The snake pit in my backyard had been there for as long as I could remember. As children, we would all lay on our bellies as the grass tickled our still-soft skin, the full heat of the sun burning down on us as we peered small curious eyes into the murk. We tried to make out the writhing bodies, but the darkness blinded us, and we would rarely see any more than a flash of a tongue or a wide-open pink mouth. The rattle would echo off the dirty walls, and we would jump up and run into the house, shutting doors and windows as though something so evil that it defied description was close on our heels. When our parents came home from work, they would chase us back outside again, but in our minds not even the heights of our treehouse were safe. For wild children left on our own far too often, we were a tame bunch, as though the snake pit was nothing more than an unspoken threat that kept us quiet in our beds when the rest of our schoolmates were sneaking out for their first magical moonlit care rides at 16. I read about Medusa in school one day and started having nightmares. I would wake up and touch my head with shaking hands just to be sure I still had my straight hair and not a curling mass of vipers. I shaved my head when I left for college, the only rebellion I allowed myself.
Over the phone, my parents told me they had covered the hole. When I asked about its shiny inhabitants, they told me that it had never had snakes and that one of my sisters had made that whole story up to terrify the rest of us. I didn’t believe them. I had seen the fangs and the glint of their intertwined coils. I had heard the death rattles. They started arriving shortly after that conversation. I left my apartment one chill fall morning and found a garden snake coiled around a lamppost, and I was almost sad knowing that it must not have survived the frost of the night before. Its eyes were still open and staring into mine, alone and scared in that hostile environment. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to touch it as I hurried out. The next time I opened a mailbox to send a Christmas present back home, the light struck on twin flames of yellow eyes, and a menacing hiss escaped the dark metal enclosure, so I shot my hand back and went to the post office instead. My building had always had a mouse problem, but the tiny echoes of scampering feet in the dark slowly disappeared. I found a tiny serpent in my coffee cup in the morning and a fully shed snakeskin on my couch. They had all followed me here, I thought, and there was no escape anymore. Maybe there never had been, and I had just been fooling myself all those years. Sometimes, I was sure I felt the touch of their scales in my sleep or could hear them whispering to each other under my bed, but I always managed to convince myself that none of it was real.
My siblings were all doing well and getting on with their lives, but I was still alone in my old apartment with creaky floorboards. When I spoke to my pregnant sister on the phone, she told me she had found a gopher snake in the tall grass of her lawn andlaughed as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Still, my whole body was seized with terror, and I couldn’t tell her that I had found the shells of a recently cracked egg in my closet just that morning. I told myself I had lived with them before and could live with them again. There was work, friends, and lazy weekends, but then, one day, the stench of death filled every inch of space, and I could barely breathe at home even after opening the windows and searching everywhere for whatever poor thing’s body was hiding in a corner. There was nothing there, and I eventually got myself in bed and closed my eyes. The stench was gone by the morning, but when I looked at my face in my bathroom mirror, my skin was pale as marble, and an unnamable collection of open mouths and glowing eyes flickered their tongues at me, demanding to feed, coiling out of my scalp as they had in my dreams. Not all of the horrors of the whole wide world would satisfy them.
Calla Smith lives and writes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She enjoys continuing to discover all the forgotten corners of the city she has come to call home. She has published a collection of flash fiction “What Doesn’t Kill You”, and her work can also be found in several literary journals.