What she needs is chicken soup. Something healthy, to bring her strength back. As she is chopping carrots, she sees the snake, curled into the mixing bowl. She reaches out to stroke him and he raises his head, looks her steadily in the eye, and gives out a long, low hiss. She freezes. When he returns to his coils, she thinks about how easily the knife in her hand could slide through him—a cut into muscle, the slit of blood, and the hard ca-chunk as the bone snaps. She could slice him up like zucchini, like a baguette. She has never dissected a snake before, but she has done cats and dogs and fetal pigs and worms. She can do this.

She is ready when he leaves the toilet. He stretches out on the radiator and she picks up the butcher knife. In one clanging blow, she detaches his tiny head and sends it rolling underneath the couch. There is less blood than she expected. For a minute or two, his body writhes and twists. It falls to the floor and she jumps on a chair and waits. She waits some more, then steps down and pokes the body with her knife. She gets the broom from the closet and sweeps the head into a dustpan. Among the hairballs and spare change, it looks like something she might get in a plastic bubble from a dime machine on the way out of the supermarket. She goes to the bathroom and plops the head in the toilet. It sinks to the bottom. She flushes.

After that it is easy. She takes out her old dissection kit— scalpel, forceps, needles, probes, and scissors. She makes a clean incision along the length of his body. Identifies his trachea, esophagus, heart, and lungs; liver, stomach, gallbladder, intestines, and kidneys, as if she were still in school. She tosses the guts in the garbage, peels back the skin. What’s left is a yellowish meat.

The buzzer rings. It is Fred.

“Come on up,” she says. The skin goes into the garbage, the dissection kit stored away, lipstick smeared on before he knocks.

“I’m sorry about the other night.” Fred scratches his cheek in the doorway. His eyeliner is smudged. “I ran into an old friend.”

“That was three months ago.”

Fred shrugs. He looks around the apartment. He sees the terrarium. “You let him out.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

Now it is her turn to shrug. She waits for him to kiss her.

“I got a new apartment,” Fred says.