Rattlesnake Eyes
A dust-coated juice box rattles across the packed earth. I straddle my windowsill, one leg inside our mobile home, one leg out, thinking of things I’m not even supposed to know about. But as soon as Mum left for town this morning, my sister, Candace, pulled me down to the crawlspace and showed me what she found in our bedroom.
Mum will be back, with the distraction of presents—maybe new lipstick or panties this time—but for now my thoughts feel dirty, like I’m coated in the graveyard dust from outside. Clydesdale is too small for a cemetery, actually, but I’m pretty sure the hamlet itself is a boneyard for childish dreams. The kind of “highfalutin ideas” buried in the backyard with the savings and dead cats—becoming a TV star, winning a Pulitzer, singing on Broadway.
Fortunately, I’m practical.
I brace my hands on the window frame, rocking back and forth, hunting for the feeling that will spiral high and then explode like fireworks, washing out the bad thoughts. The ridge of the frame is too hard to be comfortable, though, and my bored gaze angles downward.
And hits a sand-colored spiral, coiled beneath my window. My lower belly contracts, and sweat glands prickle all over my body.
—the rattle doesn’t belong to the tumbling juice box, after all—
The snake is absolutely still, except for that twitching tail. I hate how such a small thing holds so much power over me.
My right foot dangles above the serpent, within striking distance, bare. My left foot, still inside, wears its sneaker. Like I’ve gotten it backward.
Really, I got distracted by my thoughts, stopped halfway to vaulting out the window barefoot, and saved myself from landing bare-skinned on a rattlesnake. Poised the way I am, pressed up against fear like it’s a heavy body smothering me in the dark, being half-in, half-out doesn’t feel much like salvation.
If it’s all the same to God, I’d rather not see my fate coming.
Click. Bam. The reptile flies up in the air. Dirt scatters. I swear dry scales touch my foot, but it’s probably a clod of parched earth. Candace is a sharpshooter, and that’s why she wants to confront our parents about what she found.
Seeing her, I can’t not think about what she showed me, but I can’t think about it either. Like a forbidden door in my mind, suddenly illuminated, it niggles at me, beckoning, but almost as soon as I give in, it’s smack up against that door again.
The only people who could have hidden what Candace found in our room are Mum or Dad, and there’s only one reason I can think of— Smack. So far, and no further.
Dust-dulled black hair whips around Candace’s head in the hot wind as she lowers the shotgun to her side. Grit has mixed with sweat to smear the russet skin of her arms. More smudges mark her chest above the cutout neck of her t-shirt—her decoltage, or whatever that’s called. Candace’s hair is just enough longer than mine, she’s just enough taller and curvier and better muscled than I am, that she could be me from a year or two in the future. We face each other over the baking clay, the dead rattler, and the secret—and she comes out victorious.
“So, there’s a snake under your window,” she says.
…
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