shirt to show
him skin, and he has a vision, flashbacks of the strippers teasing him in Miami.

Current Issue

July-August, 2026 Issue

Officer Martínez is not Saul of Tarsus, not the landscaper or the house painter
or the orange-picker, not the inmates pleading for water in the Spanish tongue
of his grandparents, not the man caged in solitary, the Special Housing Unit,
where the rules on the wall say the guards must loosen the shackles if the steel
cuts off the flow of blood to the hands, where they have it easy, he says. He is
the keeper of keys to the shackles, the guard who slaps the Reaper patch
in the hands of his brother guards. He is the Reaper, the alligator, the skull.

They tell you they’re your executioners, that you won’t get out of there alive,
Ana’s husband testifies, freed in court by writ of habeas corpus, his heart
palpitating when reporters speak of patches worn by the guards. He still
waits for the Reaper to stride from the patch and handcuff him in the hallway,
for the alligator to slither from the patch and drag him into the underworld.
I am fourteen hundred miles from Alligator Alcatraz, fourteen hundred miles
from a guard by the name of Martínez who brawled his job away and still
believes his gospel, like a missionary to the Seminoles in the Everglades before
the Trail of Tears. I am fourteen hundred miles from a sign at the gate that says
Shame, yet my skin stings as the word floods my face, a feast of mosquitos.