Snake

Snake Dreaming by Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi

The proprietor of the Bone Room keeps his beloved in a cage of glass at the back of the store and his beloved lies behind the glass comfortably, ignoring both admirers and curiosity seekers with complete equanimity, but the woman does not know this, having never been inside the Bone Room until today (she had been walking down the sidewalk in a daze, the children gone for the day to camp and she alone with her thoughts, her husband having left for work that morning after finally confessing the night before that it was a man, not another woman, a man) and when she enters the place, the bell on the front door tinkles and the proprietor, a tall heavyset man, turns his back on her so she is free to admire in silence the skulls and the skeletons, and the drawers full of preserved, pinned glistening beetles and butterflies with gloriously patterned wings, all so beautifully united in the domain of death, until she finds him in the back, the one living thing in the shop, the huge albino python lying motionless in a small glass vivarium, curled up softly in large, flaccid loops, the intricate pattern on his radiant white skin the color of lemon custard, his head hidden in his coils, and she begins to weep, turning now to the proprietor, “How can you do that to him,” she says, “keep him packed in like that, with no room to move and nothing to do, a magnificent thing like him—it is so cruel,” and the proprietor sees the tears and the carefully dyed blond hair and the diamond on her left hand, a real rock, he assesses, and he replies scornfully, “Lady, don’t speak to me of cruelty when you know nothing, absolutely nothing—the python is a snake, not a human being, a snake, therefore, he is not like you—so please do not imagine for even a minute that you can possibly know more than I do about what he needs.”

by Nina Zolotow


• Subscribe to Delusiastic! here • Follow Delusiastic! on Facebook and Nina on Instagram •