SNAKESKIN, BABY!
By Ellen
In 1908, a cowboy took a lead slug to the heart, and was reincarnated as a regular girl.
Everything was wrong, of course. Wrong everywhere—wrong century, wrong
coast—Appalachian mountains rather than Rockies, copperheads rather than rattlesnakes,
tropical hurricanes rather than wildfires. With a limbic system still attuned to holding up trains
and losing gunfights, all sharp edges and sharper teeth, the cowboy-turned-girl brought the spirit of drag-out saloon brawls to returning emails, left jagged little slivers of poker-table taunts in water-cooler conversations, took to spreadsheets and data entry with gritted teeth and bronco-busting fervor. She left every day disappointed, of course.
Late one night, stagnant summer air thick with the stench of sickly-grape kudzu and thrumming with frog-and-cicada symphonies, the cowboy-girl had a vision, just as July dropped off into August, just on the edge of a dream. In it, she bled out red into the flaxen Mojave, and stared up at merciless blue. In it, numbness rolled in like the tide, from her fingertips up through her arms.In it, her hearing went out with the tide, somehow plunged deep underwater. In it, her vision
narrowed and narrowed into a distant point of saltwater-sky.
Then nothing—and she stumbled back into the waking world, into always-hungry kudzu and
seventeen-year cicadas, with a metallic taste in the back of her throat.
She sat up, went outside, and let mosquitoes drink her blood until the sun came up. She found herself furious at her muscle and bone, her blood and aortic arteries for their betrayal. When the sun rose in soft pinks and oranges, she sloughed off today, yesterday, yesteryear, and followedthe sun West in a six-cylinder Bronco.
***
Through the winding mountain roads and into Tennessee, the dying summer suddenly came
alight with fluorescent promise. It was so easy to leave, to run and keep running, so easy to
become something from nothing—to roll the windows down and let the world rush up and
through.
She filled up her tank once in Knoxville and gas-station beef jerky took her all the way into the sludge summer of Mississippi. The bared-teeth animal of her, half-domesticated and half-wild, slowly but surely came alive with the setting sun. She almost hit a handful of deer and made eye contact with another dozen, waiting on the edge of the highway, silhouetted in blue light, eyes flashing in the halogen-bulb headlights.
***
In Louisiana, she dipped south through the swamplands, and followed the bayou back up north. She stopped at a roadside stand to buy peaches and walked down to the marsh’s edge. Sitting down, she found a little boy standing just across the way, staring back at her, wide-eyed and still.
She hadn’t spoken in a few days. “Hello,” she rasped.
The boy said nothing. He shuffled closer. She cleared her throat a few times, bit into a yellow
peach, tried again. “What’s your name?”
The boy came closer. His hands were clasped in front of him. She tried a third time. “What do
you have there?”
All of a sudden, a smile split open his face and he opened his hands, a frog leaping out at her.
The peach dropped from her hands and into the water, sank to the bottom of the bog. Turning back to the boy, she found him already running off, laughing like windchimes in the dusk.
She laughed until she cried, ate a second peach, and let the juice run from her fingertips down onto her arms.
***
The air turned dry in Texas, and the Bronco sputtered to a stop outside Lubbock. The
girl-cowboy cleared out too-much cash at a mechanic, and trudged to a sleepy diner.
Drinking lukewarm coffee and dreaming of summer peaches, she watched a couple bicker in a corner booth, tried to read their lips and picture the home they lived in, shifting between farmhouse and motel room as their fight lost and gained momentum. Argument reaching a
barely-audible crescendo, and the woman swept past the girl as she stormed out of the joint. The man threw a few dollar bills on the table and stormed out after her. She heard yelling. A car started, and roared into the dust.
Suddenly, an old man at the bar, skin sun-spotted and wrinkled with age, beard curling and white, started to laugh. A violent, hacking kind of laugh bubbled out from his throat and cracked his lips open in a desperate escape from his body. He turned and looked the girl straight in the eye, hysterics still crawling unbidden from his chest. She ran out of the restaurant without paying her bill.
That night, she waited for sleep for hours, counted her ribs one by one, ate the scraps out of the bottom of a bag of jerky, chewed half-a-pack of gum with the dry wind blowing through, before finally falling into a fitful darkness. She dreamed of climbing trees back home and cold, rushing creeks; of being swallowed by floodwaters and eaten whole by kudzu vines.
In New Mexico, the landscape dropped off into hypnagogic emptiness until the gas light came on. The Sierra Madre monsoon thundered through the vast, empty expanse. Rain fell in sheets down the Bronco’s windshield, blurring the road into distant memory.
Salvation came in the form of a middle-of-nowhere roadside gas station. A woman smiled at her, sharp-toothed and conspiratorial, through the window as she brought her car to a stop outside. Coming inside to pay for the pump, she felt a sudden urge to explain herself.
She laid down her last twenty-dollar bill, and hoped the desperation wasn’t obvious in her voice. “I’m from out East.”
“What are you doing out here all alone? Seeing someone?” The woman barely looked up at her, voice soft and nearly drowned out by the rain.
“Nobody at all.” She hesitated a moment. “I dreamt—”
The woman laughed, pale eyes finally meeting the girl’s. A jolt of déjà vu ran down her spine.
“You dreamt you were a cowboy, huh?” She laughed to herself. “You bleed out in the desert a
hundred years ago, again?”
She smiled again, and the girl stared back, remembered the old man in the diner, the little boy in the swamp, the deer waiting just on the fringes of the highway. “Do I know you?”
The woman waved her off. “Just a feeling, sweetheart.”
The once-cowboy got back in her car, drove West at ninety-miles-an-hour in a cold sweat, until the desert dried back up and the sun crested golden over an orange horizon.
***
A cowboy-shaped-like-a-girl walked into the desert, all scar tissue and frayed nerves. She knelt into the sand, cotton-mouthed and lightheaded, tasting metal in the back of her throat.
She looked into the shifting yellow mirage and threw it up on side of the road.
Two weeks later, a local rancher found a dry, withered snakeskin by the highway next to a
dust-battered truck, with no one in sight. A herpetologist later identified it as a copperhead.
Ellen is a senior majoring in Physics and English. She can often be found squinting at CD spines in record shops, trying to get through her ever expanding film watchlist, and playing fetch with her pet cat.