[ WP ] You buy a baby alligator and are driving it home thinking of what you 're gon na do and how you 're gon na tame it . Your plan is to have this gator sometime roaming around without a leash .

`` Will you be happy when I go to sleep, daddy,'' she asked. 
 
 
 `` Oh sweetheart,'' he said to her, `` well, I'm going to miss you a lot, and I'm always going to love you.'' 
 
 
 `` You have to be happy still, okay daddy?'' she insisted. 
 
 
 `` Okay baby,'' he whispered. 
 
 
 `` You have to eat cookies for breakfast and you have to have a tree-house and you have to be friends with an alligator, okay daddy?'' 
 
 
 `` Friends with an alligator?'' he chuckled, crying. 
 
 
 `` Yes,'' she insisted, `` that's what I would have done, if I did n't have to go to sleep all the time.'' 
 
 
 How much later he could n't tell, but the machines were blaring. He'd drifted off in the chair. The nurses and doctors rushed in. And then it was done. 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 `` No, it's just, I thought you meant something else when you said you had a surprise,'' Marian said, `` like maybe you were ready to try to- never mind. Jake, you ca n't be serious about this. Is this even legal? What if it escapes?'' 
 
 
 `` It was the last thing she asked me to do,'' he said. 
 
 
 `` She was four years old.'' 
 
 
 `` It was the last thing she asked,'' he repeated. 
 
 
 `` Fine,'' Marian relented, `` let me see.'' 
 
 
 The alligator was a few weeks old, small enough to live in a small enclosure under a heat lamp. It was filled with rocks and artificial, tropical ferns with long, impossibly green leaves covered in dew. She was six, maybe seven inches long, striped brown and black. Her pupils were thin black lines in a mustard yellow eye; her teeth were like tiny icicles dotted around her cotton candy tongue. In not much time, he knew, she would be many feet longer. She would need most of the backyard. He'd stop treating the pool with chemicals, throw in fish and crustaceans every day. For the time being, he'd feed her by hand, so she trusted him, felt safe with him. 
 
 
 `` You know they ca n't feel love, right?'' Marian said, `` This is n't like a dog, their brains are n't evolved to have emotions like that. All they know is food, reproduction, fight or flight. But I can, Jake. I can still feel things, I still remember how I used to feel with you, or what real life was like. This is fucking crazy, Jake. I loved her too, you know. And I'm not going insane like this. I lost her and now I'm losing you too, I guess?'' 
 
 
 He ignored her. He took a frozen cricket and lowered in into the enclosure, the insect supine on his open palm. She lunged, in an instant, from the corner of the glass tank, snatching the insect in her long mouth, then turning away. She had taken a piece of his skin as well. His blood was slowly trickling out of the small cut. It was okay. She did n't mean it. She'd never hurt him on purpose.
