“You need the untranslatable ice to watch.
You need to loiter a little among the vague.”

–gwendolyn brooks

I walked closer to the bureau and peered behind it watching it move along the chords slowly, coming to a stop right before the end of the other side.
“Where’s the snake?” I heard my dad kind of screech.
“Behind the bureau.”
My dad shuffled in his sweat shorts and polo, the same outfit he’d worn for days, as he always had, oxygen tubes in his nose.
“Keep an eye on it, I’m gonna call animal control. We had a snake in the house a few weeks ago.”

My dad was already leaving the room to grab the phone before I even gave a response.
“You want me to just watch the snake???”

“I’m just gonna grab the phone, Ava.”
I already had my cell phone in my hand and had looked up the number. I dialed waiting, watching the snake, sort of of hovering over it as it lay still. I tried to bypass the pre-recored menu as I always do ny smashing “0” or screaming “operator” and that is how I got Linda so quickly.
“Linda, there is a snake in my mother’s bedroom. I have it trapped behind the dresser. Can someone come get it?”

“Oh we don’t come get snakes unless it’s trapped in a container.”
“Well, I have it contained.”

“No… it needs to be in a box or underneath something where it can’t get out. We’ve gone out to people’s houses and chased snakes for hours, all around their house. We can’t go out unles sthe snake is contained. You can call an exterminator.”
“My parents are elderly, my father is on oxygen, they can’t afford to pay for an exterminator or to live with a snake in the house.”
I could sense the anxiety in my voice and the pressure of the animal behind the dresser, ready to move at any moment. I could feel it. I wanted to scream at her. If I was alone, I may have. I didn’t want to frighten the snake. I didn’t want to kill it either. I wanted it relocated.
“I’m sorry to hear that but we can’t come out to find snakes anymore. We’ve gone out too many times for them.”
I once saw a snake gutted but moving on the side of the road. We called animal control to euthanize it. I waited an hour maybe over an hour before giving up. It laid still in front of me that entire hour. My partner, his son and I were there, comforting the snake in presence as people walked by. We were at the beach going back to our car. A car had clearly run the snake over and people continuously told us to “let the evil serpent die” and that they “hoped it would die” as i tried to calmly educate them on how fucking ridiculous and selfish they were. I tried to watch my language and temper and teach the value of kindness to animals to Nate from a young age. It was hard to make children vegan but we gave him vegan chicken nuggets, hot dogs, french fries, fun things that my partner would make and take him to every local protest I organized for PETA. I tried.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes,”

“If you can contain it, we can come out and pick him up.”
“Ok sure. I’ll call you back.”

As we walked away, after that hour passed, I looked back, checking on it. It was slithering into the grass into the woods.
“Sometimes snakes play dead,” Smith said to me. “That’s what she said on the phone right.”
I stood stunned. It’s stomach had been cut open and it had laid there still so long as I stayed next to it, for over an hour.
“But it’s stomach was cut open.”
“Maybe he was playing,” Nate said, excited to go home and eat.
I waited a few more seconds.

“Remember that time on the way to the shore, we stopped and helped that hurt butterfly in the road?”
“Yeah!” I turned away from the snake, trying not to ruminate on whether I had helped or hurt it more. “Good eye. It was in the street with a hurt wing. I can’t believe we saw it from the car.”
The snake began moving towards my mother’s nightstand.
“Dad!”
“I’m calling Animal Control. I have them on the line.”
“I already called. They can’t help us. They said we have to contain it. Dad, it’s moving!”
I held my phone up, wanting to record it’s size as it wrapped around the painting of the mother and young boy I had given to my mother years ago. It was framed on her nightstand. All the paintings I had bought her were displayed in her room.
“Ok, well get it, don’t let it get away!”
“Dad, it’s on the nightstand, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to just grab it?”
And I watched it both in real life and through the lens in awe of its grace, display of confidence, and the way it jumped from floor to hamper to nightstand. It didn’t weave it’s way up like I expected. It just kind of jumped.

I showed up that Saturday as we had agreed upon. I never break promises. This makes me “dorky” my brother says but if we made plans, I believe somewhere that we still have them. I waited until 12:00 before heading to Leana’s house.
“You’re already dirty,” she said through her screen door.

“You want to come out and play?”
She turned around to look over her shoulder.
“Sure, hold on.”
She closed the big white door in my face and I rocked back and forth eyeing her dad’s boat. I didn’t hear the door reopen but I did hear a squeaky voice through the screen.

“Hi Aaaavvaaa.”

“Hiiiii Jaaaaackkkkk,”I slowly turned around.
“Aaaaaavvaaaaa.”
“Jaaaaaaack.”
“Aaaaaavvvvvvaaaa.”
“Jack!” and i flicked the screen with my fingers.
“Ow!”
“Jack move!”
Leana swung the screen open and I could see her little brother in only his underwear.
“What do you want to do?”
“Want to go in the ditch?”

She shrugged and we headed towards the abandoned house down the street where we cut through sometimes if we thought her parents might be watching.

“I’m going to Ava’s!” she screamed and slammed the door shut.

“You’re filthy, Ava!”
My mom opened the door for me that day, big smile on her face, excited to see me and then the scolding.
“Wait, stop,” she put her hands out to stop me. “Take your shoes off, take your socks off, bath immediately.”
“Mom,” I whined.
“Do not whine, Ava. If you’re going to keep playing in mud, you’re going to start taking baths immediately after playing.”
I threw my head back in protest but began sliding my shoe off with my other foot. I never untied my shoes, I just ripped them off. My mom headed down the hallway to start the bath. My dad walked by me.
“Mom, making you take a bath huh?”
“Yeah,” I grumbled, pulling my sock off.
My dad snorted and said, “Let me look at you.”
I looked up at him. My face was covered in dirt, arms, hands, shirt and pants too. After we buried the worm, I thought it would strengthen the spell if we rolled on top of the grave and chanted Worm! Worm! Worm! Worm! Live forever! over and over.
“Now you have the power of the worm,” I whispered to her, both of us on our stomachs on the patch, my head laying flat on the dirt.
“Wow, what were you doing? You really got in there?”

My dad was examining me and I began to kick the other shoe offf. I shrugged as girls do. My brother never got this dirty if at all.
“Just playing.”
My dad laughed on his way to the laundry room to get a snack. It was Sunday. I remember he had slept in today. Tomorrow was work. He wouldn’t drink too much.
“Ava!”
“I’m coming,” I pulled my other sock off and left it in a pile by the door.

The rest of the evidence buried somewhere in some hole near someone’s backyard. The only evidence of our friendship: swallowed, tombed, washed off, never to be seen again. Never to be believed.

The house had a smell: cigarette smoke, but our rooms smelled of vodka and stale potato chips.  My mom was always coming in to open the windows and turn on my fan. Everyone smoked but my brother. Everybody drank. Now, the house smells of smoke only near the front window when my mom allows herself a cigarette. Though it’s mostly scented candles and there is a rhythm, the oxygen tank in the corner near my mother’s plant collection, sort of breathing itself announcing presence at all hours of the day. It’s not a beep or a hum or a whirr but a steady electronic heave and fall that I hear as I lay in my brother’s room staring up at the psychedelic spinner that he got from Spencer’s Gifts years ago: black with white checker boxes and if I plugged it in, it would spin. I never plug it in. I watch it though, every time I’m here. I remember when he got it. I remember when he painted his room black, I painted mine dark purple.
It’s hard for me to sit still so I get up suddenly, abruptly and constantly. I walk into my mother’s room. I need to walk, pace. I did this as a child: walked up and down the hallway, walked into the den, danced, hopped, twirled around and then back into my room with the music loud, door shut, hopping up and down. Do people change? I really can’t tell. I am looking at myself in my mother’s giant mirror above her bureau, another reason I hang out in her room when she isn’t here and I hear something. I turn to the direction and also notice my mother’s trolls on the floor. She collects them. Not the little cartoon trolls with the diamonds in their belly button, although she has those too, but these big scary mannequin trolls that would have freaked me out as a child. They look like trolls from The Labyrinth; real trolls, happy but you know they have a nefarious world somewhere too. And they are all a brown hue. I liked the colored trolls. “General Hair” my dad called him: a troll we took out every time we played Risk. 

He was beloved, our mascot.
“General Hair! General Hair!” my dad would repeat, sipping Wild Irish Rose prepared to lose again, every time.
“You’re kind of the worst at this, Dad.”
My brother and I were ruthless in Risk. It’s hard to stay one place. How do you not let grief destroy you? I can’t answer or cry or sit still or come to any meaning. I’m in my mother’s room noticing two of the larger trolls are on the floor previously having been on the bench next to her other dresser. They would not have fallen by themselves.  I squint. That’s what I do when I’m fathoming concepts, squint. Then I see it’s black body slither towards the bureau.
“Oh fuck. Dad!!! Dad!!!!! There’s a snake in mom’s room! Dad!”
I didn’t scream though. It was, I’d say, two feet long in actuality but I described it as three feet to animal control, and only a foot away from me. I had walked right by it and it laid low for a minute. That is what I mean: the surprise. It laid low for a minute then took off knocking the trolls off the bench.  That meant, it was on TOP of furniture. That meant, it was slithering over her stuff. It was the middle of the day in August, sunny, cool in the house. I didn’t scream. I wanted Alex to know that. I don’t scream anymore but I still called Dad. I didn’t leave the room either. I watched it. I didn’t run away when the snake got in the house and I didn’t plan to leave it.

“Oh my gosh, Adelmira. You are a wolf now.”

She grinned and I half expected to see the worm crushed against her gums, growing eyes and smiling. Hello, executioner. In half and still alive.
“Ok, Adelmira, now you have to bury this one.”
I was still holding the tail and the body was wriggling. This was my fascination. It moved.
“It’s moving!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah, it’s still alive. Worms can live like that. The other half is alive inside of you.”
Her eyes were big but she took the other half gently. She held it up to examine it writhing in the wind.
“Do worms feel pain?”
I laid each one neatly in a row on my picnic table.
“Answer me, worms, do you feel pain?” 

I began to shake the can.
“Does he feel it?”she asked me.
“The worm? It’s not a boy, it’s nothing, it’s a hermaphrodite.”
“What does that mean?” she asked still holding the worm in the air

I giggled, “It means it’s both. It has sex with itself.”
Her eyes got wider. I said the word ‘sex.’ Not as bad as the time I accidentally said “fuck” when the VHS tape would’t work in front of my mom. I learned it from Dad. She giggled too and then we both laughed uproariously in synch like this was just so easy and normal and good. Friendship that is. If only it were always like this.

“Bury it!”
“Where?”
I pointed to the spot right in front of her.
“In you and in the ground. Here i’ll help.”
I scooted forward on my knees feeling the thread stretch, my knee raw from the constant kneeling in the dirt. I took both hands and formed a claw movement and stuck my fingers in first then pushed down to get my palms in and tore up a huge chunk of dirt and grass. The soil near the water was always soft. I knew we’d see other worms, rollie-polies, maybe some beetles. Excited to show off this micro world, I tossed the dirt to either side of me and nodded my head in the direction of the hole. Five worms wriggling and a millipede.
“I ate one of those before.”

She nodded towards it without saying anything.
“That one,”I pointed to the millipede. “It tasted like dirt.”
“So did the worm.”
“Shh!” I held my dirty finger up to my mouth. “He can still hear you! Oops I mean IT can still hear you!”

We laughed together and she held the worm higher in the air, peering up at it above her, squinting.

“So long!”

She dropped it without looking. I leaned forward, both my hands and knees on the ground, mouth open. It landed in the center and the millipede sped up, heading towards the grass towards Adelmira. I became mezmerized by its movement. What do giants look like? It rushed into the blades, into some hidden hole or place. What do giants look like, insect? I held the millipede in my palm before I brought him to my mouth.
“Cool,” I heard her and turned my eyes back to the half eaten worm.
We watched for a few moments in silence as it wriggled, missing pieces surrounded by whole worms and cool earth.
“Bury it,” I said.
And she did as she was told.

“there is no such thing as still lives”

–erica jong

She grinned and I half expected to see the worm crushed against her gums, growing eyes and smiling. Hello, executioner. In half and still alive.

When my brother was alive, it was easier to catch snakes.
“Alex!” I slammed the door and screamed. “Alex!”
I ran to his door and began knocking furiously. My brother was furtive, hidden behind a locked door most of the time.
“Hold on!” he yelled.
“There’s a snake.”
“There’s a what? A snake? God,” I heard him mumbling, heard glasses clank, heard him shifting things in his room.
My brother and I were both secretive and nearly identical in appearance. We peeked through cracks before opening doors. We hid things: bottles, papers, drawings, notes, food wrappers. We both had our separate lives that took place in a 8 x 12 box. When he opened the door, I rushed him.
“In the den, I don’t want the dogs to hurt it or eat it, hurry!”
He followed me and I continued jabbering.

“I didn’t know what to do, it’s not that big but I saw Dakota swipe at it and Sasha is in there too.”

The den was where our TV was and when we had been younger, our video game consule and exercise bike that we both enjoyed. It was like an annex to the rest of the house. My parents said someone had built it after the house had been built so there was a separate door you can lock and a slight step down. My brother once accidentally slammed that door on my bare big toe when I was younger and I wailed more loudly than when the wasps attacked me. I always think of that when I see the door. My big toe was black for a week.
Our house is already small so I can’t imagine the house being built without a den. It would feel more like a shack to me. I always was grateful for that: the separate room with the door that closed where I could blast music and later would live in that room when I had to move home one more time and my dad had moved into my bedroom. The washer and dryer was next to it where we stored all of our snacks and board games. It held the hot water heater too which was centered around cobwebs and active spiderwebs and hidden only by a curtain. I did not like to have to turn the water on and off but I had to do it all the time or the tub would drip and the kitchen sink would leak onto the floor. To say there are a few problems is a delicate way of exposing your status in the caste.  The den led to the back door. Between the floor and the wooden back door was a gaping space that my parents had tried to stuff with a towel. It had been like that for as long as I could remember. Slugs, spider crickets, crickets, spiders, beetles and snakes simply crawled right underneath, and when Michaelangelo was alive, our snapping turtle, I would scoop the crickets and beetles up and throw them in the tank. Spiders I let build homes everywhere. Spider crickets and cockroaches freaked me out so I usually screamed and made my dad or Alex deal with it unless I had Hot Shot nearby. Snakes, no matter how small, I would not touch.
“Make sure the dogs don’t hurt him! I saw Dakota try to snap at him,” I repeated frantically.
I was obsessed with everything staying alive except for flies, cockroaches and spider crickets. They were disgusting. My brother opened the den door and I stood back, interested in the interaction and afraid. It wasn’t the biting I couldn’t take, it was the surprise, how they move, they way they sway and suddenly. I’m easily startled. Snakes are fast and their slither intimidates me. Alex said I ruin everything by screaming and he’s right. I don’t like to be caught off guard. My brother had grabbed the broom that he kept in his room. Despite his secrets, he always had a neat room, obsessively cleaning it even as a child. Once he approached it, shooing Dakota and Sasha away, I ran back into my room suddenly terrified this would all go wrong. I was twenty, living back at home temporarily after moving out of the Oceanview bay house with my girlfriends,into and back out of my partner’s apartment and sort of waffling in general.
“But making Straight A’s,” I told Jake holding my shot glass to his, letting the smell of rum fill the air, throat tightening on instinct.
Things burned me and I set myself on fire anyway. It only took five minutes and my brother returned, passing my door without stopping in as was our new adult custom: passing each other but not with any gaiety or friendship.
“Snake’s gone!”
I ran out quickly before he locked himself back in his chamber.
“Are the dogs ok? Is the snake ok?”
“Everyone’s fine! It’s outside!” he yelled through his already shut door.
The house had a smell: cigarette smoke, but our rooms smelled of vodka and stale potato chips.  My mom was always coming in to open the windows and turn on my fan. Everyone smoked but my brother. Everybody drank.