Snake Eyes

NOT EXACTLY TEXTBOOK DESCRIPTION

I woke with a start that morning, as was usual. One of my snakes had me by the nose again. Someday, I worried, they would try for my eyes, but hopefully that would be awhile in coming.

I sat up gingerly, feeling all the reptilian bodies behind me slither backward as their host altered altitude. Where their bodies ended, my head began.

My room wasn’t elaborate. It was a bed, four walls, a door, a mirror, and a closet with clothes. There were no windows. A rack on my side of the door held an assortment of hats, while a drawer in my bedside table had handkerchiefs. One of these I grabbed from its fellows and tied around my head before I did anything else. I glanced in my mirror. A red handkerchief. It matched the two drops of blood on my nose.

One of the snakes pulled its way out of its cloth restraint and struck at me. Even after all these years, I flinched, and the kerchief shook, allowing more to yank themselves free and indicate their ire by biting at my ears, my face, and my neck. I made no sound. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had, anyway. They couldn’t hear. As they snapped, I made my way to my bedside table and grabbed a scrunchie and ran my hand down the back of my head, along the coils of each scaly tendril, until I had most of them by the necks. Deftly, I used both my hands to get all of them in the scrunchie, and then double them all over to tie them by the necks at the nape of mine. It didn’t hurt them. I wasn’t entirely certain how they lived on my head, but they didn’t seem to breathe. Unfortunately, if one was hurt, it caused me pain, so the idea of cutting any of them off was like chopping a finger. A hand, maybe. Albeit one afflicted by Alien Hand Syndrome.

When they were successfully repressed, I put the handkerchief on again, and it hid most of the angry writhing they would attempt as I went about my day.

Like my bedroom, my living room wasn’t much. It was a bit run down, but it was home nonetheless, and I treated it as ungratefully as every person does in their living space. Newspapers sunbathed on my table, ignored, as flowers swooned in their vases with dehydration. Thank God the only pets I had were on my head, or I probably would have starved them too.

My fridge was as cluttered and unorganized as my table. Everything in it was pretty much shoved where it would fit, sometimes not in the orientation in which it was meant to be. At least, I was pretty certain my egg carton was supposed to lie flat and not on its side. I grabbed it and opened it. Make that empty egg carton. Shit.

I dug a tunnel into the back of the fridge, looking for the milk, but from its absence, I was pretty certain that if it was there, it had gone bad. I gave up and started jamming things in roughly their original places, and straightened. Someday I would have to clean the fridge.

Unfortunately, that day was not today. I needed food.

I walked back to my room and mirror checked my clothes. They didn’t look like they’d been worn all of the night before. At least, I hoped not.

…well, there weren’t any glaring stains.

Already feeling miserable, I shoved my wallet in my pocket and slid into a pair of flip flops before stepping impatiently out the door.

I wasn’t a people person. People understood that. They understood the moment they made eye contact.

My mother had homeschooled me when I was a kid, and by the time I had graduated homeschool with the cops coming and escorting us out of our house, I knew how to read and how to pay off credit cards. Mom was never exactly brainy. I never learned from her how old she had been when she got pregnant with me, nor under which circumstances, but I had never really cared. What kind of drug made a birth defect like a child with snakes hissing out of her head?

Of course, what drug makes such hallucinations that such a child was still beautiful to her mother? I didn’t get it.

I turned a corner and made it into the bookstore. The man behind the counter had been a friend of my mother’s, and I suppose that courtesy was an inherited one. After she had died he had offered me work and even a place to live, though I had turned down the latter. He was a nice man—I didn’t want to play vampire to his pockets. Even so, I was pretty certain that I was being overpaid by an old man who didn’t see any better place for his retirement money to go after his wife had died childless.

I gave him a quick wave and went about reorganizing shelves. As old as the place looked, he actually did get a lot of new books, and with them a lot of customers. And with those customers came the caboose of unorganized shelves.

Cue my job.

The sausage biscuit in my stomach belly flopped every time somebody looked at me when they shopped. Surely they didn’t all believe that I just had really smooth dreads or corn rows? I dunno. Maybe they were all just unobservant.

I straightened the shelf of new textbooks, and stopped to stare when I saw a woman on the front, and she had snakes on her head. The woman had sharp eyes like mine, but the snakes all seemed to be tangled together on her head, and there were tails every so often. The serpents that intertwined under my kerchief all had only half the body their species of reptile was usually gifted with, and generally were happy enough to keep themselves on the sides of my head.

“Excuse me…ma’am?”

I turned and looked at a petite blonde girl. As was expected, she drew back when she met my eyes.

“Umm…do you have any good Spanish textbooks? I need to learn.”

Generally, that was what most used a textbook for. I smiled, more in the way of a predator than with good nature, and walked her to a shelf farther back in the store.

“This one,” I said, plucking it and dropping it unceremoniously into her hands. Her frame bent, as if the weight was unexpected, before she stood up and looked at it. “It’s an older text, but it’s the best to use if you’re self taught. And it’s cheap.”

She looked grateful, and looked up to tell me so, but then made eye contact again and cringed away. Taking the hint, I turned and stalked back to my former activity.