“It’s not real food,” he said, but they didn’t care. They just wanted to get something inside while they could. October had started and the cold nights had come and it wouldn’t be long before they were on the table.

How to Revitalize the Snake in your Life

how to revitalize the snake in your life

He is inherited. A Colombian red-tailed boa constrictor left behind by a man named Fred, who wears black eyeliner and is briefly her lover. She meets Fred on the street. He picks up a pair of underwear that has dropped from her laundry bag into the gutter. The panties are stained and falling apart—she should have thrown them out long ago—but now here they are, in a stranger’s hands.

“They’re clean,” she says. It is all she can think of. Before she finishes, he has lifted them to his nose.

He seems harmless—Coffee?—and has blue eyes. They walk past a café and she invites him upstairs. It has been years since a man was inside her apartment. She feels proud of herself, a little giddy, and a little scared that she has let him in. He offers to fold, and together they spread her sheets across the room, match corners, and double them into tiny packages, each crease moving them closer.

“What’s this?” He points to a large black book with a skull on the cover.

“It’s for my anatomy class,” she says. “I used to be in medical school.”

“Creepy.” He has opened to a page on facial dissection. There is a photograph of a cadaver. The man is placid, eyelids closed, hair shaved, his lips just slightly blue. On the next page the skin is gone, the muscles pulled apart with metal instruments and identified, the mass of white eye hovering unprotected in its socket.

“Why’d you quit?”

“It wasn’t for me,” she says. This is her standard line. She doesn’t talk about the lack of sleep, the isolation, the loneliness. She doesn’t say it was because of Mr. Green.

There was a tradition among the anatomy students to give the cadavers nicknames. Her lab partner suggested Mr. Green. Their assigned body was a young man, forty at most, but somehow in the preservation process his skin had turned. It was gray, with an olive hue. Otherworldly.

“Swamp Thing,” her lab partner had said.