Page 15 of Snake-Eater
“Sure,” said Grandma easily. “Sure. That’s fine. But it makes the house feel better.”
Selena looked down at the match in her hands. She had to scrape it along the brick edge of the fireplace to light it. Thin white trails indicated that she wasn’t the first person to do so.
The match flared up, and she dropped it into the fireplace. A strong, hard smell filled the house, powerful but not unpleasant.
Grandma straightened up and paused, her eye suddenly caught. “Oh,” she said, in a rather different tone.
“What’s wrong? More scorpions?” Selena grabbed for the broom.
“Just saw that thing.” She pointed to the doll beside the fireplace. “Startled me, I’d forgot it was here.”
“Is it a kachina doll?” asked Selena.
“Nah. That’s Snake-Eater. Local sorta fellow.” Grandma Billy frowned at the statue. “Never did like that piece much, though Amelia was pretty fond of it. Where’d you find it?”
“Find it?” Selena was puzzled. “It was here. Right there. I didn’t touch anything. It’s not my—”
She stopped. She had been about to say, “Not my house.”It’s not, is it? I’m just borrowing it from Aunt Amelia. It doesn’t belong to me.
If it belongs to me, I have to worry about it, and I don’t think I can stand to worry about something else right now.
Fortunately, Grandma didn’t seem to have noticed. She scowled at the doll. “Could have sworn it wasn’t here when I cleaned the place out. Must be going blind in my old age.”
Selena picked it up. “Snake-Eater?”
“Roadrunner,” said Grandma. “Exceptthatname got all mixed up with cartoons and shit, and roadrunners ain’t funny if you live with them. They kill rattlesnakes.”
“But that’s good, right?”
Grandma shrugged. “Depends on how you feel about rattlesnakes. Always thought they were polite fellows, givin’ you lots of warning before things go bad. Could wish some people had that kind of courtesy.”
Selena studied the doll more closely. The thing she’d thought was a chin ... was that a beak? Suddenly the odd features snapped into clear relief. Yes, that was a beak, and the bit that looked like a straggly beard was actually the back end of a snake hanging out. The eyes were big and yellow, with a blaze of red on either side, and the spiky hair was a crest of sharp feathers.
“It’s not very pretty,” admitted Selena. “Still, I guess it was Amelia’s.”
“Yep,” said Grandma. She frowned again, glancing at the doll, and opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again. “Well, harmless enough, I suppose.”
“It’s not going to come alive and stab me in my sleep or something, is it?” asked Selena.
Grandma aimed a swat in her general direction. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a doll, not some bit of magic, even if it’s tied up with people I don’t much like.”
“People?” Selena was getting more confused by the minute.
“Akindof people, anyhow. Amelia used to take in strays, like I said. Some of ’em ... well.” She clearly weighed out what to say next, thenshrugged. “Amelia liked him well enough, and if you stay out of Snake-Eater’s way, I imagine he’ll stay out of yours. Most like.”
Selena chalked this up with all the other cryptic pronouncements her neighbor had made, like Aunt Amelia’s ghost hanging around the garden until summer.
“Anyway, that’s enough to be going on with,” said Grandma, dusting her hands off. “You’ll be fine. There’s dinner in the casserole dish. I’ll come back by tomorrow and we’ll figure the garden out. And I’ll bring cups.”
Outside, in the dark, the scorpion sat in the dust. Its mind was not, in fact, large enough to feel gratitude, but it understood death / not-death. It was not-dead. There had been large dark blurs and movement and at the end it was still not-dead.
Insomuch as a scorpion could find anything interesting, that would have been it.
Eventually, one leg at a time, it picked its way into the dark.
Chapter 4
Selena woke up in the morning and suffered a jarring sense of dislocation. She wasn’t in her bed and Walter wasn’t lying next to her. She wasn’t on the couch in her mother’s apartment, where she’d spent the last month of her mother’s illness. She was somewhere with bright-white walls and light coming in through the window. Her mouth felt dry and her eyes were scratchy.
