Crocodile

Crocodile is a monologue for a young woman in her twenties, identified as Jenna.  The time is early in the 1920s and the location is a bedroom in Ohio with moonlight slanting through a window and a small table on which is a half-filled glass.  We hear a ticking clock and see Jenna sitting on the bed in a plain white nightgown.  She tells us that, because her sister convinced her that Captain Hook’s Crocodile was waiting in the dark under her bed, she has thought a lot about the Crocodile.  She says that Peter Pan cut off Captain Hook’s hand and threw it to the Crocodile who must have liked it because after that he followed Captain Hook everywhere.  She says this is the story of nearly everybody’s life, finding some person or situation that makes us happy, losing it, and spending the rest of our lives searching for it.  She says that perhaps there was nothing special about the hand, that the Crocodile was feeling particularly happy that day and mistakenly associated the happiness with the hand.  She says romantic love is nostalgia for an imagined happiness that we have misunderstood and misremembered, and so, she says, is obsession with revenge.  She says that all through her childhood she heard a clock ticking at night, the alarm clock her sister had put under the bed, but she thought it was the clock the Crocodile had swallowed.  She says her mother is evil, but that she has always been a good girl.  She says she attacked her husband with a butcher knife on their wedding night, telling us he married her for her father’s money and she married him to keep her father out of jail.  Her mother said she killed her father in the bath tub and that’s why she is locked up in this place.  She says her mother has smuggled her a special treat, icedgreen tea to soothe her nerves.  She picks up the half-filled glass and says that Tinker Bell drinks the poison without complaint.  She empties the glass and says she plans to haunt her mother until she walks the plank.  She asks us if we can hear the clock in her stomach, tick tock, tick tock, and we hear the sound of the clock again as the light fades on her and goes out.