King of Serpents

            William took a puff on his inhaler, pocketed it, and pushed the turnstyle out of the way. He expected someone to show up at any moment. Part of him hoped that someone would, but when the door closed behind him, leaving him in total darkness, hope was lost.

            Something hissed. Something croaked. Claws scratched at glass. William pulled out his phone and started up the flashlight ap. It was just a gecko crawling up the display. Nothing to be afraid of there. Even with it’s bulging eyes, the gecko was no larger than his hand. This mission was meant for bigger things.

            William passed by the entry exhibits, the large bits of indoor rainforest being politely sprinkled by the timers to recreate a tropical environment when no one was watching. Lizards in those exhibits he could handle.

            He sidled up a ramp, his palms sweaty along the railing, his puffer not far away from his fingers at any time. Each step brought him closer. He started imaging the thick coils wrapped around his legs, strangling his resolve to go any further.

            “Mustn’t worry, William,” he said. “It’s behind glass. It can’t hurt you.”

            Ten meters long and up to fifteen centimeters in diameter, he hoped the glass was thick.

            “It must not mistake you for a mouse, William. Stand tall.”

            He came to a circular room with various exhibits positioned around it. Something splashed into some water, which flashed in the meager light. Williams jumped back, barely grabbing the railing.

            He read the exhibit tag. “Frogs. Newts. Worse than geckos. Not even reptiles,” he said and shook his head. “Nothing to fear.”

            He had to get to the end quickly. Someone would have noticed the alarm to the Reptile House going off. Someone would be around soon to check on it. Worse still, someone would have noticed he wasn’t on the bus headed home with the other children.

            “Do you want to be a man?” He waded through his own fear, his muscles seized by spasms to flee. “When she hears you snuck into the snake-pit, she can’t call you a coward anymore, but only if you face the snake.”

            There were two things that scared William, really. One was on the bus back home, and the other was somewhere in a tank, hunting small rodents.

            “The boa constrictor can swallow small children,” he said, reciting what he’d read from the Zoological Books. “It can crush steel girders or break the neck of a buffalo. It does not need venom. Once you’re in it’s grasp, you are as good as dead.”

            He read the signs as he passed, each one more dangerous sounding than that last. “Skink. Monitor Lizard. Gila Monster….”

            He paused at a bronze sign with white lettering. “Copperhead.” He tapped the glass, but it was too dark to see. Besides, the Copperhead was only three meters long, at best. It wouldn’t be enough.

            Nor would the Coral Snake, the Taipan, or even the King Cobra that seemed to fly by him. At the end of the hall, there was a large glass structure that held the place of honor. There was no mistaking who lived in that one. No other exhibit could match its sheer size.

            His feet were positively glued to the floor, and there was no railing to let him haul himself forward. His fingers brushed against the glass of exhibits on either side, oblivious to the noise of the disturbed serpents inside. Transfixed on what lie before him, nothing could stop him, not even his fear of lesser snakes.

            Finally, he was at the exhibit, pressing his palms up against the transparent material too strong to be for meant anyone else. His breath fogged up the surface; he had to lean back to see through clearly. He held up his phone and saw something moving in the corner. He jumped back, dropped the phone, and yelped. He clawed at the floor trying to scramble back to his feet.

            “It cannot hurt you. You have to be strong.”

            Retrieving his light-source, he pressed himself against the glass again. The something in the corner moving was just a leaf. He shook his head.

            “Courage, William. Are you a man, or are you a mouse?”

            Just then, he caught sight of an actual rodent near the leaf. It chewed nervously on some of the fake foliage, twitching every time the leaf moved behind him. So small, so weak, it ran from the light.

            “You are doomed, mouse! Thirty feet of snake is hungry!” He chased it with the light. “Mustn’t be a mouse, William. Mustn’t be afraid.”

            He cornered the little creature, backed it up against the wall, and just as he was about to scold it, something moved on his left. Slick scales slithered through arranged foliage, over rubber pebbles, and out of lukewarm tap water. William’s light caught only the tip of it’s tail flicking through the homemade dirt.

            He flashed his light back at the mouse now too frightened to move, thinking that motionlessness might help it’s cause. He flashed back to the snake, or at least the paper undergrowth. The fog cloud on the window became denser.

            “Move, mouse! It can sense your body heat, you know.” His attention darted back and forth between the villain, and it’s terrified prey, whispering prayers of good fortune for a rodent he hardly knew. “You must fight. Run for your life.”

            But the rodent did nothing, save slowing it’s breathing. Against the blue painted wall, the gray mouse had no camouflage. In the light of his phone, there was not even darkness to hide it.

            “Perhaps it could get to the shrubbery?” he asked. “If only I could…”

            Snake and mouse converge, the diamond-shaped head emerged from the plastic forest, rearing up to tower over the poor animal. There was nowhere to run, no need for stealth. It’s coils, slightly less than thirty feet for sure but still omnipresent at rodent-level, slipped to either side. There was nowhere to run.

            “It’s only a mouse.” William balled up his fist. The distant click only barely registered in the back of his mind, the darkness fading with the distant light. “You are a man.”

            Footsteps echoed off the ramp into the amphibian room, the snake flicked the air with its tongue, the rodent’s little heart pattered like rain on the canopy, and William balled up his fist. Just as the beast was about to strike, William slammed the glass. The snake twitched, the rodent escaped, and it turned its massive head hungrily toward the boy. Mouth opening ever-so-slightly, it slithered forward, into the puddle that it used to cool down, drawing closer and closer, just as the footsteps and shouts behind him.

            He looked it square in the slivered eyes, let out a primal roar, and turned in time to see Ms. Abignail and the security guard rushing toward him. “I am the bane of the boa!” he shouted, beating his chest. “I am the King of Serpents! I am a man!”

An Emotional Roller Coaster

            Bruce looked up at the steel arch and felt his knees knock together. A mad scream and thirty people hurtled over the crest, riding double-file, some with their hands in the air, some holding tightly to the belt in front of them. The roller coaster car screeched to a halt, and the windblown passengers filed off.

            Lucy nudged him toward the car, but his hands were stuck fast to the gate.

            “Bruce?”

            “Sorry,” he mumbled, breathing deeply. “I’m just not—.”

            “Oh, God,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes. “Tell me we waited in line for two hours so you could chicken out again.”

            Bruce couldn’t speak.

            “You’re making a scene.”

            Several smaller children scraped past the height requirement worker and positioned themselves in the front car. The people behind then were tapping their toes, eager to take his place. He would have let them, if she hadn’t been so insistent.

            “We have to get out more,” she had said. “We have to start living!”

            Afraid that she would find him boring, he’d taken her to the theme park, came to the roller coaster first thing in the morning, and realized it wasn’t for him. After a couple of hours going through the games and the food markets, Lucy had started doing these little, disapproving sniffs every time he suggested something. Desperate, he’d come back to The Blaster.

            Reluctantly, trying not to see the slope going up away from the platform, Bruce sidled over to the car, buckled himself in, and said a silent prayer. “Does this belt feel a little loose to you?”

            Lucy sighed. “We need to talk.”
            “Now?”

            “Yes, now. I can’t keep doing this.” She shook her head, the operator’s distant voice starting the pre-ride warnings. “Where’s the man I met, Bruce? Where is the guy who ate a chunk of wasabi to make me laugh?”

            The brakes released, the car slid forward, swooped down a small hill, which made his heart jump into his throat, and then, the chains started dragging them up the first slope. All the while he kept thinking that he ate the wasabi accidentally.

            “Now look at you.” She twisted in her seat. “This was your idea to spice things up, and you can’t even carry through. I want adventure. I want excitement. I want a boyfriend, not a baby.”

            The front car disappeared, followed shortly by the second. Soon, they plummeted. He closed his eyes, which made things worse. The contents of his stomach kept coming to mind. They swooped up another hill, around a corner and into a second set of chains.

            “Seriously, it’s like I don’t even know you,” she snarled. “It’s like it was all a front.”

            Swoop, turn, flip, turn, swoop. Brakes.

            “I’m done with you, with this whole charade. It’s like I don’t even know you anymore.”

            He made a noise of pain. Nauseous, nauseous pain.

            “I’m breaking up with you, Bruce.”

            “I—.”

            The car lurched, and shot up into a loop. Without his consent, his feet were soon over his head, his eyes struggling against gravity to stay open. The blood drained from his face. Next was a tightly banking turn. She screamed expletives at him. He just held the rail.

            The last straightaway unfurled, and the brakes hit, mercifully. He fought down the chilidog from an hour ago, breathing deep. They waited while the train in front of them loaded.

            “Aren’t you going to at least fight for me?”

            The train rolled into the station. The belts kept them locked down.

            “What’s to fight for? You’re right,” he replied, finally. “I’m sorry I had to be someone else just to get your attention.”

            She sniffed and left the moment the belts clicked.

            Queasy, Bruce hobbled onto the platform. One of the small children from the first row was staring at him. “The things you do for love, eh?” he asked.

An Open Letter to Mother Nature.

I am a chieftain among men when it comes to missing out on awe-inspiring natural disasters. That’s not to say that where I go is safe to follow: quite the contrary, but I am never a part of the terrible experience that so many can say that they lived through.

In particular, I can think of three stories.

The first takes place in Disney World, believe it or not. We had gone down to Disney in a trailer to stay at the only trailer park in Disney because having a big family meant sleeping several feet from half your immediate relatives. I was seven, and at the time, I didn’t know any better. I thought camping was the best I could ask for…that is until two tornados tore up the county. It was the deadliest tornado disaster in the history of Florida, with forks of lining that even Floridians couldn’t handle, knifing through the sky and splitting open trees. The real sufferers, however, were people that lived in a trailer park five miles south of where we were. Sleeping tight in my own trailer, I never saw a thing, not the swirling winds of either tornado nor the bright flashes nor the deluge that came with them both. When I woke the next morning, everyone had a story to tell but me.

The second was one of the most destructive blizzards the northeast has ever seen. It happened in October, which was why it was so devastating, hauling down trees that hadn’t lost their leaves, felling ancient monuments to the existence of nature in the few small spaces where they hadn’t been pushed out by Connecticutians. My father, and he was not alone in this, described it as looking very much like the pictures of Hiroshima when you walked through the forest. Everything had been pulverized. People were without power for months in a part of the country where missing your TV shows can be a tragedy. A tree fell through my Aunt’s roof and, to my knowledge, wasn’t removed for almost a week because there was simply too much damage to the infrastructure of the state to allow engineering crews to do anything else. And while this once in a lifetime experience was taking place, I was spending my very first winter in the south of the country, away from the northeast, where snow had also paralyzed the state…except that the snow was a dusting of half an inch and only resulted in a distinct shortage of eggs and milk at the local WalMart, the shortage being caused by paranoid denizens and not the storm itself.

The last was one of the first earthquakes that I can remember hitting the east coast. As long as I’ve lived here, there has been only one. Mind you, I’m the kind of person who wonders what it must be like to have the Earth shift beneath your feet, rattling and vibrating and pulling pictures off the wall (because that’s about as disastrous as I can imagine). It happened near Richmond, VA while I was living in South Carolina, only two states over. By all means I should have felt it. I should have heard glass shattering and metal groaning. Certainly, some of my fellows did sitting in different buildings, but I was in the engineering building, which for some strange reason, had been properly engineered not to do those very things. How is one supposed to experience a natural disaster if you are so well prepared, University? What really cooks my goose is that the vibration was felt by people in the next room who quickly came over and let me know what their bottoms had felt. Unfortunately for me, I had been sitting on a cushy chair with my feet pulled up Indian style. I never felt a thing.

So to you, Mother Nature, while some might find you moody or vindictive or to be a stone-cold bitch, I say thank you. For whatever reason, and I don’t want to say it was the invasive species project I did in AP Biology (though it might have been), you have spared me your wrath. If you could kindly keep doing that, I would be more than appreciative.

Hugs and Kisses,

Bryan Thurston