Something I've been working on a while

Snakes In The Huts In My Back Yard
Ashlyn Ervin

The day my father died I was sitting cross-legged on the tile of my kitchen floor watching my cat lick peanut butter off my shoes—wondering how the sticky mess got from my sandwich to the floor (and my shoe) yet, at the same time, really not caring. My father was in the back yard, there must have been something out there because the dogs were barking way too much for there not to be and Dad was sick of those fox’s getting after his chickens. But, I was used to that. Whenever there is ruckus outside, Sniff crawls through the ripped screen in my front door and hides between the big wooden door and the thin wooden and ripped screen door. For a cat, she acts awfully chicken, but I would never let her think that; and she really does just sit there between two doors waiting for me to hear the rustling of one door smacking the other until I come in from whatever I’m doing, namely eating a peanut butter sandwich (since Dad had polished off the jelly at breakfast the day before, not because I was ironic and only liked peanut butter), and let her in. I guess I really should have known something was up, but, again, it was something I was used to.

Snakes in the Everglades aren’t like gators in the sewer systems of New York, they’re not debatable—it’s been proven. It wasn’t, however, the kind of story (actually interesting) that my father would find interesting. So, when the lady that never blinks came on WDAM and said, “Hey, ya’ll those snakes aren’t sitting tight in Florida anymore,” and I said, “Dad, I think they’ll come here,” and he said, “Hush, girl, you always say the stupidest snakes,” and I said, “Louisiana feels a lot like Florida sometimes, and the coast feel awful close to the New Orleans, and bet those snakes are long enough to stretch across Mississippi—they’ll be here,” I knew that last part was a bit imaginative, but I also knew that I could pull a scientific formula that proved they were building shacks in our back yard and Dad would still rock holes into the hard wood floor, sit in his big chair, and tell me to hush—so I did.

I guess I heard something, I must have gotten startled and dropped my sandwich and stomped it—that’s what I keep telling Ma, though, I don’t remember what happened. I still dream about what I think I saw though, a snake, with the perfect shape of a person sitting in his middle (because snakes cannot have stomachs, they just can’t, they’re one long face and neck.) When I dream about it, I can hear Dad muffled through that skin—tight, and I wake up thinking, “How can you breath in there? Isn’t it tight? Always worried about those stupid chickens, what now, huh?” And, yeah, that last part is mean—but I just never knew why we couldn’t just buy eggs at the store.

Well, when WDAM showed up to my house, asking to interview my mom about what happened and she just couldn’t bear to get out of bed, I couldn’t bear to tell them that she wasn’t just crying over snakes. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Mom and I, we’ve never liked snakes—and not just the long necked kinds, the kinds that are sometimes people, and tend to wrap around married men. But, I didn’t tell them that for two weeks she’d been in bed, I just told them that I was too busy eating peanut butter off my shoe (and sharing one side with my cat) to notice. They really just wanted to see the back yard, but the cops told me and me that no matter what we couldn’t let anybody out there.

Sniff sat in my lap that whole day, and she’s the only one I told about the night before my dad died, when I heard him backing out of the drive way, when I answered his phone because I was in the kitchen getting a coke from the very back of the fridge so it might have some ice slivers in it and his phone was going crazy on the counter so I picked it up and heard a lady say, “Hurry up!” and quiet real quick when I asked who she was. I didn’t tell Mom that Dad had arranged to have Boo-Boo pick up eggs for him in the morning because he had to go make groceries and try to sell a pig somewhere far-off. I mean, of course me and Mom wouldn’t notice if a pig went missing, we didn’t count them or anything crazy, and neither did Boo-Boo. And Mom, being in bed, and Dad, being on the couch, had no knowledge of what the other was doing, or planning. And that snake, that snake just slithered away as soon as it caught me looking at it—like snakes always do, and I didn’t even think that weird, or ironic. Like everything else that day, I was just pretty used to it.