“Stay here!” Daddy said. He stepped over the snake’s body and crossed to the fireplace, where he fiddled with the rack of fireplace tools. Jenny saw his right hand, the one that had slapped the rattle from her. He had only touched her for a second, but that was enough to give him bleeding blisters al over his palm.

He took the fireplace shovel, walked to the snake’s head, and stabbed down through its neck. The shovel bit into the hardwood floor. He scraped the snake’s head forward, separating it from its body. Dark blood leaked onto the dusty floorboards.

Jenny drew her knees to her chest and kept sobbing. She felt guilty. She’d made Daddy mad. And she felt bad for the snake. She shouldn’t have touched it.

Daddy scraped up the snake’s head onto the shovel and carried it outside. Then he came back for the body.

He looked at Jenny and sighed. He looked tired, and a little pale and sick. Jenny couldn’t stop crying.

“Gonna be okay, baby,” he said. He ran to the went to the kitchen and washed his hands, and poured some of the icky brown stuff for scrapes onto his open sores, the sores he’d gotten from touching Jenny. He sighed in relief. “You just stay where you’re at and don’t go nowhere. Stay!”

He went into the back of the house, where the bedrooms were, and returned wearing a long-sleeve orange Clemson shirt and cloth gardening gloves. He shook out his red cloth mask and slid it down over his head. It had only two tiny holes for eyes, and one tiny hole over his mouth. It was his Cuddle Mask.

He helped Jenny put on her own fuzzy pink cotton gloves.

Then he shook out her little yelow Cuddle Mask and slid it slowly down over her head, taking care not to tangle or pul her hair. He straightened the mouth hole so Jenny could breathe, and then the eyes holes so Jenny could see.

Now he could pick her up and set her in his lap. He wrapped his arms around her and she buried her face in his shirt, listening to his heartbeat, smeling his stale sweat. Her sobbing finaly began to subside.

“See, Jenny?” He rubbed the back of her head, through his glove, through her mask. “It’s okay now. That was a diamondback rattler, a big one. You got to stay away from snakes, especialy the rattling kind. Okay? They’re poisonous.”

“What’s poze-nuss?” Jenny asked into his chest.

“When something bites you and it makes you sick. Some things are poisonous if you just get too close to them. Like poison oak.”

Jenny lifted one smal, fuzzy-pink-gloved hand and looked at her fingers.

“I’m poze-nuss,” she said.

He took a long, deep breath. He kissed the mouth hole of his mask against the crown of her mask.