Page 63 of Snake-Eater
Chapter 14
The next morning, Selena was pulling weeds—where were they coming from? They didn’t look like anything she’d seen out in the desert—when a voice said in her ear, “You are her kin.”
She jerked back, landing on her heels, just in time to see the roadrunner leap up onto the stone wall.
She would have wondered if the voice she’d heard was real, and if so, was it related to Snake-Eater, but she was immediately distracted by the fact that the roadrunner was carrying something. For a wild moment, she thought that it had a whip, and that madenosense, but Selena was pretty sure that she’d abandoned sense the first day the squash god came down to her garden.
The roadrunner stamped its feet and turned its head to look at her, and Selena finally realized that the long ropelike thing in its mouth was a dead snake.
Snake-Eater. Yes, of course.
The reptile was at least three feet long and its head was a bloody ruin. The thin tail, with its line of rattles, was very much intact.
“Oh,” said Selena. “Oh, that’s ... um. Very ... big. Yes. A big snake. That you killed.”
The roadrunner spread its wings and snapped them back in, then bowed and laid the dead rattlesnake across the low stone wall. It stepped back and bobbed its head in her direction.
“Oh. Is that a ... a gift?”
It spread its wings and snapped them back in again. The wings briefly gave it bulk, and there were patterns of light and shadow on them like winking eyes.
There was absolutely nothing less in the world that Selena wanted than to go pick up a dead snake that might not be all the way dead, but she stepped forward anyway. One, you didn’t refuse gifts just because you hated them. Two, Snake-Eater was apparently bringing her a peace offering, and she definitely didn’t want to reject that. So she steeled herself and reached out and put her hand on the snake’s bone-colored belly. It was the same temperature as the air and it didn’t move.
“Thank you,” Selena made herself say, and bowed back to the roadrunner. “It’s very ... ah ... impressive.”
It let out a low string of mechanical sounds, clicks and whirs, like a piece of clockwork. Selena felt her eyes go wide. Then it nodded, as if it had concluded some important piece of business, hopped off the wall, and scurried away into the desert.
Selena looked down at the dead rattlesnake. If she threw it away, would that count as rejecting the gift?
Well, I’m certainly not going to eat it!
She sighed, placed the dead rattlesnake gently on the porch, and went to get the shovel to bury it next to the house.
Six days passed. She borrowed two books from Grandma and read them both. They were indeed romances and the dirty bits were very impressive. She returned them and got another two, which were equally impressive, and then Grandma took her to the town library, which was not at all impressive, but had a room full of dusty paperbacks. It turned out that Gordon, the elderly bird-watcher, was also the librarian. Selena filled out a form and he gave her her own library card. She stared at the little square of card stock and tried not to think about how this was one more thing tying her to Quartz Creek.
There was an internet connection at the library. She thought of going online and seeing ... what? All the news of world events that she couldn’t change, celebrities whose names she couldn’t remember.Sorry,she told the world silently.I can barely manage to take care of myself right now. Maybe later.
Instead she looked up information on roadrunners. There wasn’t much, which surprised her. On some level, she expected every species to have been painstakingly analyzed and cataloged by science, but apparently not. Most of what she got simply confirmed what Gordon had said—they mated for life, they ate practically anything, and they hunted rattlesnakes. The only surprising fact was that they wept salt tears, like humans. The website said that it was a desert adaptation and used less water than excreting it via the kidneys.
Nothing about what to do if your aunt had been dating a god of roadrunners. Well, that was probably beyond the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s purview.
After a lot of internal dithering, she logged on to her primary social account. There were ten messages from Walter. She hovered over them, decided she couldn’t handle it right now, and sent him a message instead. “I’m fine. I’m doing well. I’m sorry that I’m not responding to messages, but I don’t have reliable internet. Please feel free to give away or donate my stuff if you haven’t. I hope you’re moving on with your life.”
She collected her bounty of romance novels and added a book on gardening in the desert. It was a trifle embarrassing handing the books to Gordon, but he held up the first one and said, “Oh,When a Scot Ties the Knot, that’s a good one,” and recommended two others in the same vein, which left Selena relieved and slightly confused.
She took her books and went home with Grandma Billy, where the peacock screamed at them both.
Selena harvested the first tiny green sprouts of lettuce from the shaded side of the garden. She saw the squash god and raised a hand in salute, but did not approach him. She read more books and returned them andchecked out more. She spent a little more of Aunt Amelia’s credit and bought a new pair of jeans from Connor’s store. Lupé promised to take her to a thrift store in the next town over for more T-shirts the next time she went out that way.
And nothing terrible happened. The tiny nerves along Selena’s spine began slowly to stop their jangling, and when she looked at the screen door, she did not expect to see monsters.
Another week passed, then two.
The most stressful thing that happened was actually Grandma Billy deciding that Selena needed to learn how to use a gun.
“But I don’t want to shoot anyone,” Selena argued, knowing that it was futile but feeling as if she should make a token effort.
“What about them fetches the other night?”
