I was five years old when I first vomited up the snake.
A second grader cornered me on the playground and shoved me off the swing because he wanted a turn. My palms skinned, knees dirty, I climbed to my feet, tears in my eyes and fists clenched in sorrow and rage. And there he sat, on my swing. Laughing.
That’s when I felt it. A tightness in my throat, a lump that threatened to choke me, a writhing in my belly. I heaved, and instead of lunch coming up, a small little snake came out. I was dumbstruck, terrified. Fear quickly replaced my anger. How had a snake gotten in my stomach? Were there others?
The bully stared, equally shocked, and while I still carried a little resentment for him, I had more important concerns. The snake eyed the kid on the swing, gave a hiss, and then slithered back to me. It had wrapped itself around my ankle before I regained enough composure to move. I tried shaking it off and running away, but the snake held me too tightly, slowly working its way up my leg. I clawed at it but no luck. It kept climbing me, higher and higher on my small body.
I opened my mouth to scream, but when I did, it darted for my face and slid down my throat, just as forcefully as it had come up.
The teacher didn’t believe us. She just told us that I must have seen a worm and eaten it, and that I shouldn’t eat worms.
That was the first time, but not the last.
In seventh grade, my friend Carter and I were walking home from school. It had just rained and there were mud puddles everywhere. He thought it would be hilarious to splash me, and I ended up soaked and caked in mud. I was a little annoyed, but tried to take it in stride. I splashed him back, and he lost his mind, started yelling at me.
“What the hell?” he shouted. “Do you know how much this shirt costs? Why would you do that, dick?”
“You splashed me first!” I said, utterly indignant.
“Yeah, but your shirt is from K-Mart. No one cares if it gets messed up.”
He’d never brought up the fact that my family was poor before, but saying it then, that my clothes didn’t matter, that I didn’t matter because I was poor, set me off. As he stormed away from me, muttering every curse word a seventh grader knows, I stood there wet and shivering from the cold and from my growing anger. My cheeks burned hot with hatred, and I could feel it rising, large and venomous.
I collapsed to my knees as the snake came up again. I had almost forgotten it had ever happened at all, and when I was reminded of it I always assumed I had mis-remembered or made the whole thing up. But there it was. My snake.
It was larger than when I was five, and more aggressive. It went straight for Carter, and I was too surprised to say anything until it was too late. Striking impossibly fast, it bit him in the ankle. I gasped in horror as he cried out in pain, and the snake slithered back to me.
I tried to get away from it, just as I had when I was five. I ran to my friend to take back what just happened, to suck the poison out or something. As I knelt down, however, the snake came for me. Carter tried to warn me, his anger replaced by the shock of getting bit. He must have thought it had been hiding in the mud puddle. It didn’t help. The snake came for me, wrapped itself around my throat and forced itself into my mouth again.
I didn’t know what to do, so I tried to ignore it, to get the poison out of him, but he shoved me back down.
“Stay away from me, freak!” he shouted as he limped away.
I sat there alone and crying, drenched in mud and shame. We never spoke again.
In high school, it was a struggle to keep the snake down. I have always been short and unathletic. I struck out twice in tee ball. I was bookish. I was into theater and sci-fi. Needless to say, I got picked on a lot. My throat was in constant pain for years forcing the thing down. But I could always feel it, down in my guts. Growing larger day by day.
While walking home from school one day, a guy from my chemistry class drove by. He’d been giving me grief for ages. Since freshman year, my throat had begun to reflexively clench when I saw him in hallways or at football games. On this day, he swung his door open as he passed, clipping me and knocking me to the pavement. I could feel the bruises starting before I even hit the ground, but more than that, I felt a swelling in my throat, a pain so intense I nearly blacked out, and from my mouth slithered an disturbingly large snake. At least ten feet long and six inches thick. There was no way. It was physically impossible. How much had it grown since last I slipped and let it out? How could something so great and terrible possibly fit inside me?
I couldn’t breathe, and my eyes were too filled with tears to see clearly, but I knew what was happening. The snake raced down the road after the car. I lost sight of it, but soon after heard a loud bang, like a gunshot or…
The scream of tires, the crunch of metal, and the sound of glass shattering filled the air. And then the snake returned, a little smaller than before, but still a terrifying creature. I clenched my jaws shut, but the thing wrapped itself around my head, covering my nose so I couldn’t breathe without opening my mouth. When I could hold out no more, I gasped for air, and in it went. Once more, I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. I could only cry in silent agony as the snake forced its way back in, a pain as though my jaw were breaking as it forced its way in, back to coil up in my belly to sleep, to grow, to prepare to strike again.
The news would later report that the car had blown a tire, causing the driver to lose control of the vehicle and impact into a tree, ejecting the driver. He would spend the next four weeks in the hospital recovering. He would go through physical therapy. He might never play sports again. His promising career crushed before it started. What a tragedy.
But I knew what really happened. The snake–my snake–had escaped, had tracked him down, had bitten his tire as he raced away.
Some part of my felt guilty for what happened. When I would see him limp down the hallways. When I heard his voice fade away when the rest of the team would talk about state championships. But then I would see the way he stared at me, read the things he wrote in my yearbook, and in my stomach, I could feel the snake sleeping soundly, contentedly.
I’ve never had many friends. I was too afraid they would find out about the snake and call me a freak like Carter had. But not Julian. Julian was into the same things I was. He was cool, at least as far as my definition of cool went. He really listened when we’d talk. He understood me. I’d never been as close to another human being as I was with Julian.
One night, we were drinking some bourbon we’d snuck out of his dad’s liquor cabinet and I told him about the snake. At first, he thought I was speaking metaphorically. No, I told him. It was a literal snake. He laughed, then got serious. He probably thought I was crazy, but he never said it, never implied it, and that meant the world to me. I loved that guy.
Years later in college, we went out to a bar after catching a friend’s improv show, and some homophobic dick came to our table, started calling Julian all sorts of terrible names. I told him to back off, but he didn’t. Finally the bartender got involved and made the guy leave. We nursed our drinks, but the verbal assault put a dampener on the evening and sooner rather than later, we called it a night.
When we finally left, the guy was waiting for us in the parking lot. He came at us hard, swearing and swinging. I’ve already said I’m small and this guy had at least a head on me. He could take me in a fair fight, an unfair fight, any sort of way he wanted. Didn’t matter. I tried to step in anyway, to stop him from attacking Julian, but he shoved me aside as easily as anything. I lay powerless, impotent on the ground as he shoved Julian down and began to kick him mercilessly. I shook, and this time when I felt my throat begin to swell, I took a deep breath and let it happen.
The thing about the snake is it wants to be out. It wants to be anywhere but inside of me, except when it needs to rest and recover.
The thing slid effortlessly from my mouth. The size of an anaconda, bigger than me easily, and somehow that thing fit inside my tiny little body, coiled up in my guts, always waiting to seize a moment and escape.
Facing no resistance, it didn’t hurt me at all coming up. It flew from me and wrapped around the drunk bastard and began to squeeze the life out of him. He never even saw it coming. Who would? Who would expect an anaconda to fly out of a guy’s mouth and crush you? No one. Definitely not that drunk guy. I heard his bones break but he didn’t scream. Oh he tried. I watched his face contort in agony, but the snake was so tight around him, he didn’t have the air to make a peep. And I watched it happen. I didn’t try to wrestle it back in. I just watched.
Julian watched too. He watched in horror. In awe. A thousand emotions flashed across his face and I looked for the one that let me know if we’d still be close when this was all over. Something to let me know if he’d be my friend at all.
The snake unhinged its jaw and began to swallow the drunk. My stomach turned in horror and righteous anger, and when it was over, it slithered back to me, wound its way up my legs and arms, then disappeared back into my mouth as easily as it came. It didn’t hurt a bit. Instead, it coiled comfortably in my stomach, like a hot meal on a cold day. I felt better. Justified. Whole.
Then I saw Julian. His face a mix of fear, confusion, and revulsion. “You really have a snake in you,” was all he could stammer out.
I tried to take his shoulder, to explain, but he just turned and walked away.
My heart broke, and the snake stirred in its slumber.
For three days, he didn’t return my texts and finally I stopped trying. Then, a week later, he called me.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “we’re still good. You never lied. You told me a long time ago about the snake. I didn’t believe you, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t tell me. And you saved me. No one ever stood up for me like that, not even family. And I never thanked you for that. Thank you for that.”
We agreed to meet for drinks, to talk about what happened. We went to a place called Mickey Finn’s, and we let the questions flood out. What happened? How long had I been dealing with it? Did the cops suspect anything? How guilty should we feel, really, given what that guy wanted to do?
Julian convinced me we shouldn’t feel guilty at all. I felt a little funny about it. It was easy for him to say not to feel bad. It wasn’t his snake. But he was right about a couple things at least. The guy was a bastard. The guy was probably going to kill Julian. He had it coming. Didn’t he?
As we made our way back out to the car, a couple of assholes stepped up and gave Julian and me a shove and an insult.
“You don’t wanna do this tonight,” Julian said, and I got the distinct impression he’d had run-ins with these guys before.
“Or what?” one said. “Your boyfriend gonna kick our asses?”
“I’m not his boyfriend,” I said, “but you don’t wanna do it. I know I don’t.”
They laughed to each other, and mid-laugh, one swung hard, punching Julian in the face, sending him sprawling. The other, taking me by surprise, got me in a choke hold. With my friend out of the fight, the first came and started dropping blow after blow into my abdomen. I could feel the snake stirring deep within me, but I didn’t know if I would be able to let it out even if I wanted to. The second man’s arm constricted around my throat as surely as the snake had the other man a week ago. I couldn’t get air out, let alone a snake. Would it be able to come up? Would I want it to, knowing what it was capable of?
My vision started to blur around the edges, the world slowly turned black, and I could see the first had pulled away and begun to give Julian another barrage of punches.
Before losing consciousness, I felt my mouth drop open and the lurch of the snake biting at the arm around my neck. Then I collapsed to the ground, pulled down by loss of oxygen and my attacker’s own fall.
I woke and found Julian beaten and bloody, but raining kicks down on one of the attackers. My snake lay curled on me, waiting for me. It lazily slunk toward me and disappeared down my throat. I didn’t want the thing inside of me, but given that it had saved me twice in two weeks, I didn’t fight it much. I only resisted a little, so it only hurt a little.
“It didn’t swallow them,” I said, looking over at the other. “What happened?”
Julian stopped kicking. “It bit them.”
He showed me the puncture wounds as I slowly got to my feet. There was a mottling of the skin where necrosis had begun to set in. They may have been comatose. They may have been dead. I didn’t want to check, but the way the snake snuggled up in my belly told me anyway. They had felt the sting of my anger. Their veins burned with the heat of my hatred. They wouldn’t be bothering anyone else again.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, my stomach in knots.
A few blocks later, Julian broke the silence.
“Maybe the snake isn’t a curse,” he said.
“It’s evil,” I said.
“Maybe. Maybe it’s just a tool,” he said. “A tool’s not good or evil. It’s all in how you use it.”
“And how should I use it?” I said, feeling disgusted with what he said, but more disgusted by how comfortable I was with the idea.
“Think of all the assholes. The bigots out there curb-stomping people just because they look different. Pray different. Love different.”
The last words hung extra hard in the air, pointed, accusatory.
I had a lot to think about.
***
The news reported two men killed by snake bite, though tox screens couldn’t say what kind. Neither could the snake experts. No snakes missing from the zoo. No one knew where the snake had come from or where it had gone. No one but me and Julian.
Julian and I went out again, this time to a dive bar in a part of town that hid hostility behind words like “conservative” and traditional family values.” We hung out in the parking lot, pretending to flirt until someone came to give us grief about it. When he spit the first homophobic slur at us, I leaned in, opened my mouth, and before even I knew what happened, the snake had already struck, biting him on the neck before disappearing back down my throat, and into my waiting belly. It was over in an instant.
I didn’t fight it anymore. The snake wants to be out. It wants to grow and feed and strike. And it became so easy to let it out. I almost wondered why I held it back in the first place. It was so easy to point it at others, at the monsters, the assholes, the people who wronged me. Too easy.
***
A few months later, the snake still dominated the news. It had killed nine people. Still no one knew where it had come from. Experts couldn’t agree on what kind it was. Julian and I went out for drinks a lot.
One night, after a long search for some asshole deserving of my special friend, we gave up and made our way back to Julian’s. We’d both had a bit to drink and stumbled to the couch. Julian looked at me deeply and said, “I never thanked you.”
“You did,” I said.
“Not properly,” he said. “And not just for saving me, not just for what we’ve been doing, but for everything.”
“Yeah, man. No problem.”
“Really,” he said. “I appreciate it. I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”
Then he leaned in to kiss me. Maybe it was the booze. Maybe it was residual buzz from getting away with something, from sharing a secret that big. Maybe it was something deeper. Whatever it was, for a while I let him.
And then, I stopped him. Something, some old, long forgotten circuit from my conservative upbringing kicked in, and I pushed him off. “I’m not gay,” I said.
“Or course you’re not,” he said with a wink and he moved back toward me.
“Seriously,” I said as I gave him a second rebuff. “I’m not gay.”
He gave me a look like I’d told him the moon didn’t really exist. “Okay, so you’re bi. Or pan. But you can’t pretend you’re not in love with me.”
“I’m not,” I said, my voice rising. “I’m straight, Julian!”
He gave me an incredulous look, a wounded look. And I hated him. I hated him for calling me gay. I hated him for that hurt expression, like it was my fault we would never be together. For touching some raw nerve I didn’t know I had.
“We’re not getting together,” I shouted, fury seizing every muscle in my body. “It’s never happening!”
Before I could stop it, before I could clench my throat, the snake was out and had wrapped itself around him. I tried to pry it off, tried to get it to come back inside, but it turned at me, hissed at me like it knew a secret that it wasn’t ready to tell yet, then turned back to Julian, his eyes filling with tears, his skin turning purple. I beat the snake, put my mouth to it to try to swallow it back down, but I had lost control of it. I had forgotten how.
And all the while I hated him. I hated him for pushing the issue. I hated him for making it so easy to let the snake out. I hated him for kissing me. I hated him for being right about me, even if I wasn’t ready to admit it yet. But I couldn’t stop it. I sat there, weak and impotent, and I watched it happen. And the hate grew, and the snake grew until it swallowed him whole.
It turned back to me, tears streaming down my face, my voice too hoarse to scream, my fists white, my palms bloody from how hard my fingernails had pressed into them. It tried to make its way back into my mouth, but I wouldn’t let it. I wanted nothing to do with it anymore. The snake pressed harder, tried to force its way in, but I was done. I had convinced myself keeping it locked up inside me was the problem, letting it have a place to hide.
I hated it. I hated Julian. I hated those assholes who taught me to let it out so easily. I hated Carter and the guy from chemistry. I hated the kid from second grade. As far as I knew, there was no snake before him. It was all his fault. I hated everyone, and I didn’t want it in me anymore.
So it left me.
But the snake attacks continued. And I knew what it was doing. Lurking in the darkness, slipping through shadows, feeding on my anger, killing people who made me mad.
These days, I read the news a lot. I look for pundits and politicians and columnists and crimes reports. I look for people to hate. And it’s so easy to find people to hate these days. I read the news and surf the internet looking for things for my snake to eat. Anything to keep it busy. Anything to keep it from tracking down the one person I really, truly despise.
Sometimes, I worry I don’t keep it busy enough, because sometimes I lay in bed at night, and I am certain I hear hissing outside my window.