KAREN

I’d wanted Perley to be strange to me. I’d wanted him to be animal. I got it and I paid for it. He screamed like I’d never heard his voice before, like I’d never soothed him to sleep as a baby. He screamed like a stranger, but the worst part was when he stopped. He went slack. His voice ended. The snake was part of his face, attached somehow. I couldn’t see his left eye. For once, Lily didn’t cry. She wrestled Perley into her arms snake and all. She held him so close that he was tiny again, his legs and arms folded against her, that snake swinging from him. Helen, naked and wild-haired, burst in and threw herself onto the bed next to Lily, got her arms in there around Perley, too. But me, I didn’t reach for Perley. Instead I clasped the snake.

I’d seen a copperhead bite before, a rattlesnake, never a black snake. But I’d read up on it at Community Health. People came in with all kinds of shit. I tried to stay prepared.

A black snake’s bite is like a slap, there and gone. You treat it like you’d treat any minor abrasion. Keep it clean and dry. Put your mind to other things while your body does its good work.

But the way a black snake eats is different from the way a black snake bites.

When a black snake eats, its mouth is a conveyor belt. Its back-curved teeth haul the snake forward to engulf its prey. Once attached, it’s difficult, as a practical matter, for that snake to let go.

Perley was prey too big to eat whole. He’d rolled onto the snake with the full weight of his sleeping body, trapping it. The snake struck his face, just below his left eye. It couldn’t retreat, so it dug in. The snake thrashed against him. Perley hung in Lily’s arms, Helen pressed him. His mouth dropped open, his eyes rolled up, gone. The odor that overtook the room belonged to all of us. “Kill it,” commanded Lily, crisp and dry-eyed, but there was no way in. I had hold of the snake just below its head. I used my other hand to find the hinge of its jaw. I wedged my fingers into the snake’s mouth.

My fingers worked against Perley’s flesh, and I felt the snake’s teeth punch holes in me, and I saw my blood mix with Perley’s blood but none of it was painful until later. My task was to make the snake loosen its teeth, but the panicked creature kept pulling back. It dragged Perley’s skin wide. When I finally pried the snake free and flung it at the wall, bits of its teeth remained, winking at us like pearls in an oyster. Beneath my hand, my boy’s face lay gaping and raw, his horrible open eye vacant above the wound.

“Call 911,” Helen said.

“I’m a nurse, I can handle this,” I said.