Gainesville, Florida
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“There are three snakes in the pool.”
This was the first message I sent to W. The snakes were so small I was embarrassed to use the word “snakes” to describe them. They were like long earthworms, though structurally more sound, meatier. Their complexions were generally orange, and they had obvious heads and tails—in this way they weren’t earthworm-like at all. They were swimming on the surface of the water in a way that I would best describe as panicked. I could tell they didn’t want to be in there. It was late summer—they had probably been washed into the pool during the heavy rains in the night.
“What should I do???” I added.
I messaged W. because I knew she would give me practical advice. I also secretly hoped she might come over and extract the baby snakes for me.
“Get them out,” she wrote. “Or they will drown.”
The snakes were already trying to get out. They were slithering up and down the side of the pool, looking for an opening, a path to dry land. Despite witnessing this distress it hadn’t occurred to me that drowning was a possibility. I hadn’t thought to use such a word in relation to what might happen to them.
I had been standing on the edge of the pool, phone in one hand, cup of coffee in the other, just watching. This—or they will drown—jolted me into action. I placed my cup and phone on the ground, and went for the pool scoop. It took me no time at all to assist the small, orange snakes out of the water. Two immediately went under the nearest mound of leaves. The last, it was already unmoving.
While I was doing this—interacting with the snakes in this distanced, impersonal way—a strange woolly fright took hold of me. The snakes were unbelievably small and there was nothing they could do to me. There was also the long handle of a pool scoop between us. In their own tiny snake ways, they were probably terrified. And yet, as I carefully trapped them against the side of the pool, and lifted them to land, I was unable to shake off this fright. It was as if some ghostly creature had reached in and linked its fingers though the back of my ribs, its thumbs pressed to the hard of my spine, and was gently shaking me, allowing a cool, persistent gust to pass through me.
I felt as if the windows and doors of me had been flung open. I felt exposed and scared. I felt foolish, too, as I loomed over those strange, tiny slippery things. Thinking about how foolish it was to be frightened didn’t lessen the fright. Snakes, they are so freaky man.
After the first two vanished somewhere safe to, I imagined, catch their breaths, I stood over the one who hadn’t made it. Its small body, I couldn’t even tell if it was lying on its belly or its back. Using the metal lip of the pool scoop, I rolled it into the same bush its siblings had disappeared into. Though I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do—if they would want to be reunited in this way. After that, I stood at the edge of the garden and watched for movements, and the chill I’d experienced just a moment before dissipated.
“I did it,” I messaged W. “They’re safe in some leaves now.”
I didn’t tell her about the one that hadn’t made it. If she reads this piece she will know, but back then I lied. I didn’t want her to be disappointed in me.
That was the summer before I got pregnant. The summer we all moved into the Bodiford House apartment together. The next summer, when I was pregnant, I was again staying at this house, J.’s house. I was already huge with the pregnancy though I still had many months to go. On the regular throughout the summer, W. left the stinking heat of Bodiford and came down to J.’s house with the pool. Together we sunbathed and floated and fed the lizards that lived in the shrubs surrounding the pool the small winged insects that got trapped on the surface of the water. The lizards would only eat the insects if they were still moving, not yet fully dead. We scooped the insects on to the concrete, and the lizards took turns scurrying down from the legs of the lounger where they were basking and watching, and gobbled them up. W. and I, we did this for hours at a time. I was happy. I thought good, big things were coming my way, and I was enjoying the lull before those things arrived. I was basking in the potential of what I didn’t yet know was going to in fact be a time of the opposite, a time of failures and difficulty.
During this happy time W. told me a story about a recent camping trip to North Carolina with her father. After hours of driving they reached their destination. Her father jumped out of the truck, began removing gear from the trunk. He came around to W.’s side of the vehicle just as she opened her door and stepped down onto the road.
In his steadiest voice he said, “Don’t look down, just get back inside.”
W. did look down. To her left and to her right, so close they were almost touching her, were two thick rings of copperhead. The snakes were coiled because they had been basking, not because they were ready to strike, but there they were. Two of them, with W. dressed in shorts and sandals, standing in the middle.
This story doesn’t end with W. and her father driving at insane speeds to the nearest emergency room. It continues with W. calmly stepping back inside the truck and closing the door. Her father driving the truck to a different spot up the road. The two of them carrying on as normal.
“Chloe,” W. said, “I got lucky.”
I could see how much it shook her up though. I imagined she had spent time playing out the other scenarios that could have followed, the bad ones, the different levels of pain, the scars that might have stuck, weighing them against the good luck of the actual outcome.
In the years since that summer, I have put myself on the side of that road in North Carolina many times. I have stood square between those two copperheads and I have tried to play out my response. W. never described the snakes for me in detail. I imagine them as paler than usual, the regular hourglass patterns on their backs a washed-out brown against almost-cream, as if they are being seen through a dust cloud. They are plump and they have the auras of an aged couple dozing on their porch in the afternoon sun. They do not give a flying fuck about me, but they will, they could.
I can’t get a grip on it though, my response. Most often, it results in one of the different outcomes that I imagine W. imagined—bad. Yet there are times when I find myself possessed by a W.-level calmness, level-headedness and I do as she did and I don’t jump or squeal or get myself bitten. The thought of that is exciting. It makes me think luck has only something to do with it. It makes me think I’m not yet all sealed up. The windows and doors of me. It makes me giddy enough to want to meet them for myself, those copperheads. It makes me want to test it out.