THE SNAKE INCIDENT

Everyday Serendipity / Mixed media abstract painting / 2019 / RCS

The day of the snake incident isn’t much different from many of the other days passing by. I’ve taken a week off from school due to a combination of severe migraines and a head cold. Bright Florida sunshine burns into my skull, acting as a tonic on my psyche. I feel the sensation of warmth as a child might feel it. And that’s when the child appears.

Her family recently moved into the house next door that’s always being rented out. When I was a little kid an old couple lived in it. She was a painter, and he was a drunk. After they died, an endless river of working-class humanity passed through the house, stopping for a short while to rest on a rock, or sun themselves on the shore. But eventually they were pulled downstream by the strength of life’s current.

She’s a little girl about the age of four, and has blond hair and eyes that open up farther with each word she speaks. Every day, her mother deposits her in the fenced-in backyard, and the little girl amuses herself by hosting imaginary tea parties, or chasing lizards in the sun when she tires of the Mad Hatter.

We sit on the grass and speak to each other through the chain-link fence, the child and the leaving childhood. She’s as interested in how I perceive the world as she is in simply doing so. She’s on an open wavelength, with no method or device to tell me what the right way to see things is. I’m reminded of how large a place the world used to be, before I was sent to school and was pushed around by bells and clocks. It occurs to me there’s no halfway good reason to make life seem smaller.

The little girl waves and moves to the middle of her yard, and begins digging a hole with a plastic shovel. I sit cross-legged under a tree, and watch brushes and branches turn into silhouettes of their former bright green selves.

Then, a strange sound punctures the humid air. It’s the scream of a four-year-old girl with blond hair.

Her scream brightens the damp air like the heat pushes into the pores of my skin. I stand up and yell across the fence to see what’s happened to her. A screen door opens and slams shut, and her father rushes outside. It’s the first time I’ve seen him. His thin face is heavy with lines. There’s a curiosity in his eyes similar to the little girl’s eyes, but it’s faded. He spots the black Garter snake before I do.

He runs up to it and places his daughter behind him. He becomes a wall of protection between the snake and his little girl. She peers around his legs into the shadowy grass and the snakes looping black movements.

All around us the mid-spring light is fading, yet life is alive and roaring: rays of light penetrate the leaves, birds are chirping sweet short songs, insects are clicking, and snakes are slithering.

Her father asks me, “Got any cardboard boxes handy?”

“Yes, on the back porch,” I say, and ran into the house and grab one.

I hand it across the fence to him.

The little girl’s father holds on tightly to a corner of the box and picks up a stick on the ground. With a few steps reaches the snake and scoops it into the box with one easy motion of his arm.

He brings it over to me. I look down at the skinny, scaly, black creature, then up at his thin face.

I look into his eyes and say, “I’ll take the snake.”

He nods, and offers a half-grin while he holds the box over the top of the fence. And I take it from him.

Time stops while I remove a small, black reptile from the small girl’s world. I place the box on the ground and take a breath. My breath comes and goes like the rush and roar contained in a seashell. For a second or two, it’s quiet enough to hear a spider spinning a web under a magnifying glass. Momentarily, the volume is turned back up. I hear electricity buzzing along telephone wires, and listen to bits and fragments of conversations traveling through twisted copper and plastic lines connecting our house and neighbor’s house together. Everything’s set back in motion in the space of several breaths. Evening sky turns from crystalline blue to blue-black. The child and her father melt back into the flickering blue light of their living room.

I pick up the snake-in-the-box, and stick my face directly into the openness of the box. I carry it in the flattened palm of my hand to the gray, wooden shed in the far corner of my backyard. Staring at his pointy snake face all the while.

Inside the shed, I flick on the bare 75-Watt lightbulb and pull a green and white folding chair next to the edge of the box. The snake is a foot-long writhing bundle of blackness. It seems so harmless. All its snake brain can tell it to do is to try and escape the confines of the box. It slowly works its way toward a corner, and slithers up along where the sides of the box meet. Then flops against a carboard wall and sinks back down.

For over an hour I sit and watch the small snake use up its energy with the same up and down motion. Seeing only the slightest discernable variation each time. I stretch my back and rub my eyes. The snake stretches and curls. I feel the need to get away from what has, somehow, become my prisoner.

I get up and walk out of the shed. My body is revived by the cool night air. I look up at the stars for a while, then go indoors for a glass of water. Mom is sitting in front of the TV with a can of Old Milwaukee beer. She looks in my direction and I laugh at what’s on TV. It’s The Magic Christian, a movie with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.

“This is a crazy movie,” mom says, after a sip from her beer.

“Yeah,” I say. “I liked it when I saw it in the theater with Tom.”

“What was the little girl next door screaming about?”

“There was a Garter snake in her yard,” I say.

“Oh, that’s why you came in for the box,” she says.

Her eyes turn back to the TV screen.

“What did you do with the snake?” she says, without turning away from the screen.

“Got him in the cardboard box out in the shed.”

“Why have you got it in there?”

“I’m watching him, see what he does,” I say. “Want to come out and see it?”

“OK,” she says. “When the next commercial comes on.”

My mother puts on her housecoat and slippers to follow me outside and have a look at the snake. The damp grass washes the bottom of my bare feet. A faint yellow light comes from the half-open doorway of the shed. We step inside, and I give the box a nudge with my toes. The snake moves from a corner of the box to the center. Changing from a question mark to a wiggle. My mother leans down, her hands on her knees. She’s pointing at the snake with her nose, and watching it through sleepy eyes.

She stands up and brushes imaginary dirt from her housecoat. “He’s probably been in there long enough. You should let him go.”

We both stare down into the box.

“I never said I wasn’t going to let him go.”

She turns to walk back to the house, and says, “Don’t stay up too late.”

“Night, mom.”

When I walk outside all the lights in the house are turned off. I walked around the yard, and over to the spot where I was handed the snake by the girl’s father. It seems like days have gone by instead of hours. After watching clouds move across the half-moon for a while I go back into the shed. What am I going to do with it? Nothing, I tell myself. I just want to watch. I sit on the dusty wooden floor and lean my chin into my hand.

I watch the snake do its continuous dance of inching up the side of the box, taking a brief rest, then falling back down. I doze off twice, but shiver myself awake before I fall over. It’s so late it’s early, and the thought of my pillow takes on a greater significance. I’m almost ready to call it a night when I notice something. My captive reptile is climbing a lot higher than he’d been doing earlier. Making it halfway up the side of the box before dropping to the bottom again.

Leaning closer, I get a better view of his snake face. A little, beady point of a face it is. With a small, determined snaky look on it. With his last bit of snake-juice and snake energy, he’s struggling and straining to crawl out of the cardboard box. I sit up on my knees and lean my head down to the top of the box, staring at him. For a few moments, we’re joined. I feel as though I can read his snake mind. I’m feeling remorse I’ve kept him caged up for all these hours. I’m ready to spill him out onto the damp night ground.

And then it happens.

The snake snaps in two. It breaks in half, in front of my eyes.

Two snake halves writhe on the floor of the box, and wriggle in so many directions I’m seeing quadruple instead of double. I only have one question in my head. How did it happen? Does the snake think I’m a large beast of prey and was going to kill it, so it decides to commit suicide first? If the snake had crawled out of the box, the spectacle would’ve been over.

Now it’s over. But not in any way I could’ve predicted. I feel simultaneously awful and elated. I’ve broken a small, spiral creature in half. One who’d earlier, inadvertently, scared a little girl at sunset. Seems like a pretty stiff sentence for such a relatively harmless act. I pick up the box, carry it outside into the dark night, and toss the two parts of the snake into the yard behind me.