By Joe Manus
I received a phone call in the stovetop summer, following my sister Tracie’s diabetic death. At the time, I lived in an Athens apartment complex, in cube number 217, with a New Yorker with New York cats. I was redundantly confined to its walls from 4:30 pm until 7 am. Ordered by a judge who wished me to change. Enforced by a pistoled probation officer who wished I would not.
The call was from her friend George. He was old and gentle. He looked a little like Santa, but instead of Christmas cotton, his beard was matted and yellowed from cigarettes and sweet tea. His jolly had vacated, leaving him like a hitchhiker home. He worked alone, in the night, in the water treatment plant. He called to let me know I had inherited Tracie’s Boa Constrictor and he was ready to let it go. He brought it to me the following week. He had it in a pillowcase, displaced among other alien articles, on the back bench seat of his LTD. He once again became Kringle when he handed me the bag of serpent.
George had always wanted to lay with Tracie. He never did or she never would. He chased her with cached kindness, while she, in literal blindness, chased criminal country boys with bad haircuts and blown-up muscles. He cried old, stale tears when he confessed his postmortem love for her. He had wanted to cry every time she confided in him her broken hearts, from broken promises, from broken men. He had wanted to cry while he watched her combat death back like a cat cornered. That day, in that parking lot, he soaked my shirt shoulder with every tear he was too scared to expose to her, when she was living. He handed me the last living trace he had of hers; A snake in a bag.
He drove away. I went inside and shut the door.
I never heard from George again. I built the snake a home inside a gutted 1950s television cabinet. I hung my dead sister’s silver emergency alert bracelet on a nail above it. She had worn it on her wrist every day she lived. Its raised emblem of two snakes climbing a winged pole to nowhere. I did not inherit a name for the snake, so my future wife named him Mowgli. In her innocent homage to Kipling, she embraced how George had become the Bagheera that saved my sister’s orphan and how I would become the wolf that raised him.
The snake shed its skin that night. Turning itself inside out, in a concertina movement by moonlight. I woke up wishing I had as well.
About the Author:
Joe Manus is a lifelong resident of the South. He was educated in the public schools of rural Georgia, receiving his high school diploma in 1992. Joe is an award-winning furniture designer and builder. He believes in living the best and worst of the human experience and writing about it.