Cotton Mouth

I

A cottonmouth swallows me when I am seven. It waits for me just outside my front door, stretched out along the walkway. When I step into the concrete space, it opens its mouth wide. Hemmed in by coquina walls and boxwood bushes, the only place to go is within the belly of the snake. The last thing I see is white, the color of ice and bone–but supple and fleshy between fangs, until I am gone. I am lodged in the reticulated stomach next to a mouse, who trembles and climbs into my lap.

But this isn’t what happens.

I remember jumping over the white maw. With a running leap and a perfect aerial split, my body glides over loops of coiled muscle. I run down the street and do not look back, not even when my house is a dot on the horizon. Instead, the cottonmouth swallows me again in my dreams. Over and over. 

II

I am abducted when I am eight. I am home alone and a man calls me. Do not hang up. Do not hang up. I have your momma. You give me your address right now. Tell me your bra size. Your momma is tied up. I will hurt her. Do not hang up. 

And I tell him and I don’t hang up and he comes and gets me. He bangs on the front door until splinters fall off the back and I let him in. His mouth is like the maw of the snake and I am swallowed into him. The mouse trembles in my lap again.

But this isn’t what happens. What really happens is this:

I hang up. I hang up. I hang up. I know that I hang up after minutes of frozen fear–my hand curled into the receiver, my fingernails cut into the plastic. I don’t have a bra size, not yet. My mom is at work and this son of a bitch knows I am at home. One of many kids alone. He pawed through the white pages or the school directory until he found me. His voice grinds into my ears like gravel stuck in a fan. In my nightmares he wears the face of a snake and mouse in my lap becomes a child I cannot save.

III

I am eaten again. This time as an adult. In days and work and children. I am swallowed whole. I do not know if the mouse is nearby. I am too tired to check.

IV

There is a vole trapped under the rug at work. I chase it from one corner of the bookshelf and then back again. I skin my knees on the carpet, my skirt riding up my thighs. I capture it in my hands, warm and soft. He does not tremble, but bites into my flesh again and again. I do not let him go as his teeth puncture the soft pad of my palm. If I lose him in the building, he will be killed. 

This is true.

Another morning, I find a snake at the base of the steps, next to my chair. He is cold and docile and I scoop him up. He curls into a spiral in my palm. I recognize this one. It is the same kind my children used to play with outside our front porch. If I lose him in the building, he will be killed.

This is also true. I take both the vole and the snake into the woods and let them go.

V

Inside the warm stomach of my longer days, my dreams have not changed, though sometimes the snake and the mouse resemble each other. I hold them all in my lap: the lost child, the trembling snake, the biting mouse. They regard each other in spinning fantasies and solid regret. Who have I saved? The danger and silence of the world are still as soft as white cotton–as inviting as an open mouth, poised to strike.

I am sure this is true.