Red White Fur

Sonny Fillmore

Sometimes Zelda got out of her cage. Some mornings, her young owner, Levi, found the snake slithering around his bed, under the covers where it was warm, or wrapping herself around the coils of the radiator. Sometimes she coiled all the way around his leg, like Asclepius, and squeezed so tightly that the blood in his toes started to turn blue. He once told his mother, Jenny.

     “How would you give a hug if you had no arms?” she said, patting him on the head.

     In Ohio, they haven’t stopped sweating since May. The cicadas scream like a factory, like an applause machine. An empty, spinning blender. It’s Friday, and tomorrow, Levi’s father doesn’t work. Sunday neither. Despite the sun having scarcely risen, hot air collects in the high ceilings, and it’s only by hiding in the cracks of the kitchen floor that creatures find relief. The tile is deliciously cold. Jenny wants to lay her cheek on it now.

     “There is nothing uglier than a hungry animal,” her brother Marlo says.

     “Who are you calling an animal?” Jenny keeps her back to him and peers at the stove, where cheese is frying.

     Marlo looks up from thumbing the newspaper and over his shoulder, finding no one else in the room, animal or human. “That’s not what I meant,” he says. “You know that, right?”

     “Things get ugly when things get hungry,” Jenny says. She flips the cheese. “Doesn’t make you an animal, though.”

     “We all are animals. Especially us, especially today. The only difference is that,” says Marlo, pointing to the ceiling.

     “Amen,” Jenny says. “Hallelujah.”

     “Not that. The roof.”

     A small scream comes from upstairs, but neither Jenny nor Marlo moves. Jenny’s child is known for this, for dramas of all kinds. The best thing—according to what they read and were told placidly at the playground by parents whose children beat and begged at their knees and ankles—is to ignore it. Let the kids sort it out themselves. “You won’t always be alive,” said the parents, and then they all touched their noses as fast as they could.

     In the kitchen, Marlo and Jenny listen for more, but all they hear is cheese frying. At the top of the stairs, Levi listens for the scraping of chairs on the kitchen floor, the rushing of adults to the rescue.

     Ignoring the scream, Jenny says, “Last night in dreamland, Zelda swallowed me whole. She took her jaw off the hook, like they do, and wrapped herself around my foot like a stocking.” She knocks the cheese around the pan with a spatula. “I gave her an extra mouse today. Alive and warm. At least it was this morning.”

     Levi begins a slow descent of the stairs. His feet step sadly. He sniffs.

     Upon landing at the bottom of the stairs, directly into the kitchen where Jenny and Marlo look at each other and not him, he holds up his hands, speckled with blood, and says, “Why didn’t you come when I screamed?”

     “Is that your blood?” Jenny puts the spatula in the pocket of her robe, approaches the child, and takes his hands, holding them up to her face.

     “Don’t burn the cheese, now,” Marlo says. He walks to the stove and turns down the gas. The igniter clicks and the flame goes out.

     “Something happened with Zelda,” Levi says.

     “For fuck’s sake—say what you want to say,” says Jenny. “Sweetie,” she adds.

     “Today is Zelda’s birthday,” Levi says. “She’s gone.” He puts his hands in his pockets. Blood seeps through the cotton.

     “How do you know?” Marlo says. “Maybe she escaped and is on her way to a vacation in the Amazon. Bon voyage.”

     “Because.” Levi opens his milky palm to reveal a snake’s head. Her scales are grass and mud, flowing next to each other in thick rivers that don’t mix. A green and brown arrowhead. Zelda’s eyes are open, as always, as is the mouth. Tiny drops of venom collect at the tips of her fangs.

     Marlo and Jenny descend, holding Levi’s hand like a page to the light.

     At the neck end of the head, exposed ribs poke, like fish bones, like rice noodles. Translucent and milky and bubble gum flesh still clings.

     Jenny speaks first. “Is she dead?”

     “Be careful—snake heads can still bite,” Marlo says.

     Levi brings Zelda’s head close to his chest, as if she might hear. “Zelda would never hurt me.”

     “She might be angry,” Jenny says.

     “She’s dead,” says Marlo.

     “Dead things can still be angry,” Levi says.

     Levi leads the way up the creaking wooden stairs, to the terrarium. Zelda enjoyed bathing in the infrared red light on her rock and could often be found wrapping herself around some wooden sticks that her owners had found in the backyard. The space offered her a modest hunting ground, where she had been known to let her prey burrow in the piles of hay before striking it, squeezing it to death, and swallowing it whole.

     What Zelda’s owners didn’t see this morning: The mouse moved cautiously, a few, quick steps at a time, one big black unblinking eye on the snake, which was coiled and motionless aside from her tongue, periodically sampling the air. In a truly reckless stint of bravery, the mouse lunged for Zelda’s neck and took one ferocious chomp. The skin broke easily, and flesh came off with it.

     Zelda retaliated only in threats. She hissed and bore her fangs, swirling indignantly to face the prey turned predator. The injury was really nothing—you would have barely seen it without looking closely. But the mouse kept going until she lay resting with a bloodied muzzle and Zelda’s head, separated from the rest of her long body, lay mouth agape, as if in surprise.

     Presently, the pile of hay quakes. The uncle, mother, and son move closer. They see her there, surely, that killer mouse, eye-deep in bloody remains. Some of Zelda’s molted skin, shed halfway, surrounds her body like a ghost.

     It’s hard to know at first whether the red on the mouse’s snout has always been there; it fits in so well with the ruddy tinge of her eyes, ears, toes. Eating her cagemate came naturally to her. The snake’s body, a fat and swollen string of pearls, bulges with old skeletons in the long stomach. The mouse continues to take small bites of snake flesh.

     “Hungry mouse,” Marlo observes.

     “She’s not hungry—she’s not even swallowing,” Jenny says. “She’s angry.”

     The mouse gnaws at Zelda’s milky underbelly, unzipping her like a stuffed animal. Soon, the stomach bulges through her skin, and inside it can be seen a skull. With a bite, the mouse starts to burrow, clearing and ripping as she goes. Mouse carcasses from feedings past, half melted and covered in stomach acid, spill out.

     Fur comes off in sloughs, the snake now splayed out to the tail, like a rug. The mouse climbs over a carcass and starts to slip. One of her little feet goes through the eye socket. Sucking mud.

     Suddenly, Levi grabs the mouse, indelicately at first, by the tail, then cradling her like a precious dragon’s egg.

     “Not doing something is still doing something,” Levi says.

     “Put it down. It could have rabies,” Jenny says.

     “It’s too late,” says Marlo.

     Jenny sighs. “If it has rabies, you have rabies. Put it down.”

     “I will, outside,” Levi says.

     An enormous Cincinnati backyard: untillable, boggy, bumpy land, filled with groundhogs, unsuitable for farming or running or building. Tall grasses striped like the feathers of a peacock or the fronds of a lionfish grow toward the sky.

     They walk through the peacock grass to the wooden fence that separates the backyard from the forest. A frog leaps high to the top of a post; a woodpecker digs in her claws and tap-tap-taps.

     “We have to go beyond the fence,” Levi says.

     “She could probably dig under,” Marlo says.

     “When we close it, we’ll be sure to latch it.”

     Jenny has called the cousins from down the street. They come over with the aunts and uncles, the grandfather and grandmother too. Everyone files into the backyard and then into the striped grass, walking out to the vigil. The unmowed grass is so beautiful, taller than their heads. Ticks cling to strands by their legs, reaching toward warm passersby who might offer them a blood meal.

     Sometimes, when lightning strikes, a small fire lights in these tall grasses and scars the backyard black, but the fire never comes close to the homes or even past the fence. Animals burn alive and choke on the smoke. Learning about this in school—how deer catch on fire and birds’ eggs cook in their nests—Levi wanted to become a firefighter. Or an arborist. Then he learned that firefighters cut down trees so that they don’t burn later.

     Presently, Levi’s cousins pester him. They follow behind him, eyes to the ground, stomping through the grass. All summer, none of them wear shoes.

     “Anything could be hiding in all this,” one says.

     “Boo!” Another cousin pops out from behind grasses, tackling a third.

     “Boo you, bitch!” They fight. “You can’t hide.”

     “Not with your loud-ass breathing,” says a fourth.

     “Not with your big-ass feet.”

     “Not with your stanky-ass breath.”

     “Not with your buggy-ass eyes. They’d light up the place. Like two flashlights.”

     “They call them torches in the United Kingdom.”

     “And what do they call dummies like you?”

     “Twits. Next question.”

     “This is serious!” Levi says loudly, turning to face them.

     “This is serious!” they imitate. Voices echo across the yard and into the woods.

     “I don’t know why any of you came. You should go back inside.”

     “We will, eventually.”

     “We’ll do this first.”

     “Then no more laughing, and no more joking,” Levi says.

     “Then no more laughing, and no more joking!” Jeers, followed by a brief silence, which Levi’s grandfather fills:

     “Your ancestors kept animals, animals of all kinds. We come from a long line of green thumbs and red palms.”

     Sighs.

     “Your own great-grandfather, my grandfather, owned 10,000 fish. He raised those fish himself. Well, the fish did most of the raising, but he gave them the food and cleaned out the aquarium. I guess it was more of a swimming pool. He swam in there with them. They used to nibble off his dead skin, some of the alive skin too. Sometimes, when they got too nibbly or mean, or too big, he’d pluck them out and fry them up for supper. Once, when he told his friend that he owned 10,000 fish, a doctor was summoned to declare him insane.”

     “Okay, grandpa,” say the cousins. That’s what they always say.

     “When the doctor saw that my grandfather was telling the truth, they called another set of authorities entirely.”

     “The fish police?” Marlo is genuinely curious.

     “They came over and seized them all. Sucked them all up in a Shop-Vac. They put the tube right in the pool and took it all, including the pebbles,” the grandpa says, looking at the ground.

     He flips a page of his newspaper, which he carries always.

     “The fish were let go into the local stream. Most of them died straightaway, but some of them grew to be one of the most resolutely invasive species the United States of America has ever experienced. Fish grow forever, did you know that?”

     They march past the firepit, from which corn stalks grow. (When the cousins were younger, they once threw popcorn kernels into the fire. It smelled like a circus.) They make a hothouse out of Ohio. All the water leaves their body for their skin and is immediately burned off by the sun and the moving air around them.

     Levi holds the mouse in his hand. She is restless. She burrows into his hand like something is underneath his skin, something more than just his muscles and bones. She might dig into his hand and rip it all out if she wants to. Her teeth are very sharp.

     “Is she hurting you?” Jenny asks.

     “Not really. She’s only playing, pretending to dig.”

     “The Chinese have a saying: Dripping water will pierce stone,” Marlo says.

     The family has a loose sense of right and wrong; they are guided first by religion, though at this point, they have seen too many false Armageddons. During last year’s false prophecy, they waited with their hands in each other’s hands. They waited all night, even until it was fully night all around the world, the day having fully and thoroughly passed. There was nowhere else on the planet where it was apocalypse day, and still, nothing happened. Yet there is still right and wrong, probably, and it is up to them to decide, to dole out justice; no one else is watching. That is why, although they fear her, the mouse must be released.

     As they walk, they recount her crimes. They discuss whether she knows right from wrong. Whether there is right and wrong. Whether she should be judged against their standards. Whether there are other standards even to be judged by. All the while, she digs at Levi’s palm. It occurs to him that this is the first time that the mouse has smelled the outside air.

     “We can’t just execute her,” he says.

     “You’re not executing her. You’re letting her go,” one of the cousins says.

     “She can’t survive out here.” Levi looks around, peering up at a sky filled with hawks.

     “Out here’s good for a mouse. She’s an animal,” another offers.

     “Would you shut the fuck up? No one asked you. You have no idea what’s good for her,” Levi says.

     “And you do?”

     “You speak mouse?” he asks.

     “Do you?”

“Do you?” He is screaming.

     In the end, he puts her down in the grass. She considers the grass for a while and Levi can tell that she doesn’t know where to go, what to do. He watches her and the little fish bone–gray mark on her back, along her spine. She is very fat, which will help her in the winter but will not protect her from looming predators.

     He worries too about humans. His mind flashes to salted slugs and gerbils put in blenders, the kinds of things he has had to witness as a child. He doesn’t know everyone in the neighborhood, and people he does know have done cruel things with magnifying glasses.

     The sun is setting.

     “Makes you hungry, being out here this late. You can smell the prey running around,” Levi’s grandpa says.

     “Probably your hunter instincts,” Marlo says.

     “Fuck you, man,” grandpa says, laughing.

     “Levi, there’s popcorn on the stove inside.” Jenny says. It’s true. The stove will be overflowing right now with popcorn. Surely it’s burnt. She’s surprised there isn’t a trail of smoke billowing out of the kitchen window. “I should be making dinner by now. Your father will be home.” She walks back towards the house.

     “Just a second,” Levi says.

     “Ill attachment and disregard for the dead—an apparent lack of remorse or capacity to regret,” Grandpa says, as a goodbye. “Thou shalt not…” He walks back to the house.

     The mouse in the grass gains confidence, and it is harder and harder to keep track of her. She runs around and starts to remember herself, the part of her that ran through grasses in past lives. For a second, she sniffs Levi’s pant legs and investigates a few frayed ends. She bites them as if they were worms, then retreats, spitting them out. The ears on the back of her head twitch. The others start walking back to the house.

     “Popcorn on the stove, Levi.”

     The others walk back. It gets darker. The mouse hears owls hooting, and other things rustling, things she has never heard before. She’s clueless. She has no idea what to do.

     “I think she’s learned her lesson,” says Levi to no one in particular, looking up at heaven. He plucks her from the grass, almost too fast—fearing that she would suddenly remember her wild bloodlust and recover her instincts, weaving through the grass—and coddles her like a baby.

     He decides to bring her back inside. He will hide her under his pillow or put her in the ventilation system and occasionally drop pellets of grain, bits of chicken. She can run around the house and be freer than she was in the cage. She can have free reign of the entire bedroom. She can make nests out of his books and poop in them, he doesn’t care, he’ll figure it out.

     The mouse can feel that she is going back home and gets excited. She is burrowing her way even more deeply into Levi’s hand. They feel like little kisses, little furious kisses. “I don’t want to go back to the house either,” he says to the mouse, whom he has named Ofelia. “Dad will be home and dinner will not be ready, which will be noisy. It’s quieter out here.” The father will be mad and leave greasy prints on his belt, on Jenny’s arms. She won’t scream—she never does, not for them and not for her either, but to spite his father, he thinks. It would be better if she screamed, he thinks. “It would be better if she screamed and fought back. What’s holding us all back from covering him and picking him apart like we’re piranhas?” he says to Ofelia.

     The pair, his parents, grab knives sometimes; they grab the gun. They grab the poker next to the fireplace. They grab lighters and forks and big mason jars of jelly. They grab each other, too, and phone books. Anything they can get their hands on, but they try not to leave marks because people at the church are nosy. When they’re bloody or bruised, they don’t go to church, and then the church people come by the house, walking slowly, letting their dogs smell the house’s yard for a long time. They send letters and ring the phone off.

     In Levi’s pocket, the snake’s head has sopped a bloody stain into his cotton shorts. It bounces against his leg as he walks back.

     Down the hill and back at the old brick house, noise billows out of open kitchen windows. Smoke climbs out of the chimney. Things are flying out of the windows, all sorts of things: bowls, pictures in picture frames. Levi’s grandma climbs out of the window, followed by Marlo, holding a baby cousin. They reach back into the smoke and help the other cousins escape. At the back door, his mother is laughing so much it sounds like a scream. Probably listening to granddad’s old stories put her off, Levi thinks. That old man never knows when to shut up, never tells the truth. The wind blows, and suddenly it is cold. It smells like popcorn.

© Variant Literature Inc 2023