<commit_before>---
layout: story
category: short story
issue: 97, November 2021
issue-cover: issue-97-cover.png
issue-buy-link: https://store.firesidefiction.com/products/fireside-magazine-issue-97-november-2021
title: Roar, Sweet Child, Roar
subtitle:
author: sydnee-thompson
author-2:
author-3:
editor: chelle-parker
illustrator:
copyeditor: chelle-parker
selector:
translator:
narrator:
letterer:
word-count: 1844
date: 2021-11-16 01:00:01 -0500
permalink: roar-sweet-child-roar
audiourl:
teaser:
art:
artcaption:
spanish-language:
spanish-date:
english-url:
spanish-url:
serial-name:
serial-url:
part:
previous-url:
next-url:
contentnote: This story contains depictions of a child in a life-threatening situation.
generalnote:
published: false
---
He woke up in a shallow puddle on the edge of the forest, mud thick and golden like molasses coating his bare body from head to toe. He felt like he’d just belly-flopped across a football field of sandpaper.

The noonday sun cast splashes of yellow through the canopy of the ancient, sprawling cypress trees that surrounded him. He recognized the overgrown dirt road leading from the town's outer limits toward the nearby swamp stretched out to the left of him, where a faded wooden sign in the distance warned that the area was in gator territory. He had no idea how he had ended up here, though.

His wife was going to kill him.

"Fuuuuck," he groaned out, letting his eyes slide closed and his head roll back. A tension headache slammed him in the skull in time with his heartbeat. What the fuck had happened last night?

"Hey, Mister," a soft voice called.

He opened his eyes again. A thin little Black girl, her dark skin as velvety as a midnight sky and her full, kinky hair piled in two perfect puffballs on top of her head, stood over him with wide eyes. She was hugging a Moana backpack protectively against her stomach.

_Fuck_, he thought again, his heart racing. He shouldn't be here. The warmth of the sun and the dense humidity made his blood sing, and that was kind of the problem.

But before he could utter a half-assed excuse and hightail it back home, the girl dropped her bag to the ground and raised her arms, palms facing outward. At first glance, all he could see were the grains of sand that stuck to her wet skin in clumps, but then the sun caught the unmistakable glint of scales on the underside of her wrists. They were glistening with a subtle sheen and shifted easily from black to white and back again. He knew the sight of those scales as well as he knew his own, because his wife's looked just like them.

He could only stare at this little girl in awe, and here he was, butt-fucking naked and covered in mud. Not a good look, to say the least.

"Mister," the girl whispered. "Are…. Are you like me?"

He didn't have the presence of mind to answer her. He didn't have a chance to.

A gunshot rang out nearby and a flock of cranes flooded the sky, their squawks frenzied and afraid. Beneath him, the ground vibrated in slow, haphazard waves that settled deep in his bones. The girl didn't seem to notice, her searching gaze trained on the mud-caked skin of his right forearm. The commotion was too close for comfort. He needed to go, and so did she.

He sat up with a groan and glanced around. Spotting his black Nike shorts clinging to a bush a couple yards away, he pushed to his feet and angled his body away from the girl, awkwardly covering himself with his hands splayed out over his junk. The mud hid the details, but…. Well. Last thing he needed was to traumatize the fuck out of someone's kid.
<commit_msg>post story<commit_after>---
layout: story
category: short story
issue: 97, November 2021
issue-cover: issue-97-cover.png
issue-buy-link: https://store.firesidefiction.com/products/fireside-magazine-issue-97-november-2021
title: Roar, Sweet Child, Roar
subtitle:
author: sydnee-thompson
author-2:
author-3:
editor: chelle-parker
illustrator:
copyeditor: chelle-parker
selector:
translator:
narrator:
letterer:
word-count: 1844
date: 2021-11-16 01:00:01 -0500
permalink: roar-sweet-child-roar
audiourl:
teaser:
art:
artcaption:
spanish-language:
spanish-date:
english-url:
spanish-url:
serial-name:
serial-url:
part:
previous-url:
next-url:
contentnote: This story contains depictions of a child in a life-threatening situation.
generalnote:
published: true
---
He woke up in a shallow puddle on the edge of the forest, mud thick and golden like molasses coating his bare body from head to toe. He felt like he’d just belly-flopped across a football field of sandpaper.

The noonday sun cast splashes of yellow through the canopy of the ancient, sprawling cypress trees that surrounded him. He recognized the overgrown dirt road leading from the town's outer limits toward the nearby swamp stretched out to the left of him, where a faded wooden sign in the distance warned that the area was in gator territory. He had no idea how he had ended up here, though.

His wife was going to kill him.

"Fuuuuck," he groaned out, letting his eyes slide closed and his head roll back. A tension headache slammed him in the skull in time with his heartbeat. What the fuck had happened last night?

"Hey, Mister," a soft voice called.

He opened his eyes again. A thin little Black girl, her dark skin as velvety as a midnight sky and her full, kinky hair piled in two perfect puffballs on top of her head, stood over him with wide eyes. She was hugging a Moana backpack protectively against her stomach.

_Fuck_, he thought again, his heart racing. He shouldn't be here. The warmth of the sun and the dense humidity made his blood sing, and that was kind of the problem.

But before he could utter a half-assed excuse and hightail it back home, the girl dropped her bag to the ground and raised her arms, palms facing outward. At first glance, all he could see were the grains of sand that stuck to her wet skin in clumps, but then the sun caught the unmistakable glint of scales on the underside of her wrists. They were glistening with a subtle sheen and shifted easily from black to white and back again. He knew the sight of those scales as well as he knew his own, because his wife's looked just like them.

He could only stare at this little girl in awe, and here he was, butt-fucking naked and covered in mud. Not a good look, to say the least.

"Mister," the girl whispered. "Are…. Are you like me?"

He didn't have the presence of mind to answer her. He didn't have a chance to.

A gunshot rang out nearby and a flock of cranes flooded the sky, their squawks frenzied and afraid. Beneath him, the ground vibrated in slow, haphazard waves that settled deep in his bones. The girl didn't seem to notice, her searching gaze trained on the mud-caked skin of his right forearm. The commotion was too close for comfort. He needed to go, and so did she.

He sat up with a groan and glanced around. Spotting his black Nike shorts clinging to a bush a couple yards away, he pushed to his feet and angled his body away from the girl, awkwardly covering himself with his hands splayed out over his junk. The mud hid the details, but…. Well. Last thing he needed was to traumatize the fuck out of someone's kid.

{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0500277932184547, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010561423012784881, 'mean_word_length': 4.215217391304348, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 3, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 3, 'https://': 2, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 4, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '4335619', 'n_tokens_mistral': 2078, 'n_tokens_neox': 1923, 'n_words': 1185}