WRITTEN AND OWNED BY KRISTEN REID
Trigger/Content warnings: implied sexual assault, attempted suicide, violence/murder, drowning, house fire
No one really likes snakes. It’s like we’re all born with this innate hatred of them. Perhaps it’s God’s way of further distancing us from the devil. What happened with Adam and Eve will unquestionably never happen again due to the never-ending fear of poisonous damnation in the form of serpents. I never had that fear of them. I never liked snakes, mind you, but I never looked at them and saw something sinister. I think that people say snakes are wicked simply because they bite, and sometimes their bite kills. But it’s those same people who will take a garden hoe and sever the heads of snakes once they find them amidst a garden even if there is no ill will or intent to harm on the snake’s part. Perhaps the snake would not have bitten them, but if the snake had known that it would be beheaded so cruelly, I’m sure it would have liked to devour them.
There were no Adams or Eves in the fall-from-the-Garden-of-Eden community of No Business, but a snake did lurk amongst them. Hidden in the Appalachian Mountains on a road few know about, No Business was named justly for what it stood for and what it still stands as today. Years of crime. Years of death. Years of sin. Years of false beliefs and lies spun from superstition and hatred. Years of indoctrinating ideals from those that seek power over the weak and gullible. And in the year 1935, it was still just as dark as it had been at its founding in 1866, retaining bits of that war which had been so cruel—to keep a bit of its chaos at every turn just for the hell of it. There are no laws, no police, and no hope for anything beyond the mountains it lies in. And No Business shall remain a place of such sludge for all of creation’s existence, though I had always hoped that the good Lord above would rain hellfire down upon it for its sins, like Sodom and Gomorrah’s fate. It had been due for a good check on its sins.
The only beacon of promised hope and virtue resided in the Church of God of No Business. Pastor Rowe kept those of us who wanted more than black marks on our souls close to his messages of goodness every Sunday. I never liked him. Mamma always did, though, and would throw a moth-eaten, cream sundress over my head and brush my brown hair into a loose bun at the nape of my neck every Sunday morning as a child. She would nudge me into an old pew at the front of that church and shoot daggers at me anytime I fiddled with the hem of my dress instead of listening to Pastor Rowe shout his promises of damnation for those who commit evil like Mamma was expecting me to be an offender of righteousness. Pastor Rowe’s left eye always had a large blood spot right next to his pupil that I would stare at during the services. It always unnerved me, and I figured that all the screaming he did during services had popped one of the vessels in it and had never healed. I liked to imagine that he was some monster living in human skin to hide from us, and that bit of his eye was what could not be hidden of his true self.
A year ago, I walked into that bleak church without Mama at my side the day before services. I was going to speak with Pastor Rowe in Mama’s place about that Sunday’s fellowship supper and if Mama needed to bring liver and onions or her pot of chocolate gravy for biscuits. Mama couldn’t ask him herself on account of she was back at the house, passed out with a bottle of whiskey clutched in her left hand on the living room couch. That church always looked ominous to me with its white slat walls dashed haphazardly with paint, and the lone wooden cross nailed at the back of the pulpit. The pews were cracked in places, and the windows couldn't open to let in any air to battle the sticky heat of midsummer. I called out for Pastor Rowe as I walked in but heard no response, so I walked to his bedroom in the adjoining room out the back of the church. The door was open, and my curiosity propelled me to push it open further. And my eyes landed on him and Lilly Forester, a girl of just fourteen-year-olds I was well acquainted with from Sunday school, together in his bed. I stood there, still as a statue with wide eyes, unable to get my feet to move and carry me away from the church entirely until Pastor Rowe stepped over with a blanket around his waist and slapped me over and over again on the face until I fell to the floor. When I looked up at Pastor Rowe, I saw his awful, bloody left eye staring down at me like he was damning my soul himself. After I had raced out of the church and back home, I didn’t tell Mama anything about what I had seen. I believed she would think me a liar, and then I would get a second beating that day.
Pastor Rowe always eyed me during services since that day, threatening me silently as if he knew I held all of his destruction in my hands. But I knew he would destroy me, in turn, if I breathed a word of his transgressions. It was a joint pact of equal destruction between the two of us, and I hated that there was even a tiny bit of a rope to bind us together in sin and fear. But I broke that rope when I finally had mustered up enough courage a year later to tell Mama about it after the gnawing guilt of silence and desire for Pastor Rowe's downfall drove me to speak. And I had gotten that beating from Mama that I had attempted to avoid the first time. I think, somehow, Mama ended up informing Pastor Rowe of my lies and heresy spoken against him, and since that moment, he had wished my end as much as I had wished his. Mama dragged me to church the next Sunday to beg for forgiveness from Pastor Rowe and God for my sin. I had it in my mind to beg God to make Pastor Rowe pay for his own.
Pastor Rowe would often turn his attention to a white wooden box with a brass latch on the front that sat beside the pulpit during a few church services. That Sunday, he did the same. The entire congregation always knew what was inside, but as that box sat in the middle of the church like an odd specter watching us, we all felt its overwhelming presence. Whenever Pastor Rowe would get into a whirlwind of a message and started to enjoy hearing his own voice filling the room, his age-spotted hands would unlatch the box and reach into its depth. And then a yellow cottonmouth would rest in his arms and drape over his shoulder. And all would join in on his shouting and swaying, even Mamma. I would stand still. It was always nonsense to me. If the snake was like Satan, why would God's people be bringing it inside and dancing with it? Mamma tried explaining it to me about how we are untouched by evils against us because of God, and I would say, but Mamma, it’s a snake. It will bite anyone, no matter their principles. Snakes have no room for principles.
That Sunday, Mamma had pushed me to be one of the ones to show my faith by holding the snake and remaining unscathed. She said if I was not a liar, then the snake would not bite me. I was not afraid of the prospect and felt that I would be proven to be truthful in the eyes of Mama from such a silly undertaking. After all, our church had had a remarkable number of people come away without bites. Not one soul had ever been bitten in the Church of God of No Business. Either our faith was so strong that we were, in fact, protected, or Pastor Rowe had simply chosen a friendly snake with no animosity towards people dancing with it. I stood in front of Pastor Rowe as the church grew in volume with its chants and prayers. Pastor Rowe had gone into a spiel on youth’s faith and atoning for sins as he glared at me and took the snake out of the box before thrusting the creature into my hands. Everyone kept shouting “amens” and speaking oddly in strange words while Pastor Rowe remained silent and just kept staring at me with his horrible, bloody eye. I think he was silently praying to God that I would get bit simply to take me off of this earth along with his unspoken sin. And he got his prayer answered. Maybe I did as well.
I turned my eyes to the snake, and it looked at me as if it was no longer a snake at all. Our eyes met one another—mine, brown and empty and wide, its, black and doll-like without a soul. And then its sharp fangs pierced the left side of my face on my eye. And I screamed. The entire church went silent and stared at me as I hollered. I dropped the cottonmouth onto the floor, and it slithered out quickly through the front door—not a soul wishing to be the one to gather it up. Pastor Rowe didn’t speak as he stood still with an unplaceable expression on his weathered face. No one in the congregation spoke as I cried in agony, clutching at my face. The first one to speak was Mamma. She whispered curses angrily as she marched over to me.
“You are a liar, Linda. And you are not faithful.” She had wrenched me away from the pulpit and forced me outside the doors in the direction of the house. And that was the last time I had stepped foot into the church as the Linda Odell that had first entered it.
I had healed over the coming week. Not well, as I sported terrible discoloring on the left side of my face and my eye had turned bloody and filmed over from the poison. I then believed God had punished me for my dislike of Pastor Rowe’s bloody eye by giving me one of my own. People in No Business stared and talked and pointed whenever I left the house. Everyone in the community had heard of the girl who had been bit, the girl of no faith, the girl of lies, and the girl with half a face of malevolence. Mamma hated me almost more than everyone in No Business. Part of me believed that she had started the rumors and hatred herself, but I never confronted her on it. She died a week later. I think a bit from shame and a bit from the alcohol poisoning finally filling her body.
In the weeks after the bite, I had felt a change in me. It was as if the bite itself had not only revealed me as an evil in the community, as the folks of No Business said, but had morphed me into a part of myself that I was unfamiliar with. I felt the human part of me slowly being chipped away to reveal something angrier and hungrier underneath. But I thought not much of it, deciding that I was to become different as soon as I was perceived as such.
Once Mama was buried in the ground, I was alone in our ramshackle, old farmhouse. I became a hermit living off of what was left in the house, never stepping foot outside to hear the cruel words and gossip about me. Pastor Rowe had apparently started a mission in damning me further as he preached to the congregation that I was a witch and that the reason the snake had chosen to bite me was that I had made a pact with the devil and was here to seek harm on everyone in No Business. Rocks were thrown into my windows from the Lawson boys, and they would dance around the house and scream at me to scare me, banging on the walls with their fists and threatening to kill me if they saw me. I would crawl underneath the house through the broken floorboards with the mice and spiders until they would leave—half hoping they would follow through on their promises and half hoping they would be gone entirely. I existed as merely a ghost then. And a ghost sounded better than living.
At the start of August, I found a rope and bucket to follow through with my plan that I had been conjuring up. I stood on the upturned bucket as I fashioned the noose around the tree branch above me before sliding it over my head and quickly kicked the bucket out from under myself. Hanging is a bad way to die. But it is an even worse fate if you can't die.
I woke up hours later when the day was just starting, and the sky was still sleepy. My eyes opened enough for me to see my feet dangling above the ground, and I instantly felt a pain that was like a terrible fire in my neck. I began choking again, struggling against the rope still tightly wrapped around me and pulling me towards death with a feeble attempt. And then I was dead again. The next time I came to, the sun was resting at midday, and my limbs felt as if they were full of rocks and that my head had floated above me into the clouds. And I was sure I was in hell. I was convinced that I had died and that my eternal punishment was a crude death of agony over and over and over again. As I was kicking frantically again and tugging forcefully at the rope, counting down the minutes of torture again until finality for a few fleeting hours, the tree limb I was hanging from broke from the tree, causing me to fall hard onto the ground with it. As I sat there in the dead grass, clawing at the rope to free myself from it so I could fully breathe in, I looked up at the sky above me. If none of the world's miracles were an act of God, this surely was. And that was my first and second death.
The rest of the day was spent sitting quietly below the tree as the nighttime sounds of summer drew in around me. Rationalities tried to cross my mind, but there were none to consider strongly apart from simple miracles or strange wonderings. And the bits of human still lingering inside me were being chipped away again, and it was almost as if I could feel my skin crawling around my bones and something deadly swirling inside my teeth. By the next morning, I decided to trudge back into the house out of the sun, though I could have basked in it for hours, but my stomach growled for something that I knew did not exist in the house. There was simply nothing left aside from dust bunnies, mold, and insects crawling through the crevices of the floorboards and broken windows. I battled in a war with myself at the prospect of walking into town for food. My hunger won.
I decided to wear my sandals in the hot temperatures with my dress and hat to go into town. As I pulled the shoe over my left foot, I noticed the sole had separated from the whole of the shoe, but it was not much to think about as the large majority of my shoes were nearly a match in appearances of age and poor materials. Alongside the sandals, I wore the scar of the snake’s bite with the eye of a witch as well as new bruises of a noose that had tried its damnedest to take me asunder. I walked briskly through town, cutting through the woods a bit and ducking around buildings to avoid the eyes of the community and to not hear their shouts and curses directed at me. As I stepped out of the general store with brown paper bags filled with eggs and bread in my arms, I heard whistling coming from behind me. I kept walking, the sole of my left shoe slapping the ground from its separation from the rest of the shoe as I picked up the pace around the corner. The hat on my head was caught by the wind, and instinctively, I shot my eyes behind me to see where it had landed. One of the Lawson boys had caught it as he walked with his brothers, side-by-side, grinning and carrying on with their discomforting whistling. I turned my head back to look at the road before me and began running with the bags in my hands, tearing off towards the lake in an attempt to cut through the forest and lose them.
“You think you gon’ go runnin’ you stupid girl?” One of them shouted with a dry chuckle to mark their words. “You can’t hide in there!”
They all joined up into a chant to mock me as I ran as fast as I could to the lake, and my eyes were wet with tears as I listened to their curses and threats. The loose sole of my sandal caught a tree root growing out of the ground, and I fell forward, skinning my knee and making it bleed. The bags had flown out of my arms, and as I looked in front of me, I noticed that the eggs were leaking out of the carton onto the dirt. I felt a firm hand grab me up and wrap around my neck as heavy footsteps came running up to join the boy who was holding me.
“Look who we got here, y’all? It’s the ugly witch!” the boy holding me shouted, “What we gonna do with you, huh, witch?”
“Let me go, please,” I begged, meeting the eyes of the other boys, hoping to see any semblance of kindness from any of them, but amongst their hatred, there was nothing but pure evil in their stares.
“Look at her,” the boy laughed as he harshly grabbed my face and turned me to the boys fully. “That eye of hers! She not only wicked in her soul but in her face.” The boys laughed and shielded their eyes from me as they picked up rocks and took turns lobbing each one at me.
“Let me go. I just want to go home,” I whispered, closing my eyes.
“You wanna go home?”
“Yes.”
The boys kept throwing rocks while some of them spit at my feet and shouted curses.
“Home,” another boy said, “Ain’t her home hell with the devil, Eli?”
Eli grinned wide as he looked down at me. “Well, I know a quick way to get you there!” And he me threw me into the lake.
As I dropped into the water, I prayed that I might stay down within its depths and never come up, but I felt hands grab my head and pull me back up. I sucked in a breath and shot my eyes around. The group of them had gathered around me, still laughing and splashing water at me.
“Pastor Rowe says we all ought to kill ya, witch. Said we’d be doing the Lord’s good work. Well, I like the sound of that.”
He pushed me deep down into the water and held me there as I kicked and swatted at him with my hands. I couldn’t process the amount of time it took for my third death, but I felt that it was longer than hanging and much, much worse.
I woke up deep within the water of the lake amongst the mud at the bottom. As I shot up to the surface, I sucked in heavy breaths and crawled my way out of the lake, my legs weak and my lungs on fire. I screamed loudly into the forest, my hands balling into fists into the mud and my body shaking. And I realized that my scream sounded inhuman, and there was not even a drop of the old Linda in my voice. My eyes landed on the boys in the distance, throwing my groceries and hat into the lake and dancing around. I rose from the ground, my long brown hair in strings draped around my face and down my back, my legs and arms dirty from the mud, my monstrous face wet from the lake, and my dress sticking to me like a second skin. The boys all turned to me, their eyes wide and full of horror as I stood at the edge of the lake, watching them.
“How is she alive, Eli?”
“She’s a witch! Come on, run! We gotta tell Pastor Rowe!”
They all took off through the forest towards town as I stood there, exhausted, a torn soul, all alone. The night was beginning to settle in as I walked back to my house, completely wet and without any food. I looked down at my knee that had been bleeding from the fall, but there was no scratch there anymore. And there was no sign that it had ever occurred.
I wondered if I was like a cat, only allowed nine lives. I had already lost three of mine, two of which to the rope. And then I wondered on the why of it all. Perhaps I truly was a witch, as Pastor Rowe preached. Perhaps I was a ghost. Perhaps I would never know. As I sat on the floor of the house, looking up at the broken windows and the rocks on the floor that had found their way inside, a black garden snake slithered beside me then onto my foot before descending below the floorboards through a large crack.
Voracious shouting came from around the house as the blackness of night was quickly lit up with an angry, orange glow. I peeked out enough to see the entire town holding torches and standing in a circle around my house, with Pastor Rowe spearheading the entire party.
“There is a great evil living among us, folks!” he hollered in his flamboyant, pious voice. He looked unhinge with his hair sweaty and falling into his face. With the fire-lit torches behind him, he looked like the devil himself had popped up out of hell. He pointed to my house as he looked back at his flock. “And it has come to us in a form like Satan’s in the Garden. This evil has come to our garden to tempt us into wickedness and to harm you and me. Now, these boys, here, can attest to this evil,” he continued shouting and then he pointed to the Lawson boys, “And I know the Lord Almighty would ask of his servants to drive this evil from His door! And aren’t we his servants?” The crowd shouted their agreement.
A clattering came from the roof, and then it sounded like a dozen more before a few of the torches flew through the broken windows. As the house caught fire, I sat in a ball on the floor, clutching my knees to my chest and closing my eyes. Another death to come, another death worse than the last. The shouts of the angry followers of Pastor Rowe filled the air as my screams matched their intensity from the flames taking hold of me. And then my soul became a raging fire of its own, swirling into intensity with the need to strike, the need to bite, the need to do just what Pastor Rowe said the Lord wanted. I let the fire finally take me into that deep sleep I had grown familiar with, but I smiled and laughed as I closed my eyes and followed death into its grasp.
The fire was still sweeping the house into a blaze when I woke. My clothes were burned, but my skin was fresh and new again. I stood from the floor and walked through the door with the flames licking at my skin. Pastor Rowe and his followers stood still and silent as I stepped outside, perfectly unscathed but dirty from the ash. And Linda, every last bit of that girl, was finally dead, and that lasting sliver of my human side had finally been slaughtered. My rageful soul burst free from its confines, and in death, came to life. I lunged at every one of them, biting them and killing them with the poison leaking from my soul, laughing and reveling in their fear. Screams filled the dense forest as the fire made the entirety of the area feel as hot and gripping as the claws of hell to drag us all into its promised depths. My body flew about like a specter of horror, and there would be none left to recount that night except Pastor Rowe, who had fled in a panic through the woods and left his lost sheep to burn.
I followed the preacher through the woods and to the church. It sat silently, just like the rest of the town, dark from the night and empty from the absence of souls. I could hear Pastor Rowe praying inside before I pushed the doors open.
"No, no, no, get away from me! I am a man of God. You cannot kill me. You are a sinful thing. Sinful things will die.”
I stepped lightly over to Pastor Rowe at the pulpit, clutching the stand with his wrinkled hands and crying.
“They will, Pastor Rowe. Sinful things will die. And this town will die before I ever will.” I grabbed his face harshly in my hand and looked at him directly. Our terrible eyes met one another, our sins still tethering us together like a rope. “Go on, preacher. Start your sermon. For I am your snake.”
Pastor Rowe breathed in hard, sweat trailing down his face. I lunged at him and sank my sharp teeth into his neck, ripping the flesh as I let him go. As the man screamed out in pain, clutching at his neck, I walked over to the front pew and sat down with my hands clasped together on my lap to watch him die. My eyes looked up to the wooden cross sitting above the pulpit. But I didn’t pray. I stood from the pew and stepped over Pastor Rowe, with his veins black and his mouth foaming in death. I walked over to the white box with the brass latch, reached inside, and took out the snake. Though it was a new one that had replaced the one that had bitten me, it, too, looked straight at me with its black eyes like it knew something about me or that we were not so different from each other. Perhaps it saw the ugliness within me and didn’t have the need to bite me. Like I had told mother, snakes do not care for anyone’s principles as snakes have none themselves. And it slithered up my arm as I walked out of the church.
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