Page 7 of Serpentine Valentine

“I do not exist. There is nothing left.”

––Euripides from Hekabe

Lex

I woke up,and my first thought was this:

I wish I was dead.

The pain was so layered, I could not find its beginning or end. Like an ouroboros eating its own tail. There was the physical ache in every muscle from fighting, from the residue of drugs in my system, and the burn, oh God the burn, between my legs. It was so much that it seemed to echo even in my hair follicles, even in the roots of my teeth.

But no, it wasn’t that ferocious, bone-chewing pain that prompted that first thought.

It was the spiritual chasm that had been carved out of my chest.

As if Professor Morgan had stolen not just my virginity, but the very essence of my soul. Punching his hand through my rib cage to wrench it free from my form.

I felt horrifyingly empty. Everything inside me was only an echo. Even months later, when people expected me to “move on” and “be wholeagain,” I relied on those echoes to prompt me to act normally. To fit in, or at the very least, not be committed to the mental ward, where I might have honestly belonged.

It surprised people, later on, the few people I told, at least, that I didn’t cry then.

But humans cry.

It was an emotional response and a physical prompt.

I wasn’t human anymore, not after that, not in my own thoughts.

It didn’t help that he’d left me in the woods like the bloody carcass of discarded prey.

The woods, the woods.

I’d loved them so much before.

Raised in the mountainous forests of Virginia, I remembered the scent of white pines and hardwoods as the fragrance of my youth, the soft spring of damp moss beneath bare feet as I chased my two brothers through the shadowed canopy. The woods had always brought solace to me in the same way the pious sought sanctuary in a church. It was where I could let down my shields, shed the armor of my anger, and open my senses to the world around me. It was where I found the courage to seek out peace.

And now, it was the setting of a tragedy.

For a moment, I thought about staying there, cold, bloody, and trembling. Letting death and the forest overtake and enfold me into the earth the way Oscar Wilde once spoke of.

Maybe I would have, but for the snake.

An ominous hollow rattle sounded somewhere to my left, drawing my gaze even though I had to turn my aching head, cheek pressed to the damp moss. I sucked in a sharp breath that ached in my ribs when I saw the Timber rattlesnake.

It was late for them to be active and rare to see them in Massachusetts,where they were considered endangered. Yet there it lay, coiled and sunning itself on a rock in a shaft of sunlight piercing through the trees. It was a few feet long and dark, the zigzag design over its scales black, dark brown, and faintly green. I recognized it from growing up in Virginia, avoiding the faint rattle and roll when I played in the rocky forests they seemed to prefer.

Timber rattlesnakes were arguably the most venomous snakes in the United States.

And this one was three feet from me, its flat, triangular head hovering above the ground, tongue flickering.

Maybe I was still high from the drugs. Maybe my mind had broken along with everything else.

But something happened to me at that moment.

Locking eyes with a snake as if we could communicate and commune.

Here was a creature everyone feared, a being someone wouldn’t think twice about fucking over. I read once that more people were killed by bees than snakes, yet we feared the latter so much we’d written them as villainous and ominous symbols in books for centuries. They were an object of power, smaller than us, easily avoided, yet so fearsome just the sight of them made people recoil.

I didn’t recoil then.