· Web view“How are the kids?” he asked, ... Gwen hadn’t spoken a word the rest of the brunch, ... It was a chess move,

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018Writers: Attached are the first two chapters of a new novel, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life.”

I see this as a dark version of “When Harry Met Sally...” with a generous helping of snakes. Each chapter will be preceded by a vignette about a certain breed of snake (hognose snake, reticulated python, king cobra, etc.), including a brief description of its personality that somehow relates to the chapter. If and when published, each chapter would also include a sketch of its corresponding snake so the reader would have a fully formed sense of it.

Some of you might recognize the first chapter, part of which I submitted in 2016 as a freestanding short story. Back then, the primary criticism was that the unnamed main character—named Sid Carver here—was irredeemable. You will likely find him even less likable now, which to me feels like a good starting point for a longer work.

I would appreciate your thoughtful criticism. Thank you in advance for reading.

WJD

#

Common Death Adder, Acanthophis antarcticus

Found throughout the sun-drenched forests and grasslands of Australia’s

eastern coast, the common death adder ambushes its prey. A tawny hide

enables this placid serpent to blend in with leaf litter on the forest floor and

simply wait for a rodent, lizard or some other vertebrate to pass by. So

patient is this stout-bodied viper that it often remains perfectly still even

when it senses the approach of a much larger animal, such as a human. As a

result, accidental bites are quite common. The snake’s highly potent

neurotoxic venom does its job all too well; as the name implies, a bite from a

death adder often proves fatal.

1

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018Chapter One: Skeletons

Like any proper serpent, Sid Carver knew his gift for cold, calculated patience

would have its reward. The only question: How to deliver the kill shot?

Two options scrolled through his mind. He could slither into a shadowed

corner, just beyond the reach of the light, and hit the first warm body to pass

by. Or he could remain perfectly still, as tight as a coiled spring, and wait for

a more tempting target. This time he had only one acceptable course of

action.

He just wasn’t sure what it was.

He sat toward the back, near the exit, trying to excise the smells of holy

ointment and sickly sweet perfume from his nostrils. Row after row of

mourners clad in black and gray stood in procession and waddled down the

aisle toward the glossy metal casket. He spied a few familiar faces, most of

them belonging to enemies, including one who had at one time or another

threatened to remove his genitals or otherwise undo him. Heels clicked

against freshly polished granite. A limp and ashen Christ, tacked to the

oversized T behind the altar, judged the congregation through vacant eyes.

Gwen stood to the left of Christ’s spiked feet, beside a man with a

rounded gut and a shag of salt-and-pepper hair. The man’s hand weighed

down her shoulder, doing his best to look solemn between discreet yawns.

Her face was tired, puffy and worn, perhaps from the trauma of losing a loved

one or simply from the rigors of age—hopefully, he thought, not the result of

the hell he had put her through.

Up there, an arm’s length from a corpse in a very nice box, she looked so

unlike her fashionable and perfectly tended self. At least she looked unlike

2

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018the perfect shell of plastic she used to show the rest of the world. Sid was one

of the few to have seen her at her worst—ugly, venomous and barbaric,

possessed by the rage of a woman whose affections had gone to waste.

“I’ll wreck you,” she had told him during a years-ago phone call he wished

he could forget. “You’ll be homeless, hopeless, jobless, penniless—a

complete zero, a fucking cripple. That’s all I want from this life: to light a

match to everything you love and then listen to you wail as it crackles and

burns.”

“Talk, talk, talk. You don’t have the stomach for it.”

He had regretted speaking the words—a dare, no less—as soon as they

spilled out, because daring was a dumb thing to do to someone who could

hurt you.

“No one will love you ever again,” she spat back. “You and that circus-

freak fetish of yours. No one will understand anything about you. No one will

even want to!”

“How could they after what you’ve reduced me to? I’m dust—nothing but

bones and dust. That’s all I am now. A shell of bones and dust.”

Or a brittle husk of shed skin, he might have said, should have said. He

would have preferred this metaphor had he taken the time to craft it

properly.

Either way, she hadn’t known how to respond to the barb, which he had

delivered, by his best guess, the better part of three years ago, give or take a

month. He had done his best to strike the dates from memory, to remove the

heartache and the name-calling and the otherwise atrocious behavior from

the seasons in which these regrets occurred. Whole winters and summers

3

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018never even happened, his brain tried to tell him, forever tarnished by the

horrors they had taken turns committing.

Yet the memories remained, sometimes rising from nothing, usually at the

most inconvenient times. What he’d learned. There was no convenient time

to repeat your sins, even if only in memory. It was best to take something

from each one, actually learn something, and become something better.

If only it were that simple …

“Fuck off and leave me alone,” he’d told Gwen as the phone call inched

toward its inevitable conclusion. “Just leave me alone. Don’t call. Don’t email.

Don’t text. Don’t send a fucking carrier pigeon.”

“That’s not at all what I had in mind. Just wait and see, you spineless fuck.

Just you fucking wait.”

It was his turn to be speechless, mostly because of how calmly she had

spoken the words. A threat, to put it plainly—a promise to put him in a

position that would have him begging for mercy, if not welcoming death. His

mind had conjured visions of her, Gwen, standing on his front step of his

family’s home in Stony Creek, Virginia, her slight knuckles rapping against a

pane of painted-red oak, waiting patiently until his wife, Lydia, answered the

door so she, Gwen, could hurl a cup of acid in Lydia’s face or plunge a

butcher knife into her breast or, more likely, blast her with both barrels of a

shotgun before Lydia had time to realize she was in a prolonged war she

didn’t deserve to be in. He imagined her, Gwen, standing in his humidity-

controlled basement with a flamethrower hitched to her back, setting fire to

each coiled member of his beloved collection—“that oddball menagerie of

4

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018yours,” as she called it, on the rare occasion she bothered to acknowledge its

existence.

“You want to get dirty, just say the word,” he seethed. “I know everything

about you, too, you bat-shit whore. I swear to God, you come after me, after

my family, after my business, after my snakes, and I’ll end you—every-

fucking-thing about you.”

He’d slammed the phone, cracking the plastic receiver. Then he’d noticed

how quiet the world outside his office door had become. His employees must

have heard every word. He’d been too enraged to even think about modesty,

realizing after the fact it had been one of the few times in his life he had

given serious thought to murder: the hows, whens and wheres—details and

specifics, the art of it all, where he could find X amount of the right kind of

acid to dissolve her butchered bones.

Then the waiting began. In the weeks and months that followed their final

phone call, he had hurried to the house phone each time it rang, done his

best to intercept the mailman to make sure every incoming package was

exactly as advertised, let his eyes rove the street for slow-moving cars with

tinted windows—staving off every imagined assault. He fought this silent war

for six months.

His vigilance died the day he had found a new trauma to contend with: the

murder of his niece, just fifteen years old, strangled by a jealous boyfriend

and left to rot in the woods, her body discovered by an old man and his dog

just a few steps from a leaf-strewn trail less than a mile from her parents’

front door. He never forgave Gwen for not calling, for not offering him her

heartfelt condolences.

5

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018

Less than a week after his niece’s funeral came his birthday, and again

she said nothing, did nothing. Ghosts.

The war had reached its end, quietly, mercifully … yet regretfully.

Then everything changed, five days ago.

Contact, by way of a call to his office, delivered by Gwen’s sister Bertie,

the one who never liked him, the one who’d labeled him “a real weirdo,” the

one who had promised to tell his wife everything, the same one who had

vowed to remove his testicles, along with other precious parts that made him

uniquely masculine, several times throughout the two-year-long affair with

Gwen. Bertie’s promises of ruination continued, in the form of thoughtful and

particularly threatening dissertations, delivered by email after email, long

after Gwen had pulled away from him for the last time.

“I’ll cut your cock off and grind it up for the pigs to gulp down,” she had

once written. Such colorful invective would have made him laugh had he

thought she didn’t actually mean it or had it been meant for any hapless sap

other than him. She kept at least three pigs in a sty in her junk-strewn

backyard, after all.

“Gwen’s dad died,” Bertie had said in the course of their brief

conversation.

“He was your dad, too.”

“Obviously. The funeral’s on Friday.”

“I’m so sorry, Bert. How is she? How are you?”

“I know she’d want you there. For some awful reason.”

“Did she tell you that?” he asked, hopeful.

6


“She didn’t have to. She’s my sister, stupid. She’s always been a glutton

for punishment.”

“How are the kids?” he asked, referring to Bertie’s twin daughters. They

would be thirteen by now. Maybe fourteen. Their names eluded him.

“So the funeral’s on Friday,” she repeated, ignoring him. “Saint

Christopher’s, the ostentatious church down the street from my mom’s

house. You remember?”

He nodded, though he couldn’t picture it.

“You know the place?” she said, insistent.

“Sure, sure. I’ll be there.”

“Friday. The service starts at eleven.”

He had met Gwen and Bertie’s father once, an awkward brunch at the

parents’ house in Rougemont, an hour across the North Carolina border.

There would never been an invitation for a second meeting, even though the

affair had limped along for another six months.

“Bertie tells me you’re married,” the father had said from his seat at the

table’s head, stabbing away at a ham steak.

Sid dabbed at his lips with a napkin, offering, “Did she?”

The overprotective sister, always stirring up the slop, always playing the

foil.

“Is she wrong?”

“It’s … complicated,” Sid’s had said, and the response went over about as

well as a fart at a tea party. Gwen hadn’t spoken a word the rest of the

brunch, hadn’t lifted her eyes from the table. Sid was unsurprised when

7

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018Gwen’s father hadn’t offered to shake his hand when he left forty minutes

later.

None of that mattered now. So much time had passed—years—it might as

well never even have happened. But there he was, sitting uncomfortably in

the belly of the beast, while Gwen’s father lie dead in a box at the front of the

church. Part of Sid wanted to let one rip right then and there, as a final

parting gift to Gwen’s old man.

His eyes moved away from the tacked-up Christ and toward the cellphone

resting in his lap. The clock told him the time: 11:38. Gwen must have seen

him by now, all alone at the back of the church, loud in his smartest suit and

most garish tie—obnoxiously orange, as flashy as fish scales, impossible to

ignore. He wondered what she might think of him, how life had changed him

since they saw each other last. His hairline had receded in the past few years,

all that remained a little grayer, and he’d put on a few pounds—fat and

happy, or at least happier—but she would no doubt recognize him. He was

happy to be disentangled from her and she from him, free of all the lies and

tears and insults and excuses and every other shitty thing that defined their

time together.

How quickly their love story had gone from pure to sour.

He squinted to glimpse Gwen’s left hand and that of the suitor behind her,

checking for wedding bands, to see if she had somehow broken the pattern

and found someone legitimate, compared to someone like Sid, who was

perfectly willing to deceive his wife and risk wrecking his family and his

livelihood—in other words, a weak-minded demon eager to destroy lives for

no good reason other than it helped to pass the time.

8


Part of him hoped she had settled into a healthy and clean relationship,

building something with the right one rather than indulging in a pre-polluted

mess. Another part wanted the suitor to be nobody special—just some guy,

another asshole—so if and when he finally got up the guts to walk down the

aisle, proud and strong and forthright and fully recovered from the damage,

to tell her how sorry he was about her dad, there would be the slimmest of

chances she would wrap her arms around him and beg him to love her again.

Forever this time, or, if not forever, at least once more, to relive the devilish

times, and the lovely times, they once shared.

Another wave of stink stung his nostrils. He eyed the woman sitting all

alone three pews up. Shock-white hair, pencil-thin neck, inconsiderately

bright floral dress—she was the source of the nauseating perfume that

reeked of dead, rotting flowers.

“Take a bath,” he whispered.

A memory jogged his brain—a conversation with Lydia during a drive to

their son’s junior high school one February night at the height of his affair.

Gwen, having grown increasingly impatient at his inability to ask Lydia for a

divorce, had threatened to show up to the drama club’s performance of

Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which his thirteen-year-old son,

Tern, was playing the role of Brick.

Back then, everything set him off, including his wife’s insufferable

perfume.

“I hate that musk you wear, especially when you wear so fucking much of

it,” he’d told her. He twisted his wedding ring around his sweaty finger, over

and over, wondering how easily he could spring it free. “Why you feel the

9

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018need to stink up everywhere you go, I’ll never understand. Just to announce

your presence, I suppose.”

“You’re turning into a real prick, Sid. You know that?”

“I’ve always been a prick. It’s just taken you this long to notice.”

Oh, Lydia. Always suffering the worst of him.

The procession had begun to thin, only a few more pews to empty—four,

maybe five on each side, including the shriveled old woman who reeked of

dead flowers—until it would be his turn to stand and follow suit, one foot in

front of the other.

Don’t be the last one. Don’t be the last.

Being the last to the coffin seemed too dramatic, too traumatic, too

insulting, and he figured there was less of a chance she would slug him if

other mourners fell in line behind him. Then again, she always did have a

thirst for the eye grab, a flair for getting attention. He’d lost track of the

number of restaurants she’d either stormed out of or stayed in her seat only

to hurl things at him: a full glass of ice water with a lemon wedge, every

warm roll in a bread basket, the butter dish, a serrated steak knife. The white

bumpy scar on his right hand—a defensive wound—had yet to fade.

He had no way of knowing which way her mood would swing. So he

waited.

A sob in a too familiar voice echoed in the cavernous church. He watched

Gwen’s face contort, and her hand rose to prevent the congregation from

seeing her runny nose. Out of reflex, he placed a hand on the pew in front of

him and inched out of his seat, to be by her side. Despite everything, the

10

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018honest part of him wanted her to need him just as he once needed her—and,

he realized, as he still needed her.

Yes, the affair had been a wreck, but it had been their wreck. The bad

times had been horrible, destructive and borderline criminal, but they weren’t

all bad times.

He eased back into his seat, his tailbone biting into the hard wood.

Leaning back, he exhaled and remembered their final day together, when he

had surprised her at her two-story condominium in Creedmoor after a client

meeting in nearby Durham. Nearly three months had passed since they last

saw each other. He’d dropped by unannounced only once before, afraid of

what he might find or, better put, with whom he might find her. He wouldn’t

have blamed her, of course, because women had needs, too, in much the

same way she couldn’t have blamed him for fucking his wife at least twice a

week even though his heart belonged elsewhere.

Gwen had been happy to see him, but she looked tired, sad, beaten. It

was a sunny, mild day in late spring, so she suggested they walk into town.

Although he would have rather they proceed straight to the bedroom, he

agreed. They passed the storefronts of posh boutiques, restaurants with

eclectic menus—Greek, Indian, Andalusian—and a black-windowed

coffeehouse called The Grind. The droning tinctures of thrash metal spilled

from the maw of its open front door. They stopped at a wrought-iron bench at

the edge of a small park.

Thinking back now, he should have known to expect an ambush, one she

had been planning for some time. She had been waiting too long for him to

11

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018step into her trap and, in a sense, impale his body on the sharpened stalks of

bamboo she had set with love, to inflict maximum damage.

He had leaned in to kiss her and she had let him, his lips brushing hers.

She didn’t kiss him back until he moved his hand to the inside of her thigh.

She then snaked her hand to his zipper, teasing at the metal teeth, and then

began massaging him through his pants, harder and more vigorously than

she usually did, which made him think she had learned a new trick. The

attention pleased him at first, until the pleasure evolved into pain. Just as he

began to tolerate the grating nuisance of his zipper’s teeth, she turned away

and wiped his spit from her mouth.

“You can’t keep doing this to me,” she said. “I don’t know what you

expect.”

“I expect you to be happy to see me.”

Her eyes became glassy.

“Are you?” he added. “Happy to see me?”

“I wanted to see more of you.”

Wanted, he noted. Past tense. Here it comes.

She said, “I never know where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re

with.”

“And I could say the same of you.”

“We both know that doesn’t make it fair. And it’s not the same thing. You

can’t keep doing this to me.”

“You already said that.”

“I want you to stay away from me.”

“I can’t. I want to be with you.”

12


“You have a terrible way of showing it.”

“I love you more than anything.”

“And your wife? What about her?”

Sid had no answer worth giving.

“Bertie is this close to hunting you down and killing you. Or castrating

you.”

“You’re an adult. This is none of her business.”

“She hates your guts. She told me so.”

“I’m beginning to think the feeling should be mutual.”

“This is stupid.”

“What exactly?”

“This game we’re playing. It’s foolish for both of us.”

“It’s no easy task to unwind a life. Good things come to those—”

“I’m done waiting, Sid. And you should stop pretending. Would it help if

you met my boyfriend?”

His mood turned instantly. She had done this before, invented a “someone

else” just to make him jealous, a calculation to spur him into what she said

she wanted most—getting to change his address. It was a chess move,

however transparent. But it felt different this time. Something about the way

she said it told him this time she meant it. Something about the way she

looked at him. A distance had grown between them.

He wanted to press her for specifics, to ask her how she and this new

“someone else” had met, and why she hadn’t told him sooner. He might not

have come to see her at all had she had been honest with him. It would have

saved him a trip, saved him the fill-up, saved him the time.

13


Realizing this made him dislike himself even more than he thought

possible. Yes, he loved her dearly, in a way, but he could also admit he was

using her just the same.

“How long?” he asked.

“Ten inches, give or take,” she said.

She laughed—probably, he thought, to keep from crying.

“Hilarious. How long has this mystery man been in your life?”

“He’s not a mystery. You’ve met him before.”

Sid wanted to know the suitor’s name but realized he didn’t deserve to

know. He also knew she would say as much.

“Why do you even care?” she said. “You have your own life—your real life

—a hundred miles away.”

More like a hundred and twenty-six miles, he thought, from one door to

the other. He liked that she didn’t know the exact math. He also knew she

had made the trek to his home in Stony Creek, across the border in Virginia,

more than once. She had driven past his house, past his wife and kids, past

everything he stood to lose.

“Do you love him?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you love me? Do you still? Could you still?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Nothing about this is.”

“I can’t let you keep hurting me.”

She started crying, hard and deep.

“Causing you pain is the last thing I would ever want to do.”

14


“That’s funny,” she said, “because you’ve gotten so good at it.”

He brushed aside his guilt, responding, “We’ve hurt each other.”

She said nothing, knowing he was right. Even so, it was a cheap thing to

say.

“I’m pregnant,” she blurted.

He paled immediately. They hadn’t fucked in months. Besides that,

barring a handful of times when they just couldn’t help themselves, he had

always used a condom and never let loose inside her. It—the “it” in her womb

—wasn’t his. It couldn’t be. The fact that someone else’s it was growing

inside her somehow seemed like an even deeper betrayal. She might as well

have kicked him in the gut, slashed him with a putty knife.

“I’m pregnant,” she repeated, though he wasn’t sure for whose benefit.

He removed his hand from her thigh, got to his feet and turned his back to

her. With one hiss-like sigh, he took one step away from her. He waited just a

moment, then kept walking, away from her, leaving her alone, save the thing

growing inside her, on a park bench for two beneath the shade of a leafy oak

tree.

Even now, as he sat in the pew regretting the memory, he recalled feeling

thankful for that tree—the din of its leaves rustling in the wind to mask her

soft cries.

That had been the last time he had seen her.

He scanned the altar for any signs of a child, which would be about three

years old by now. In the thirty minutes he had been sitting at the back of that

overly perfumed church, he had seen no one under the age of ten, more or

less. Funerals were no place for children, he thought. There would be plenty

15

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018of time to learn about death and other disappointments later on. Then came

the questions: Had Gwen kept the baby? Had she gotten an abortion? Had

the pregnancy even been real, or had she manufactured another lie—a final

test whose result would excise him from her life for good?

His mind showed him another memory: the two of them wrapped in each

other’s arms on her bed, late on a hot weeknight in July, when he was

supposed to have been at the office, working late for some bullshit reason he

couldn’t rightly believe his wife would buy. They lay naked, pooled in sweat

and other fluids, his post-coital hard-on beginning to soften. He could feel his

semen oozing out from the base of the condom and rolling down his inner

thighs to leave stain the fitted sheet. Proof, he remembered thinking.

Their lovemaking had been phenomenal, as it always was, but mostly he

remembered the conversation afterward. First she made playful small talk,

suggesting how good the sex was, how she was happy he had made her

come. “Twice,” she promised in a bubbly lilt, though he thought it a lie of the

kindest sort. She then took the conversation into deeper directions, talking

about her fears—“what if my sister dies and I have to raise her bratty little

daughters”—her goals for the years ahead—“a nice house with some trees

and a pond outback, a pair of great Danes, and a few other animals are all

right, I suppose”—where she wanted to live—“Coeur d’Alene, Idaho … or Key

West … or I guess certain parts of Virginia are nice, too”—what she wanted to

be remembered for—“something other than being born or dying”—how big of

a family she wanted—“two boys with juice stains on their cheeks, cuts on

their knees and ratty mops of hair”—even though she was creeping up on

16

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018forty, a few years removed from what was considered “safe” to carry a child

to term.

His responses during these post-coital exchanges had been terse yet

adroit enough to make him seem engaged. The part of his brain concerned

with self-preservation, meanwhile, was focused on a solitary goal: crawling

out of that bed, running down those stairs and climbing into the front seat of

his Audi so he could get home before Lydia realized he had been gone for

longer than he should have been.

This, he considered, had been his biggest sin throughout the affair. Had he

been there, “present,” engaged in this most intimate of conversations, it

might have changed things with Gwen. It might have affected how he felt

about her. It might have given him the courage to finally leave Lydia, to move

on, to find the balls to say “fuck it” and start anew.

Instead, he left Gwen there, alone in her bed, his taste still warm on her

tongue.

The memories chilled him, and he began to feel his eyes water. How he

had screwed up. How he had failed. And for what?

For duty.

For promises.

For the risk of losing his children, which he could have kept, in some way,

shape or form.

Too much time had passed, he thought. Too many things had been said.

He was too imperfect and, for that matter, so was she. He was getting too old

—less than two years from his fiftieth birthday.

17


He thought of his wife. He thought of his children, now eleven and fifteen.

They needed him. They needed all of him.

The last person rose from the kneeler in front of the shiny box containing

the remains of Gwen’s father.

Sometimes late is too late.

He watched Gwen pull a balled-up tissue away from her eyes. She leaned

toward her sister, Bertie, who proceeded to whisper into Gwen’s ear. She

looked up and aimed her gaze toward the back of the church, toward him.

She stared for several seconds, then slowly, sheepishly, extended an arm and

seemed to wave.

Warmth flooded his body. He tried to swallow, but something thick and

unmoving had formed at the back of his throat. He wanted to cry. His eyes

burned.

Above the altar, the wooden Christ looked blankly to his left—silent,

useless, refusing to offer any wisdom.

He pulled himself to his feet. He took a deep breath, steeling himself to

the kindness he had come there to perform, and shuffled into the center of

the aisle. As he looked down, he considered the perfect contrast between his

jet-black wingtips and the too cheerful mosaics beneath.

Eyes fixed on the small congregation at the feet of the pale and dying

Christ, he was immobilized, unsure as to which direction his feet might take

him.

He inhaled deeply and stepped forward—a single lope forward. After a

hitch of hesitation, he was on his way.

18

W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018Eastern Hognose Snake, Heterodon platirhinos

Small and stout bodied, the eastern hognose snake is remarkably well

equipped with a number of useful evolutionary adaptations. A hard, scaly

protuberance at the tip of its snout acts as a spade, of sorts, perfect for

digging its prey of choice—the humble toad—out of its burrow. The snake

uses fangs positioned near the back of its mouth to not only deliver its potent

venom but also to nullify the toad’s primary means of defense: inflating itself

with air to prevent it from being swallowed. The eastern hognose rarely bites

humans. When disturbed, it plays opossum by turning onto its back, belly up,

and exuding a putrid smell from its cloaca to repel potential predators.

19


Chapter Two: Stripped Bare

Sid waited for the snake to cross the trail—a black rat snake, he knew by the

white beneath its chin. At its thickest, the body was as thick around as his

wrist. He put it at five feet long, maybe five and a half. He kneeled for a

better look. The snake wound gracefully, silently, between rocks. He nearly

gasped at its beauty.

It was the first time he smiled all day.

Sunday mornings always held a special kind of magic for him, and even

more so these days. For the past few years of running the insurance agency,

he had gone into the office for easy work: returning emails he didn’t feel like

dealing with on a sunny Friday, updating policies, plotting the week ahead,

fantasy football. Now his six-day workweek had him coming home with blood

blisters and back spams, splinters in every finger.

The snake crossed the trail and disappeared into the leaf litter. After a

moment he pressed on, sunlight spilling through breaks in the canopy. The

trail crossed a dry creek bed, though the pockets of mud suggested the creek

could flow again with a few good rains. It had been a dry August, with no

relief in sight. He never used to pay attention to weather forecasts, but now,

a rainy day meant the potential for a day off. When the rain falls, home

construction stops. He could use another day off.

His head hurt.

His hands hurt.

His heart hurt.

Simply, every part of him hurt.

20


Sid’s mind wandered as he walked. His feet knew the way, as he had been

tramping this trail every morning, more or less, since he had moved into his

bare-walled apartment five months earlier. His mind wrestled with the same

maddening thought: How quickly a big life can become small.

The trees thinned, and the wood-chip trail turned to gravel, and then to

cracked blacktop with brown-filtered cigarette butts hiding in shallow

fissures. His apartment building—the Lea at Barrows, four stories of two-

bedroom apartments—cast a shadow on his street. He sighed and kept

walking.

Sid climbed the stairs to his third-floor apartment, confounded in his

realization that a full year had passed since the debacle at Saint

Christopher’s. He found it equally difficult to fathom that he had survived the

storm.

He felt a duty to endure the daily self-flagellation for the fantastic mess

he’d made: Gwen’s blowup at the foot of the altar for her father’s funeral; her

nails raking his left cheek; the ensuing brawl with Gwen’s goof of a husband;

getting dragged out of the church by two altar boys, one of Gwen’s cousins

and Bertie’s ex-husband; slugging one of the altar boys outside—an accident,

he insisted—just as a cop car pulled into the church lot; listening to the

pissed-off priest demand that the cop “kindly remove that SOB from these

grounds” while Sid sat handcuffed, bleeding from his cheek, ass digging into

the concrete curb; the call to Lydia from a jailhouse nearly two hours from his

home, and having to explain to her at the station—with some help from the

police—why he’d been arrested.

21


Claw marks in his face aside, the real pain began in the days that

followed: Lydia screaming, crying and raining blows upon his head and chest,

followed by the demand for a divorce; the kids, Tern and Melissa, having no

idea why Mom kept calling their father, all too calmly, a “doomed piece of

shit”; the months-long crucible of lawyerly bullshit he couldn’t avoid—he’d

offered to give her just about everything to expedite matters, and she’d

accepted, especially because she had the PNA to back it up; suffering the

indignity of sleeping in a former colleague’s damp basement for three months

while he looked for a place that would rent to someone without any collateral

or any material prospects; having to give up his stake in the insurance

business, of which his wife, now ex, had been part owner, now sole owner;

having to sell nearly ever member of his reptile collection, save a handful of

his favorites, to pay legal fees and first and last months of rent; settling for a

job as a blue-collar gopher, which he got only after weeks of groveling at the

feet of Henry Keane, a contractor friend Lydia and he had known for more

than a decade; and, throughout it all, wondering what the fuck happened—if

Gwen’s sister had set up the whole thing just to humiliate him and torture her

sister, or if Gwen had told Bertie to invite him to the funeral but the sight of

him had set her off, or if Gwen simply had been overcome by the grief of

seeing her father’s body in a box bound for the soil, or …

None of that mattered now. He reminded himself of this every day, his

attempts at putting all bad things behind him to focus on the good. On his

better days, he thought of himself as a hatchling free of its leathery shell,

free to roam a wide, wild world for the first time.

On his worse days, he had the same thought but the idea terrified him.

22


He ascended the staircase and keyed his way into his apartment. At the

same time, the door directly across from his—Three A—opened, and out

came Pearl Eldridge, the pudgy landlord, whiny voice, a man with a woman’s

name.

“Sid,” he said. “A minute.”

Sid closed the door behind him, not wanting Eldridge to see inside his

apartment, or to have him catch a whiff of the smell he knew would waft out.

“You’ll have company soon enough,” Eldridge said. “Got a renter for this

unit. Moving day could be as early as tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Sid said. He’d wait for Eldridge to leave before going back inside.

When Eldridge showed no signs of moving, he added, “Who is it?”

“Young lady, thirty five’s my guess,” Eldridge droned. “Be a sport and

make her feel at home.”

Based on Sid’s track record, the best way to make her feel safe would be

to steer clear. Just leave her the hell alone.

“She’ll never hear a peep out of me,” he said.

“Don’t mishear me now.”

Sid turned around, lips pursed, his back to the door marked Three B.

“No one likes a hermit, Sid. Introduce yourself, for chrissakes. She’s a

single lady. Make her feel safe. Or at least don’t creep her the hell out.”

“No lamb’s blood on the door, in other words. Will do.”

Sid opened his door just enough to slip inside and then eased it closed

behind him. He peered through the peephole. Eldridge lingered for a

moment. He raised a middle finger at Sid’s door before heading back

downstairs.

23


“Feeling’s mutual, asshole,” Sid hissed.

He went to the refrigerated and retrieved a brown bag stuffed into the

space where most people would have kept ice-cube trays. He dumped the

bag onto the counter, revealing three white rats, frozen, eyes closed and

limbs tight to their bodies, as if palsied. He then walked over to the five-feet-

long-by-two-foot-tall enclosure and put his nose to the glass. The female

albino Burmese python raised its head and tasted the air with a bifurcated

tongue.

“Hey, Sweetpea,” Sid said, as if soothing a young child. “Breakfast is

coming.”

Sweetpea was one of only four reptiles he’d able to keep after the divorce

—or at least the four he’d refused to go without. The others: Fritz and Chloe,

two brilliantly hued Tokay geckos, each measuring a foot long, which did their

best to give him new scars with each cautious feeding; and, as

counterbalance, Gemini, a soft-shelled turtle the color of clay, which had once

been an eager biter but had gone delightfully placid with age.

Sweetpea had been in Sid’s life for nearly twenty-five years. Three days

after he’d finished college, he’d wandered into a pet store in Tysons Corner.

She was a twenty-dollar impulse buy—cheap for anyone other than a

teenager whose money went to beer, cigarettes and band practice. She

hadn’t been eating, the store’s owner had said, suggesting she probably

wouldn’t make it another week, “but give it a shot.” The owner had even

given him a dozen baby mice, each one as pink and hairless as a pencil

eraser. He’d nursed the snake back from the brink, hand-feeding her one

squealing pinkie after another.

24


Back then Sweetpea measured no longer than a standard ruler—eleven

and a half inches. Now, a quarter of a century later, she was pushing fifteen

feet from snout to tail, and tipping the scales at nearly ninety pounds. Years

ago, when Sid’s salary exceeded a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year,

Sweetpea ate a freshly killed rabbit a month. Now, considering his

workingman’s budget, she had to settle for a handful of flash-frozen rats he

had to boil back to room temperature.

Even after four months, he still couldn’t get used to the smell.

Sweetpea nudged the corner of the cage with her blunt snout. One big

tube of muscle, Sweetpea could easily overpower Sid if she chose to. If she

were having a bad day, she could easily kill him, and she would probably try

to swallow him until she burst like an overinflated balloon. But like most

captive-bred Burmese pythons, she was tamer than a domestic dog—unless,

of course, you were a freeze-dried rat that had been boiled like a potato.

He grabbed the sole pot in his kitchen and turned on the spigot. Cool

water splashed into the stainless-steel basin.

[END]

25

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· Web view“How are the kids?” he asked, ... Gwen hadn’t spoken a word the rest of the brunch, ... It was a chess move,