The Good Snake by Angela O'Neal
It resembled a strip of tar paper, basking on the patio in the white
light of my fear. No coincidence it came on the longest day of the year.
I know all about them, heard the cornpone advice, how they take the bad things
in the garden so best to compromise. Bargain with danger, a kind of kickback
from nature. But there in all the wildness deep down it makes me shudder,
this hitchhiker on my daily commute, this skinny-dipper streaking bareback across my morning.
I’ve contended with wilderness before on this patch of city ground at the bottom of a hill: English ivy wrapping its fingers in a chokehold around the Rose of Sharon, the privet’s cancerous reign. Gullies running serpentine beneath the foundation. Or the time a baby snake, circling like a drain, settled in my boot’s dank basement, an electric sock balled up in the toe.
I’ve read they swallow prey whole: victims like hikers betrayed by a narrow mountain crevasse, hearts shifting to make room for the kill, conformed to a bottleneck of abyss.
And yet, my heart. This too an omen, its own dark forest coiled to strike.
How the force that tethers us, keeps us from spinning, sends also the floodwaters.
This treaty with gravity, the weight of it holding, a wedding vow for better or worse.
Angie Crea O’Neal’s work has appeared in Sycamore Review, The Christian Century, The Windhover, Cumberland River Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia, where she lives with her daughters.