The words she heard on the tape run through her mind over and over. Nothing but the peaceful dark. Lulu.

Ted leaves the path, and overhead the moon is obscured by reaching branches. Dee blazes a trunk every fifty feet. She keeps Ted’s flashlight in her sights, focusing on it so hard that it blurs into a starry glow. After a time she feels the woods change. Dee is no longer in the place where families walk. She is in the wild, where bears roam and hikers’ bones are never found.

The whisper of leaf to leaf begins to sound like a rattle shaken by a sinuous tail. Shut UP, she thinks, exhausted. There is no godDAMN rattlesnake. How long has she been a prisoner of fear, she wonders? Years and years. It is time to be free.

Dee’s foot slips on a muddy branch. The branch slides under her foot in a muscular movement. At the same moment her torch beam catches it, just ahead of her right toe on the forest floor. The diamond pattern is all too familiar. The sharp, light rattle, like dried rice shaken in a bag. The snake rears back slowly with the grace of a nightmare, poises to strike, eyes reflecting green. It is about four feet long, young. Dee’s torchlight dances crazily over the cairn of rock behind, which most likely serves as its home.

Fear spreads through her veins like ink. She screams but it comes out as a slight whistle. The snake sways. Perhaps it is sluggish having just awakened, maybe it is blinded by the flashlight, but it gives Dee the moment she needs.

Keeping the beam steady, she steps forward and swings. She knows that if she misses, she is dead.

The claw-hammer hits the snake’s blunt, swaying head with a crack. At her second blow the snake drops limp to the forest floor. Dee leans over it, panting. “Take that,” she whispers.

She pokes the long body with a finger. It is cool to the touch, limp and powerless, now. She picks up the dead snake. She wants to remember this forever. “I’m going to make a belt out of you,” she says. Joy rolls through her. She feels transformed.

As she lifts the dead snake, meaning to put it in her pocket, the head twitches and turns. Dee sees it happen in slow motion—the snake’s head lunging, burying its fangs in her forearm. Dee feels her mouth widen to a silent scream. She shakes her arm, trying to detach it. The long limp body shakes too, lashing in mimicry of life. Some things survive death. The pain of the bite is bad. But it is nothing to the horror of having the thing attached to her, like a monstrous part of herself.