A Handful of Snakes

It was evening and the summer of 1989. I was five, turning six, and sitting in my bedroom reading a Ghostbusters magazine in deep woods Maine. We had come the year before, I assume fleeing a landlord, or chasing the dream of 'work up north', or maybe as a way for my parents to find a new beginning. I was in my second school and third home in that year (which had become standard) and had made a few friends. At the moment things were still gold and green and evening shared a haze of dream, the exhaustion from spending the day outside with the cats and my young sister in the yard, or the treehouse, or the puddles, or tall grass surrounding the property. The adventures of Ghostbusters. The sun across the land, falling slow in fading sheets through my windows.

I had washed for the night, excitedly, after just beginning to take showers instead of baths, standing and reaching and becoming a strong man. I had brushed my small teeth and found pajamas. Laying on my bed and reading and the sound of the lawnmower outside of my open window. My father cutting the tall grass near the house. Further away and within the next few days he would set fire to the rest of it and my sister and I would watch from the porch or when the flames were smaller we'd come close and watch the border burn and eventually die, leaving only a scent I love to this day, and blackened stubble waiting for rain.

I read, and he mowed.

My mother, I assume, bathed my sister or cleaned up after me, most likely both.

The mower stopped and I was only vaguely aware.

My father mumbled outside and after a moment shuffled to my window.

"James," he said.

I rolled over and hopped to the window.

"Hi, Dad!"

"Check this out." He lifted his hands. They were cupped and he opened them and in them a mess of pink and red and brown and bits of white. Wet and small. 

"What is it?"

"Snakes," he said. 

I didn't see snakes. I saw nothing. Meat, at best. Slime.

"Where?"

He turned. "Right over there. Hit'em with the mower. Must have been babies in a nest or something. Pretty cool, huh?"

"Uhhuh," I said. The image of the snakes moments before and the blades shredding them in panic was all I could see and the image sits with me now, thirty years later. 

He turned and threw the wet mess into the grass and wiped his hands on his pants. "Back to it." 

I watched him start the mower and thought that the tall grass had more nests and that when we burned the grass in a few days the snakes would be able to escape into the woods or under the ground as the flames slowly moved outward and I hoped he would be finished with the grass near the house soon and I hoped there were no snakes in the rest of it.

I laid on my bed and didn't want to read anymore and soon the sun had gone down and my mother had said good night and I was in bed. Back to it.