SNAKES aren't difficult to keep. They just sit there, and the owner's job is to clean their cage when they take a crap and change their water every day.
I live with forty-three snakes of eleven different species. I also care for a large colony of rats and mice. For my largest snake I buy a rabbit every couple of weeks.
It can be a profitable hobby. The local pet stores don't pay the most for snakes, but they're the most reliable clients and snakes tend to give birth in clutches of 20 to 50. When you live alone in some quiet corner of the world, such company can be a lifesaver.
Every once in a while I expand my collection and today, I introduce a new member to our happy family. This new one is so far the most expensive addition; being my first venomous snake I took the advice of some more experienced keepers and bought a few bottles of polyvalent anti-venom at a hundred dollars apiece. Allow me to introduce to you the West African Gaboon Viper.
Gaboons are the largest subspecies of puff adders native to almost every region in Africa. This one is about three feet long and as fat as a Pringles can. Its distinguishing traits are the triangular shape of the head and the horn perched on top of its nose; half of what's in there are the biggest venom sacs of any specie of snake. Even though they don't have the most potent venom, the sheer quantity they are able to inject in a single bite is enough to kill a man 150 times over. Impressive, isn't it?
But the most attractive quality of Gaboons is their generally docile temperaments. I was very adamant against keeping venomous snakes until my friend let me carry his Gaboon. It felt just like holding one of my boas or pythons, except without any of the erratic movements that gave me little heart attacks when I handled them. It even talked to me, just like my other snakes do:
“Do you know where my favorite place to lie down is?” he asked me. “In the grass. I wish I got to go out more often.”
The voice reminded me of Meg. Once again I came to the possibility that I will never get over her.
My new Gaboon, I decided to name Matthias.
*
I purchased my first snake a few weeks after Meg died, a Boa Constrictor who I named Empress. Now she's my largest snake, around twelve feet long and as thick as a man’s arm. The decision to get a snake was a little more than a means to cope. They're the animal that reminds of Meg the most.
It happened one night when I got really drunk. Meg confronted me and we argued about my drinking. It'll get you in trouble one day, she said. I'll be fine and I can control myself, THANK YOU, I said. The memory has lots of blank spots. I don't remember everything else that happened, but I remember I hit her. I blacked out.
It was five in the morning and the telephone woke me up. It was the police. They asked me how I knew Meg. I said I was her boyfriend. They told me they had bad news and to come to the station. They had my car.
“She's dead.” They told me when I asked what happened. “Come to station, we can give you all the details.”
I called in sick for work, and it slipped my mind to tell my boss that my girlfriend just died. Without my car, I had a long walk to the station. I kept my hands in my pocket and kept my head down as I walked past a hundred others who were doing the same.
When I got to the station I was introduced to Police Chief Delaney who oversaw Meg's case. I saw shifty eyes on all the cops, but no charges were pressed against me and for that I was slightly relieved. The whole time I crossed my arms in front of my chest and kept my head hung low.
What officer Delaney told me was this. At around one in the morning a Red Toyota crashed into my BMW on the Cleveland / Monroe intersection. My car was thrown off the road and flipped upside-down. Meg, the driver, and a passenger of the Toyota were killed on the spot. Eyewitnesses appeared an hour later and that's when the police were called.
They kept my car in the garage and told me they had to keep it a few more days for analysis. The doors on the driver's side were dented, paint scratched off where the other car hit. The hood was bent and a wheel had been de-attached leaving a spool empty.
Blood stains lingered on the front seats, and that was the last I ever saw of Meg.
*
When I got home that day the first thing I did was open all my cabinets. All my beer, vodka, wine, gin, and whiskey stared back at me. In any other circumstance they were companions in sorrow, but now I took them out and placed them all in a cardboard box, later a second cardboard box when the first got full. I taped the sides of the boxes shut.
The next day I called my friend and told him what happened. Asked to borrow his spare pickup for a few days. Told him I'd pay for gas and he said it was alright. Called the boss and asked for another day off too after I told him about Meg. He gave me the rest of the week.
I drove to the outskirts of the town, the two boxes strapped to the back of the pickup, a trip which took me two hours and ended up on top of a cliff facing opposite the town. I threw the boxes off there. I could hear the sound of glass break every time a box glanced off the side.
The rest of the week I travelled. The next day I went to beaches and stared at the ocean. The day after it was the edge of the woods and I watched insects scurry about and fly. I looked at a beetle and saw how small it was compared to my shoe. At that point, only one word seemed to make sense of the universe: relative.
*
I got Empress when she was small enough to fit my hand. That was five years ago, at the advice of my psychiatrist to help me deal with loneliness.
At that point, I had been fired for poor job performance and was living off the pensions in my contract.
Initially a snake wasn't what I had in mind, but when I went to the store that day I realized something: dogs were loud, dirty, clingy, and demanding. Cats were less loud, less dirty, but clingier and way more demanding. I looked at hamsters in the little mammal section when I saw her close by, skin yellow as sunglow and eyes of electric blue, and she saw me. Then she talked.
“I know what happened to Meg,” she said. She had a deep, seductive, feminine voice. “You have my condolences, Steve. It must be hard to have the instincts of a warm-blooded animal.”
“Hey,” I told the clerk. “Can I see this one?”
Sure he said, and in a moment I held her. My hands trembled a bit, the first time I held a snake, but in this dance she did all the work, slithering on my hands, up arms, around my shoulder. At one point, she handcuffs both my wrists together and brings her face halfway up between mine.
“This feels nice,” she says while her tongue, also electric blue, shot in and out. “Mind if I take a nap here?”
“No I'm going to need my hands in a bit, but thank you very much,” I said, which made the pet store guy shoot me a funny look. “By that I mean, I'll take her.”
At that point I thought I'd be over Meg in no time.
*
I didn't tell my psychiatrist my snakes spoke to me, or that I spoke to them. I did tell him I was getting more. I also told him that I took up painting, and showed him some of the stuff I did. Mostly natural shots since I was no good at painting people. There was one of a seagull with a nest atop the ruins of a crashed yacht, and another one of a swimming pool where crocodiles were basking on top of the blankets instead of people.
There was another thing I didn't tell him. It was already months after Meg's death, and since then I'd been spotlessly sober. I didn't think much of it until one of my lemon pastel ball pythons mentioned it.
“It's a real achievement,” she said. “Most people who go cold turkey get crazy by this time, and here you are painting a row of houses without so much an inkling of thirst. I think you deserve a little treat.”
“I think I've treated myself enough this week Sunny,” I said. “But you're right. I do deserve a little treat, and a little indulgence now wouldn't do any harm. In fact, I think it might even help me stay on the path of sobriety, don't you think so?”
So that day I went to the store and bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. In opinion, the most delicious drink one could get without mixing, although the price tag separated me from its taste outside of three different occasions. In all of those, I had finished half the bottle by myself.
When I got home, I placed it on top of my cabinet. To be honest, when I left I didn't plan on getting a bottle, but I saw it on display and got the image of a hunter who hung the head of his latest kill on top of the fireplace.
“Well that doesn't look so good,” I heard a voice say.
“Don't worry Empress,” I said. Her gaze had fixated on the bottle. “I’ll be fine.”
To that she just stuck her tongue out and turned away.
*
Now today also happens to be feeding day.
I took out the snakes and placed them in a separate bin for feeding. This is to condition them so that they associate dinner time when they're in the feeding bin and not when I take them out for the occasional exercise.
It's a misunderstood act of mercy that I kill all their prey myself. I get called "heartless" or a "monster" a lot, but the way I kill is painless, as opposed to slow suffocation in the limb of one of my dears. I would place the rat down with a grip on the cervical part of the vertebrae somewhere in the neck, and with my other hand on the tail I pull taut. This was followed by the snap of life and sudden paralysis of death, without so much a struggle or a whimper from the deceased.
The most important bit would be to avoid looking at the creature's face as I killed it.
There were a few times that I had to feed baby rats for one of smaller snakes. The rats had these little beds which they'd dig out of their chips, and the babies would sleep there together, still pink and furless. Whenever I stick my hand into the rat's cage and reach for a baby, the mother would wake up and try to fend me off with her teeth.
She would always watch, even as I carried her baby out of their home. She’d look like a prisoner with both paws on the glass and both eyes trailing my hand as I put the little rat on the table and killed it.
*
It calls to mind the one and only time Meg and I talked about religion. She lay on my bed and I was hunched over the laptop doing some work.
We heard church bells toll, and I saw her roll around like a cat playing on its back. “Do you believe in God?” She asks me.
“Do you?”
“No,” she mewed, and got up. “If God were real, you'd think he wouldn't leave it to us to find our own meanings. Answer the question.”
“Yeah. I believe in God,” I said, typing away and away. “I believe in many gods.”
“Really?” She sat next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. “That's interesting. Hindu?”
“No, pagan. My own pagan.”
“Shit.” I felt her hands reach over to my shoulders, squeeze. Then she asks: “Do you sacrifice animals to your gods?”
Oh Meg. She was a very stupid girl, but sometimes she had these moments of sheer brilliance which I was completely blind to. I had laughed so hard I thought I offended her, but I kept laughing anyway. It wasn't just that she called them 'my' gods, but the judicial undertones in her voice, the very same reason I don't talk about my religion.
She knew me, then, for four years. I tell her I'm a pagan and all of a sudden I'm an animal killing freak. Hilarious.
*
The thought repeats itself for every meal I prepare for my darlings. It starts with Meg's voice as I kill the rat, and ends with the sound of my laughter as the snake swallows the rat's bottom and slurps the tail like spaghetti.
Thirty times I feed the constrictors and watch them wrap around their prey, their grip precisely aimed to allow the optimum surface area coil. Twelve times the colubrids, who no longer strike the prey but just swallow them whole. Forty-two times I heard Meg's voice ask me the silly question.
When I got to Matthias, I did something different and brought a live rat to his feeding pen just so I could see him hunt. The rat fell into the bin and wandered around, sticking its nose in the air and placing its paws around everywhere. Matthias didn't seem to care even as the rat touched the upper side of his belly, but a whick of his tongue later the Gaboon tensed himself, raising his head from the floor.
Gaboons are ambushers. They lay dormant in the grass as they wait for an opportunity to stumble by. They can wait for days in perfect stillness, a shotgun rigged to blow at the behest of a tripwire. 'God's machinery' is an appropriate term to describe their anatomy.
There was no grass here, but Matthias kept still with the impression that his camouflage still hid him inside the olive green Rubbermaid. Then there was a bang as his underscales threw his head off the plastic, baring the fangs with lightning speed precision into the side of the rat.
There was a struggle, but the largest fangs of all snake species held strong. The bite was angled such that the rat couldn't claw or bite his assailant at all. After around ten seconds the rat’s eyes popped out and blood leaked out of its eye sockets while its limbs continued to thrash around the plastic. I watched with a hung jaw.
The rat was dead, without a doubt, and there was a puddle of blood left in the bin. Its legs still twitched against the emptiness of its eyes, and this was when I realized that pain can still follow you after death. I coughed once, twice, and looked back to see the Gaboon had turned his gaze to me, rat still in mouth.
Something fascinating about Gaboons: they use their fangs like fingers. Unlike boas or pythons which have muscles on the edge of their jaw which maneuver the prey down their throat, a Gaboon’s fangs can spin in their sockets and so their fangs turn the prey and pull it down their mouth. Matthias was in the middle of moving the rat around when he turned to me, and his fang stuck out in my direction, venom still dropping from the tip.
“Sorry,” I told him. He regarded me with no response and finished his meal, while the rats in their cage filled the rooms with their cheeps and squeaks. It seemed they were watching the whole thing, so I tapped the side of their cage to make them all disperse.
Blood smudged every surface of the container. Some had seeped and stained the edge of his mouth; by now it had surely dried and would be impossible remove until the next time he sheds his skin.
Once the mouse had completely disappeared, he turned to me and spoke. Something about the bloody mouse.
*
Sometimes, Meg would say the stupidest things and I’d do my best to erase them from my memory. Of course, this was after I clenched my fists and grit my teeth listening to them.
I learned, because of Meg, not to hit people because they were stupid. I learned only after she died for that's when the revelation came. That psychological mumbo-jumbo that talked about humans adopting preferred behavior from pleasure and pain stimuli? Bullshit. People never learn that way.
Meg was still the same stupid girl, no matter how many times I hit her. The core of the lesson was it was never the pain that motivated me to change. It was the drive to get better, and the drive to survive.
*
“AAH!” Matthias had launched himself an impressive distance, one I thought was safe. The fangs felt like two nails driven into my arm, hitting the sweet spot between both of the bones.
Not a second later searing pain had spread in my bloodstream, like my blood had been replaced with burning oil. The Gaboon held on, every second I could feel the tips of both fangs deposit more of the fluid.
I screamed again.
There is a proper way of detaching a snake once it latches on to you; it involves slowly pushing the snake out following the curve of its fangs. Fuck that. I tore Matthias from my arm and his fangs made a bloody laceration through my flesh. He smacked against the wall and landed on his side.
One of his fangs stayed dislodged in my skin, locked in the gap between my bones.
I screamed once more as I extracted the rogue fang. Clear drops of liquid made its way down the tip as I held it between my fingers.
The pain found its way to my heart and it started to beat so fast I thought it was going to explode. My legs felt like they were going to snap and I sunk to my knees. Blood spurt in little bits from the two cuts in my arm. The hemotoxin took effect fast.
I sometimes wonder what the point of everything was, and where I'll be by the end of it. Meg would say that there was no point, and that's the lesson she never learned: the drive to get better, the drive to survive.
My legs wobbled their way to the table with the anti-venom, and I took one bottle, careful not to drop it in the numbness of my arms. My vision was starting to blur.
I filled a syringe with the anti-venom - it was green or yellow, I think - and stabbed my arm just below where one of the fangs pierced my skin. I stifled another scream through grit teeth as the second fluid seemed to freeze my blood. I took more deep breaths before standing up and emptying another bottle. Two bottles later my head was filled with pain, the temperature in my blood fluctuating between boiling and frozen. I passed out.
*
I had a dream while I was down, but I can't remember much of it. What I do remember was that Meg was there, and I woke up feeling a new sense of purpose.
Matthias had disappeared, but he was no longer my concern. There was a scarlet stain on the carpet beside me though my arm was no longer gushing blood. I placed my wound in a bandage and went to Empress's cage, where she was curled up into a ball, probably having slept through the entire ordeal.
My hands wobbled as I unlocked the cage and brought her out. She was heavy and I was weak, so I fumbled and dropped her on the floor and she woke up.
“Steve, what's the matter?” Her head turned up to meet my face.
I smiled at her, and held both my hands behind my back. I realized at that point that I loved Empress, so much, such that my body grew warm and my blood resumed normal circulation. Out of all my snakes, she was the only one to have never bitten me, and she reminded me of Meg's embrace whenever she'd wrap herself around my shoulders.
I stamped her head with my boot. It was odd to see a giant 14-foot snake writhe in agony; she resembled a worm, squirming as they do when you pick them up and squeeze their heads. I wiped my foot on the floor and spread her scales all around.
She went limp. Her head was as flat as a pancake, but cracks of blood had formed between her scales and one of her eyes hung from a sinew of flesh. The other one had burst into mush mixed with the remains of her brain.
One look at the rest of my collection and I sighed, resting both hands on my hip. Then I looked down and saw her fangs, which had torn through the roof and floor of her mouth. Unlike viper fangs, a boa's was a serrated edge that grew taller at the back, like the outline of a mountain ridge. I smiled.
*
I watched the rest of my snakes disappear into the cracks along the cliff-side face. The last one was a fake coral milk snake, and he bid me good bye as I opened his cage and set him free.
I took a deep breath and a seat by the edge of the cliff. With one hand I took the bottle of Blue Label and twisted the cap open. With me all alone the drive back would be difficult, the twists and turns of the mountainside on the forefront of my mind. But that's okay, life is meant to be hard.
"Love the view," I told the bottle of whiskey as I took it up to my lips and kissed, savoring the taste of someone who died long ago.
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Joseph Ledesma is a Senior BFA Creative Writing student. This literary piece was previously published in Heights (2nd Regular Folio, SY 2012-2013).
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