The night on the prairie returned to her during the long and terrible birth of her daughter, years later, after her mother’s funeral on a hill white with sleet. A shot in the spine took the pain away, and she floated above herself, safe in the beeping of the machines.
But something went wrong very suddenly. The nurses’ faces pressed in; the world shifted to frenzy. She was wheeled into a cold room. It was almost Christmas and a poinsettia hunched in the corner, making her think of the black dirt in the pot, all the life there. Her body shook so hard it rattled the aluminum slab she was lying on. There was an unbearable pressure inside her as the doctor pushed the knife in. Then the old panic returned, the darkness, the sense of being lost, the fangs she’d imagined on her ankles that were palmetto cuts, the breath of some bad spirit hot on her nape. Then she had seen the glow in the dark and stumbled back to the bonfire. How delicate the ties that bind us to another. A gleam in the dark. The bell on a nurse’s neck chiming. The bodies leaning in, the pressure so intense she couldn’t breathe, the release.
SNAKE STORIES
Babe, when Satan tempted Adam and Eve, there’s a pretty good reason he didn’t transform into a talking clam.
It was my husband who said this to me.
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This statement of his has begun to seem both ludicrous and dangerous, like the three-foot rat snake my younger son almost stepped on in the street yesterday, thinking it a stick.
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Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep.
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All around us, since the fall, from the same time other terrible things happened in the world at large, marriages have been ending, either in a sort of quiet drifting away or in flames. The night my husband explicated original sin to me, we were drunk and walking home very early in the morning from a New Year’s Eve party. Our host, Omar Varones, had made a bonfire out of the couch upon which his wife had cuckolded him. It was a vintage mid-century modern, and he could have sold it for thousands, but it’s equally true that the flames were a stunning and unexpected soft green.
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I feel like a traitor to my own when I say this, but it’s wonderful to walk beside a man who is so large that nobody would mess with him, toward your own bed, at a time when everybody is sleeping save for the tree frogs and the sinners. I have missed my walks late at night, my dawn runs. Even though my neighborhood is a gem, there have been three rapes in three months within a few blocks of my house. Nights when I can’t sleep, when my nerves jangle me from one son’s bed to the other’s, then back to my own and then out to the couch, I can even feel in my bloodstream the new venom that has entered the world, a venom that somehow acts only on men, hardening what had once been bad thoughts into new, worse actions.
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It is strange to me, an alien in this place, an ambivalent northerner, to see how my Florida sons take snakes for granted. My husband, digging out a peach tree that had died from climate change, brought into the house a shovel full of poisonous baby coral snakes, brightly enameled and writhing. Cool! said my little boys, but I woke from frantic sleep that night, slapping at my sheets, sure their light pressure on my body was the twining of many snakes that had slipped from the shovel and searched until they found my warmth.
Other nights, my old malaria dream returns: the ceiling a twitching pale belly, sensitive to my hand. All night scales fall on me like tissue paper.
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I can’t get away from them, snakes. Even my kindergartener has been strangely transfixed by them all year. Every project he brings home: snakes.
The pet project: i thnk a kobra wud be a bad pet becus it wud bit me, picture of him being eaten by a cobra.
The poetry project: snakes eat mise thy slithr slithr slithr thy jump otof tres thy hissssssssssssssssss, picture of a snake jumping out of a tree and onto a screaming him. Or so I assume: my child is in a minimalist period, his art all wobbly sticks and circles.
Why, of all beautiful creatures on this planet of ours, do you keep writing about snakes? I ask him.
Becus i lik them and thy lik me, he tells me.
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As we walked home on New Year’s morning, the night of the flaming couch, I was saying I hated the word cuckold, that cuckolding takes the woman out of the adultery and turns it into a wrestling match between the husband and the lover. A giant cockfight, if you will. Giant cockfight! my husband laughed, because there is no situation in which that phrase would not be funny to him. My husband is an almost entirely good person, and I say this as someone who believes that our better angels are matched by our bitterest devils, and there’s a constant battle happening inside all of us: a giant cockfight. My husband is overrun with angels, but even he struggles with things that appeal. For instance, Omar’s wife, Olivia, was the kind of shining blonde who always wore workout clothes, and my husband always gravitated toward her at parties, and they’d stand there joking and laughing into their cups for a far longer time than was conventionally acceptable between two good-looking people who were married to other people. Sometimes, when I caught his eye, my husband would wink guiltily at me while still laughing with her. After the divorce and a few uncomfortable meetings, I only ever see Olivia driving through the neighborhood while I walk the dog, and half the time I pretend I don’t recognize her; I just look down and murmur something to the dog, who understands me all too well.
* * *
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In February, one day, I found myself sad to the bone. A man had been appointed to take care of the environment even though his only desire was to squash the environment like a cockroach. I was thinking about the world my children will inherit, the clouds of monarchs they won’t ever see, the underwater sound of the mouths of small fish chewing the living coral reefs that they will never hear.
I stood for a long time at the duck pond with my dog, who sensed she should be still and patient. The swans were on their island with the geese, and a great blue heron legged through the shallow water. I watched as the heron became a statue, then as it whipped its head down and speared something. When it lifted its beak, it held a long, thin water snake. We watched, transfixed, as the bird cracked its head down so hard three times that the snake separated in half, spilling blood. And the heron swallowed one half, which was still so alive that I could see it thrashing down that long and elegant throat.
* * *
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This reminded me of the Iliad: For a bird had come upon [the Greeks], as they were eager to cross over, an eagle of lofty flight, skirting the host on the left, and in its talons it bore a blood-red monstrous snake, still alive as if struggling, nor was it yet forgetful of combat, it writhed backward, and smote him that held it on the breast beside the neck, till the eagle, stung with pain, cast it from him to the ground and let it fall in the midst of the throng, and himself with a loud cry sped away down the blasts of the wind.
This was an omen, clear and bright.
The Greeks did not heed it, and they suffered.
* * *
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But wait. You know that the moral of Adam and Eve is that woman gets pegged with all of human sin, I told my husband that night we walked home through the dark. We were jaywalking against a red light, but there were no cars anywhere around, our own minor sin unseen.
Yet another trick of the serpent’s, my husband agreed sadly.
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