I know that he knows there is a snake in my belly. He lays his hand upon it, tells me to lie down. Says to find my happy place. I sigh. We go over several landscapes, none of them work. There is something dangerous in each of them. He walks me out to the desert, I look around. He assures me that it is only me, yucca trees, ink night sky. I know this is not true, but I relent. So many stars blur into milk across the hemisphere. I can see three layers of coral crusted dirt at all times. Rifle beetles burrow up to retrieve the blooms of datura, then scurry down again, dragging white flowers into the underworld. Sloop, sloop, sloop. Honeypot ants move in amber murmurations across the desert floor, swirling towards me, up and over my feet, leaving sticky tracks in their wake. Starlight settles on my feet, sticks to sweet. Yucca does not need to move to dance. He asks me to lie down. I can feel the snake rubbing the inside of my belly, telling me that I don’t have to be sick. Everything that my digestion should do, the snakes does for me. I am here because I can’t stop bleeding. I am snake bloated blood, pregnant with gut of an outwitted serpent. Distance is a Pink Thing and Pink Thing is getting closer, rumbling and spitting under the hood. Silver flashes down its side, windows tinted. Pink Thing stops next to me. I ask him if I should get on the bus. He says I am already on the bus, that the desert is the bus. That’s why it is the Pink Thing. I tell him I hate when he talks like this, but when I pull myself up into the bus, he’s right, it’s all desert. Thick plants of spine and fuchsia fruit and impaled bats. It’s so dark that my brain is starting to cramp again, I feel him move his hand around to the back of my neck. Can I hold you here, he asks. Yes. There is a circle of coyotes around us and each one of them is a different shade of blue. Please tell me the shades, I ask. You should be relaxing, he says, before the surge comes. It’s already happening, I say, please tell me blue. He says, there is a cornflower coyote and a true-blue coyote. That one is steal, that one is teal. The coyote you can’t see is midnight blue. Powder blue coyote and aqua blue coyote. The seizure in my brain is getting stronger, the honey can’t hold my feet to the ground. Let me give you my mouth he says, I have all the stars in the back of my throat. I want to answer.
Before I do, the snake comes, mouth first.
The snake comes out my belly, mouth first.
The snake comes out of my belly as an umbilical cord, mouth first.
This is so fucked up, I say. Me and the snake, we are bloodless. Maybe she is my child, she looks like my mother. She’s coming for your head, babe, she’s going to eat it right up, he says. And she does. Mouth open like a birth canal. I go backwards into my own body, that small Pink Thing driving in circles over beetles sleeping in underground meadows of vespertine blooms while the scratch of my boyfriend’s voice draws the longitudinal fissures between the hemispheres of the sky which I almost remember is the crest of my brain.
Kelly Gray is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press) and the audio chapbook My Fingers are Whales and Other Stories of Cetology (Moon Child Press). She is the recipient of the 2022 Neutrino Short-Short Prize from Passages North and a finalist for Best of the Net 2021. Gray's writing appears or is forthcoming in Northwest Review, Superstition Review, Newfound, Menacing Hedge, and Driftwood Press, among other places. You can read more of her work at writekgray.com.