"Taking Up Serpents Again" by Karen Arnold

He told her the answer to her questions would be found in faith and prayer. In the coffee shop next to the Greyhound bus station, he had recognised all of her hunger. At the end of the afternoon, she followed him home, mesmerised by this softly-spoken, dark-eyed man.

The memory of the conversation stings like a horsefly as she sits on the hard wooden chair. 

The congregation settles in, humming with need and expectation like pylons in the storm-ready air. The heat is heavy, oppressive as a hand on the back of her head.  Fans whine in protest at the effort of stirring the damp air around. One of the ladies of the church catches her looking, smiles benignly. She returns the smile like a tennis ball, watches sweat mingle with the powder caked onto the woman’s face, a single mercury bright bead rolling down her cheek before becoming lost in the folds of fat around her neck.

Now he stands at the front of the church, olive green boxes on the table beside him, a drive-by memory of holes punched into the sides. He begins to speak, quietly at first, his voice building as relentlessly as the thunderheads outside the white board building. A chorus of amens floats up from the congregation, words picked up and tossed around like dry leaves in the wind. She looks at the family groups, dressed in their Sunday best, little girls in threadbare cotton dresses, faint lines showing where the dresses had been let down. Someone in each group missing a finger or bearing a silver lacework of scars on their arms. 

A current of ecstasy runs through the onlookers as he reaches into one of the boxes and removes the snake. He passes the diamond back from hand to hand, a steady, coiling flow of scale and muscle. She watches his pale, slim fingers and can feel them on the side of her face again, remembering the moment she lost herself on the path to this church deep in the south. She thinks about the pools of stagnant water at the side of the path, alive with mosquito larvae, the jewel flash of a feeding hummingbird.

The people are singing. She puts her hand to her head, pushing back the pale blue head scarf he had picked out for her, letting her hair fall loose. She shifts in her chair, away from the dull ache of the bruises on her back. 

He lifts the rattler up high, showering ecstasy over the congregation, assuring them that they are chosen, no harm can come to them. The snake’s mouth is a gaping, furious void. It lunges towards the preacher and in that second, she knows that she will leave. She will find her yellow dress, her cowboy boots, and head back to the city where she knows how to handle the serpents.