birds

in florida there are lakes everywhere. they serve as obstacles to triple the driving distance between any two points and blockade the zealous development of tightly packed track housing. anyone can have a house because they come as cheap as eighty thousand dollars. the lakes, however, are amenable housing for the birds. big cartoon birds stand knee-deep in every body of water. i once saw a heron in the night staring into the darkness of a lake. suddenly it plopped into the water and came up with a fish in its mouth, which it swallowed and then the fish stuck out horizontally in its throat, still moving. in the morning on my commute to work cormorants stand on the shore and hold their arms out wide to dry in the sun. the dry birds are big black vultures as big as dogs, always swooping around my apartment complex, and wild turkeys who stand in herds around by the golf courses and baffle me with their existence. the not-birds are the armadillos that root around in the bushes by where i park my car and the 8-foot gator my boss says he saw on property walking around near the contemporary resort a few days ago.