Snake in the Cellar

Houston 39 Beth Houston Snake in the Cellar Rumor had it there were snakes in the woods and I knew it was true; I had seen one smashed flat under the tire of my dad's tractor, and my best friends, Mike and Carol, explained in zealous detail the way snakes crept up from the pasture and slithered through the pipes, up the drains of the sink and the bathtub and—their favorite—up through the John, I believed them and was cursed with insomnia and bedwetting. Their father said that though snakes were dangerous they were our friends for eating mice, and to illuminate their own interpretation my friends locked me in the cellar, where a long black snake coiled on the bottom stair and waited to nail me with its poisonous fangs if I dared to move. The room loomed dark and musty as the deep woods where my parents forbade me to go. Upstairs my friends were giggling the way they did when their father wailed his hellfire-and-damnation sermon about the garden of Eden while I listened quiet as a mouse, and later after church when he called me to the cellar; and though I was only a child, the room echoed explicit implications, I remember the cold sweat of concrete on my bare feet, and desperate dust freckling the skinny arms of light reaching from the cracked pane of the only window, too high for me to grasp and covered with cobwebs alluding to their maker. I remember, too, the utter grayness of it all: walls, floor, stairs, dirty window, and the blackness of the snake, and that cold-to-the-bone terror of being closed-in underground. I remember the tiny peep of a mouse and the long snake's deliberate unwinding 40 the minnesota review then its slipping behind the step into the shadows and my tearing upstairs and pounding, and the utter panic of hearing only laughter. I know now, of course, that it was all a game, and that the snake was only a blacksnake and completely harmless. As harmless as my best friends locking the cellar door. ...