Rabbit’s foot

The snake sunned in the yard all afternoon. When my mother let him out in the morning, all was usual but by the time we called him in that evening my parents’ marriage had ended, and my father had taken off his ring and hidden it in an upstairs sock drawer. There was crying, a lot of brooding, but dinner had to be made and the snake had to be fed, so we ate and the snake ate alongside us. The snake usually slept on the second floor outside my parents’ room, but after they separated he began sleeping sideways on the stair landing or once even in the bathroom tub. It was sort of funny really. When the movers came and dragged the bedframes and armoires from the upstairs rooms, the snake lay motionless in the stairway until eventually the movers had to box and carry the snake out too. The empty house took over a year to sell. My mother called a psychic and had the place examined for juju spirits, the kind that wreck entire families and drive ghosts into skeletons—back to the marrow from which they came—but the psychic found no traces of evil in that place. Not even in the bathtub where the snake slept that one night contorted into a strange ungodly shape. When the house finally sold, it went to a perfectly nice family who hung a rainbow flag on the porch, and my mother said whatever spirits lurked in those floorboards belonged to us, not the house, and the snake rattled at this, and for a moment we laughed. It was sort of funny really. We carried those specters on our backs all those years, we even fed some to the snake.

For years it went on like this. Then one afternoon during my last weeks of college my mother called crying, and I knew it had finally happened. I took the train to her apartment and sat with her on the couch and held her hand while the snake lay dead on the rug, the same rug where he’d curl for hours in the living room of the old house while we ate or watched television as a family. He was the last thing left, I said, meaning he was the last thing left of our old life, and my mother simply burst into tears and said I know.

         I can’t prove it, but I’m sure the snake died of nostalgia. He was old, sure, but you should have seen him in those years. He would lie for hours on that old rug, his blinkless eyes glazed over as one looks at a reel of film. As one mourns a past that’s ripe and as permanently gone as a pulled tooth.

         Memories can possess snakes; snakes are as haunted by their history as some humans.

                  We held a sort of funeral for him. I ceremoniously cut off his rattle with a 
         steak knife and even today, even tomorrow, all my life even, I carry this rattling 
         in my pocket: 
                  it is my dumb luck,
                  the severed foot of grief.

Read more from Issue 18.2.