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Mamba
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
62 Mamba I am wearing my red string T-shirt and my jeans. I look at where the band at the end of the sleeve circles my biceps. The shadows of the bamboo make lines across my forearm like Christine’s lines. I bend my elbow and clench my fist and watch the muscle bulge. My muscle moves sideways like a hermit crab when I twist my wrist and my T-shirt is red like the canna lilies. All the talk stops in my head. I look up into two black eyes, black all the way back inside and like a tunnel leading from me into them and I am sucking out of me down that tunnel out of me. I’ve gone black inside and far away. I don’t end anywhere. Black like in between the stars and green between and now inside my chest there are these words: “Don’t move.” I remember my feet. They’re stuck to the ground. The words are in my chest. I’m in the tunnel and then black goes blacker and washes away in grey. I see flat grey metal and brown and a brown hand and hanging in the air a green and yellow and brown, a snake. Jeremiah with his machete killed the snake. I know the head is on the ground. I look and it is right near my sandal. I hold tight. If the eyes are black I’m O.K. They’re grey. Where did the black go? I want to throw up. Jeremiah takes my hand. My hand is brown too. “Mamba,” he says. “Green mamba is a deadly snake. It is good you did not move.” He straightens up, hooks the body of the snake off the bamboo , carries it away on the blade of his machete, careful not to touch. The head is still lying at my feet. I could be dead now. 63 C y c l e 1 ...