Bethany Bruno

What the Swamp Remembers

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

The first time I heard the story, I was eight. My uncle whispered it after supper while we swatted mosquitoes and picked fish bones clean.

“The Skunk Ape lives where the swamp doesn’t end,” he said, pointing toward the cypress line where the sky thickened into night. “Smells like death. Walks like a man, only larger. Red eyes if you catch the light right.”

I laughed the way children laugh at warnings, but I remembered how his finger trembled when he drew the cross in the air.

The swamp smelled of rot and oranges that never ripened. We lived close enough to hear frogs echo every night. My mother’s ashes were scattered there when I turned twenty. She had asked for it, said the swamp kept secrets better than churches did.

That summer, I went out alone, carrying the jar she once used to store preserves. I thought I might trap something of her there, her laugh caught in the reeds, her breath hovering above the water. The jar was empty but ready. My flashlight beam carved a narrow path between sawgrass and shadow.

The air clung to me, thick as syrup. Dragonflies clicked in the cattails. I whispered her name into the jar, once, twice, hoping it might hold the sound.

Then the swamp shifted. Not the small stir of turtles or the slick slide of a snake. Something heavier. A weight that pressed branches down and snapped twigs. The smell came first, sour and sharp, like wet fur rubbed with vinegar. It burned my throat.

Silence followed. Even the frogs went still.

My light swept between two cypress trunks and froze on eyes, not glowing but reflecting. Copper coins hammered into the dark. Higher than a man’s, lower than a bird’s. They blinked once, then fixed on me.

The shape stepped forward. Shoulders broad as tree stumps, arms swinging past its knees. Hair clotted with mud and swamp grass. Each stride deliberate, soundless. The stench rolled ahead of it, carrion and river muck and something older, as if time itself had soured.

I could not run. My knees locked. The jar slipped from my hand and landed in the water with a hollow plunk, sending ripples across the surface.

Then came a sound. A low growl, deep enough to rattle inside my chest. The creature leaned close and the air shifted, hot and damp, as if the swamp itself exhaled. Its eyes were not just watching, they were searching, pulling something from me I had not offered. For a moment, I thought I saw my mother there, the way her gaze lingered when she had more to say but could not.

Its arm lifted. A hand, massive and dark, brushed the cattails. The stalks bent with a crack and sprayed dew across my face. My skin burned where it touched.

I raised my hand, trembling, palm open. Not to ward it off, but to ask. To bridge the space between story and body.

The Skunk Ape tilted its head. The eyes changed, softer, almost curious, like tide pulling back before the wave breaks. Then, with one step, it vanished into the reeds, swallowed whole by the dark.

The night filled again with frogs, as if nothing had passed. The jar floated at my feet, half-filled with swamp water dark as oil. Inside, a moth beat against the glass, frantic, leaving dust on the sides like handwriting.

I sealed the lid and carried it home.

Now, when people ask if I believe in the Skunk Ape, I say yes. But belief is too small a word. I do not believe. I remember. I remember the eyes, the smell, the silence.

And every night, when the moth hurls itself against the glass, steady as a heartbeat, I wonder if the swamp gave my mother a body that could not be buried, could not be burned. Something larger, waiting in the tree line, patient as the dark.

Some mornings, the jar glows faintly, as though filled with ash on fire. Other mornings, it stays dark. Either way, I never open it.

Not yet.

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than eighty literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, The Huffington Post, The MacGuffin, McSweeney’s, and 3Elements Review. In addition to a Best of the Net nomination in 2021, she has won Inscape Journal’s 2025 Flash Contest and Blue Earth Review’s 2025 Dog Daze Contest for Flash Fiction. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.