Good Grief, Florida Man

“Even the Ocean Has Ears” by Carella Keil (originally published in The Storms Issue 2)

The headline says my father baptized an alligator in the fountain outside Publix.

FLORIDA MAN SAVES GATOR’S SOUL, STORE SECURITY NOT IMPRESSED.

Someone cropped his face and added a halo. Someone else turned him into a Saint candle. A TikTok kid looped his prayer over a trap beat. The clip shows Dad in his church suit, cuffs rolled, shoes off, water rising around his shins. One hand on the gator’s back, the other raised to heaven. The gator looks half asleep. The crowd cheers. A manager waves a mop.

I watch it over lunch, pretending not to. My phone fills with cousin texts and laughing emojis. My boss leans into my cubicle doorway.

“Is that your dad?”

“Yeah.”

He whistles softly. “Guess he’s gone viral.”

“He’s not crazy,” I say, though lately I’m not sure where the line is.

Dad has been a shadow of himself since Mom died last winter. The house still smells faintly of her rose lotion. He leaves her glasses on the kitchen counter, her robe on the hook behind the door, her coffee cup turned upside down in the sink. He cannot bear to wash it.

At first, he just sat on the porch and talked to her out loud every night. Then he started blessing things, the birdbath, the mailbox, the car tires. Last week he sprinkled holy water on the dog food and said it could not hurt.

Now this.

He calls around one. I almost do not answer.

“You see me on TV?” he asks, voice light, proud even.

“I did.”

“You think your mama would’ve laughed?”

“I think she’d have told you to stay out of the fountain.”

He chuckles, low and cracked. “She always did hate when my socks got wet.”

I hear the creak of his porch chair, the fizz of seltzer from the can he opens every afternoon. He still keeps her seat empty beside him.

“She would’ve liked Grace though,” he says.

“Who’s Grace?”

“The gator. She blinked when I touched her head. Like she understood.”

“Dad,” I start, but he keeps going.

“Who else will bless what everyone fears?”

By three, I know the reporter’s name. Her byline sits under the photo like a quiet signature. The newsroom smells of toner and burnt coffee. She is young, tired, proud of the chaos she has helped make. A plastic gator keychain dangles from her backpack.

“My father’s the man in your story,” I tell her.

She straightens. “Oh, he’s okay, right?”

“He’s surviving.”

I glance at her screen. The clip loops, my father framed by water and strangers. The comments scroll faster than breath.

“You know why there’s even such a thing as a ‘Florida Man’ headline?” she says after a moment. “The Sunshine Law. Everything in this state is public record. Police reports, arrests, all of it. Journalists can see everything before the families do.”

“So it’s legal,” I say. “Not kind.”

She looks down. “People like to laugh at what they can see. I guess that makes it easier.”

“He lost his wife in December,” I say. “Fifty-one years together…”

Her face softens. “I didn’t know.”

“No one ever does,” I say. 

Outside, the heat sits heavy. The reporter follows me to the door. “Maybe I can write something that tells more.”

“Then do,” I tell her. “But make sure you mean it.”

The sun lowers when I reach his house. The porch smells like mango and rust. A half-eaten papaya sits beside his chair. A flock of ibises pecks through the grass.

“You see the part where she blinked?” he asks when I sit down.

“I saw.”

“She was gentle,” he says. “Didn’t fight at all.”

He slices another mango. His hands shake. Juice runs between his fingers. “I kept thinking of your mother’s hands,” he says. “How she’d cup water when she watered her plants, never used the hose. Said the plants liked to be touched.”

I do not answer. The porch creaks. The streetlight hums.

“The reporter might call,” I say.

“She nice?”

“She’s learning,” I tell him.

He nods. Across the street, a boy on a skateboard shouts “Florida Man” before vanishing down the block. Dad does not flinch. He hums a tune I remember from childhood, something he used to sing while waiting for the water to run cold. The sound is low, careful.

I pull up the video one more time. Before the crowd starts laughing, there is a single frame, his face in the reflection of the water. He looks tired but peaceful, like a man who has finally found something to hold.

I close the app.

The ibises lift into the dark, wings flashing white over the street. Dad hums softer now, eyes closed, mouth moving around a prayer. The air smells of rain and mango and the slow ache of letting go.

About the Author

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. 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 a hundred literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, McSweeney’s, River Teeth, Beautiful Things, Brevity, and The Huffington Post. A Best of the Net nominee, she won 2025 flash fiction contests from Inscape Journal and Blue Earth Review. She is the winner of the 2026 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.

about the artist

Carella Keil is a writer and digital artist who creates surreal, dreamy images that explore nature, fantasy realms, portraiture, melancholia and inner dimensions. Her work appears online in Peatsmoke Issue 12, Columbia Journal, Tangled Locks, BULL Lit Mag, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize Nominated writer, Best of the Net Nominee, and the 2023 Door is a Jar Writing Award Winner in Nonfiction. She is the featured artist for the Fall 2024 Issue of Blue Earth Review. Her photography has appeared on the covers of numerous literary journals, including Glassworks Magazine, Nightingale and Sparrow, Cosmic Daffodil, Silk Road Review, and Straylight Magazine. Find her at instagram.com/catalogue.of.dreams and x.com/catalogofdream.