Fiction

Bite

"My little pit viper,” Alec’s Ma said fondly, ruffling his blonde hair. She’d called him that as long as he could remember, enamored with the way his cheekbones flared from a sharp jaw, his smile stretching so wide that you could see the flesh of gums and the insides of his lips around his teeth.

Later, as he often did, Alec checked his smile in the mirror, looking for the snake his mother saw there. He wanted to see it. Ma had always pointed snakes out to him on their walks, teaching him admiration for the animals’ quiet strength, the way their lithe bodies would persist and thrive in even the most barren of concrete corners. He wanted to be like that, to be a thing that the world could not stamp out. But when he looked at his face in the mirror, lips stretched tight by the force of his grin, all he saw was a little boy, bleach-blonde and sun-kissed, baring his teeth like an angry possum.

He let himself stand there for a long minute in front of the chipped mirror, smile fixed so firmly he worried his face might get stuck like that. He touched his wide cheeks and thought that if he stared long enough he might see the snake’s beautiful features emerge from his own. But all he did was make the muscles of his face hurt. Eventually, he gave up and ran back out of the cinder block home they’d cordoned off, into the broader expanses of the linoleum-tiled shantytown they called Bullseye (after the red concentric circles on its kudzu-covered exterior). The neighbor had dragged a swing set inside, and he didn’t want to be left behind when his friends went to play on it.

The summer he was ten, Alec caught a water moccasin in the crick down the road from the Boxes - that cluster of decrepit once-stores now-housing that included both Bullseye and the IK A (what everyone called the maze-like Box where Billy Joe lived, because of the letter missing from its blue and yellow sign). Billy Joe was with Alec when he caught the snake, but Billy Joe didn’t know how to swim so he wasn’t much help. He just sat on the rocks with his fishin’ pole and yelled a lot while Alec fought with the thick cord of seething black muscle.

Ma was hoppin’ mad when he brought it home. He walked all the way from the crick with it, holding it firmly with his fist behind its intricately brindled spear-point of a head. The wet coils of its body spiraled around his arm and tickled his summer-bare back, but he didn’t let go. He wasn’t stupid.

“Alec!” Ma shrieked when he pushed through the front door curtain with it, tracking river mud over the rag rug that marked the beginning of their house as separate from the rest of Bullseye. “What on God’s green earth are you doing? That thing could kill you!”

Alec knew that, of course. That’s why he held the snake’s head so far from the tattered denim of his thigh, even though his arm was startin’ to ache somethin’ fierce and he really wanted to let it relax to his side.

He just also understood that the danger was the point. That the fact the snake could kill him was what made it interesting, and the fact that it hadn’t, even though he swam in that crick every day and had every summer he remembered, was what made it beautiful. He wanted to show that to his ma, to have her look at the writhing black scales and see that just because somethin’ was nasty didn’t mean it wasn’t marvelous, but he was small and he didn’t have the words for the hope that the snake unfurled in his chest so he just looked at his dirty toes and said, “I was bein’ careful, Ma, you ain’t gotta worry so much about me…”

She did worry about him, though. She always worried about him. She made him put the viper in an old paint bucket with steep slick slides, and then Pa carted it back to the crick after he got home from work. Through the curtain that separated his bedroom from the rest of the family, Alec heard them talking that night, trying to be too quiet for him to eavesdrop but not bein’ very good at it.

“That boy’s gonna get himself killed,” Ma said, worry in her voice but also certainty. Like she was takin’ notes on a prophesy, not given’ tongue to a late-night mother’s fear.

Pa didn’t respond for a while, and Alec stretched towards the edge of his bed closest to the hallway, afraid he was missing whatever Pa was trying to say. But when Pa finally spoke, Alec could hear him fine. His voice rumbled and if Alec didn’t know better - didn’t know that Pa was made out of the same hard stuff as the bricks he fired at the yard every day - he would have thought there was a crack in his father’s throat.

“C’mon, Angie. I know you want ‘im to stay soft an’ innocent forever, but you know how it is out there. He’s gonna be old enough to work in a few years, and old enough to get Conscripted a few after that. Maybe it ain’t the worst thing in the world for the boy to learn how to handle himself ‘round snakes.” There was a pause where Alec thought maybe he heard Ma laugh reluctantly. Then Pa added, in a somber voice, “a little dangerous ain’t the worst thing a man can be in this world, baby.”

Alec was twelve when men in black jackets came to the house with set jaws and open palms. He’d known things were tight, with Pa laid up with a broken leg and Ma’s cough gettin’ bad again, but he hadn’t known that his parents had pulled the ends of things together with help from the Shadow Brotherhood. He didn’t think they woulda ever told him, except he got sent home from school for fightin’ while his ma was still sweepin’ up the shards of one of the kitchen plates. There was a line of pale white around her finger where the gold band of her ring from Pa used to be.

He’d wanted to run after their rumbling black cars and tell them you couldn’t take stuff from folks just because you were big and they weren’t, but Ma stopped him with her hand on his shoulder, thin fingers like talons in the meat of it. She was way shorter than him, even then, but she was strong and he wasn’t in the habit of runnin’ away from things, so he let her stop him.

“Sometimes the world ain’t fair, baby, and there’s nothin’ you can do,” she said, wiping the tears from her cheeks with impatient hands. “And sometime’s fair ain’t kind.”

The men in black jackets had pulled down the curtain that served as a front door and it lay in a heap on the front rug, crumpled and splotched with muddy boot prints. Ma touched the smooth pale ring on her finger absentmindedly when she said, “If you play with snakes, Alec, you’re gonna get bit sooner or later. And it don’t do nobody a lick ‘a good to sit there rubbin’ your hand and actin’ like you didn’t know what you were gettin’ yourself into.”

She meant to warn him, he thought, of what happened when people like them stuck their heads up too far. When they reached out of the safety of their ramshackle hidey-hole and into the writhing pit that was power in the Borderlands. But Alec stared at the wreckage the Brothers had left behind and told himself that the best way to not get bit was to learn to be the snake.

At thirteen, Alec ran into the woods to get away from the comforting words that threatened to smother him at his mother’s funeral. Stickers tore at the nice crisp slacks he knew his Pa had borrowed from men in black jackets to buy for him, and rocks bit at his feet, still bare but at least scrubbed clean for the occasion. He ran until he reached the crick he and Billy Joe used to play in, before Billy Joe went off to work bricks. He’d tried to go work bricks, too, but his Pa had said he had to finish school.

And then Ma had died anyway.

There was a snake sunning itself on the rocks near the water. It was about six feet long and it was as black as deadly denim sitting on the blue stone. The sun sank into it like a void, reflecting back in so many different directions off the scales that it was like the snake was hardly gleaming at all, though Alec knew the scales shone.

He squatted a few strides away from it and watched it for a long time. Eventually he gave up on saving his pants and sat right down on the dusty rocks, whittling a stick with his pocket-knife and still staring. The snake was harmless, he knew; just a black snake enjoying the sun. Alec could waltz right up to it and snatch it behind the head if he wanted to, or even by the tail, and its bites could do nothing to him but hurt.

He thought maybe that was the snake’s problem. Because what was the point of persisting if you were harmless? What was an existence like that if not just waiting for something larger and stronger than you to run out of mercy?

After his mother died, Alec started getting into more fights at school.

He’d never been a good student, always brought home B’s and C’s in red ink on his test sheets, but he’d never been much trouble, either. His teachers liked him, his classmates liked him, and when kids called him a “Boxer” and mocked the well-mended holes in his jeans, he tended to just put in his headphones and keep walking. He’d only ever got in fights on other people’s behalf before. But there’s only so much a boy can take on the chin before he starts to rattle his tail.

He warned them first, sure. He said, in his calm and quiet way, in the voice of a boy who was loved at home and always got read stories as a kid, “Y’all best quit yer yammerin’ or I’m gonna have to make ya regret it.”

He warned them first, but they didn’t listen, because folks like that never do. Folks like that understand a fist to the face and not much else, and a fist to the face is what he gave them.

Of course he got called into the office, and the woman with a too-high collar called his pa, and his pa came to the school to look disappointed and dusty and say, “You know you ain’t s’posed to fight them kids, no matter what they say.”

To which Alec responded, “Ain’t I? Way I see it, this town could do with a whole lot more fightin’ back.”

And Pa didn’t have anything to say to that and he had to go back to the brickyard before his boss “went and found somebody that would be happy to have this job, mark my words,” and so that was the end of that.

Pa didn’t bring up the fighting again, and Alec practiced in the woods, watching the black snakes and the copperheads and the rattlers until he was quiet and quick and venomous as them. Billy Joe even found time to come out sometimes, his muscles swelling into manhood from his time in the brickyard, and the two of them would spar until they had bloody lips and shirts dripping sweat.

Alec’s knuckles split and bruised until they hardened, flat callouses where his ma had known baby-smooth skin. Every once in a while, Pa would try to tell him that fighting didn’t make a man, but he was half-hearted about it. He was a man who had lost his wife to these wastes, and if he was losing his son, at least it wouldn’t be apathy that killed him. And besides, the fights at school stopped when Alec kept winning them, and if he was out punching trees in the woods, at least he wasn’t doing worse. It wasn’t Pa’s fault that he never thought about the fact you could do both at the same time.

By fifteen, Alec had learned all that school could teach him about the world, and he walked out halfway through math class. Tears ran down Pa’s face when he found out, but Alec had his bag packed, standing in the doorway when Pa got back from the brickyard, and there wasn’t an argument he could make to turn back time. Alec was a head and a half taller than Pa, quick and strong and mean, and he loved his old man but they both knew there was no point in pretending Pa could stop him.

Besides, the old man’s cheeks were sunken and his knuckles bulged through thin skin and Alec ate far too much for someone who didn’t bring home any money. So the men embraced, and Alec smiled so he wouldn’t lose his nerve, and Pa touched his jaw tenderly and said, “pit viper,” just like Ma used to. And then Alec walked out with his bag slung over his shoulder before Pa could see him start to cry.

Alec didn’t go to work at the brickyard.

He was the son of simple folk. Good folk who did their part and worked hard and told him stories at night about a better world where nothing had ever been nuked and nobody was lurking over the Border waiting to drop more bombs on them. They told him that if he kept his head down and worked hard, things would be good. Fifteen years and they’d never lied to their son, except about that.

Alec was the son of builders and creators and the sort of people who watched snakes sun themselves in corners and said, “ain’t he beautiful? He keeps the mice away and he never bothers nobody.”

But he was not a builder. He was not a black snake laid like a crack in the foundation, docile and content to make the world a little bit better for everybody else until somebody got slap-happy with a broom handle or went out drunk with a pistol to blow him away.

He was something sharper than that. Something less willing to go down without a fight. Something less helpful.

He brought his hardened knuckles and wide mouth used to split lips and the rims of cool bottles and he went to the cages behind Bruiser’s, where a man could earn a good living as long as he was prepared for a shit life. There was a sign-in sheet for fighters, and when he shed his shirt to step in line for it, he also shed the name his Ma had rested lovingly on his head with soft kisses.

“Viper,” he said to the man logging new contenders for the betting books. “Call me Viper.”

His first paycheck he sent to his pa. His second, too, and his third, and most of the ones after that, until he knew his old man could move out of Bullseye and into a nice house downtown. Until he knew Pa could quit at the yard, and get his groceries without having to choose between sweet potatoes and eggs, and buy shoes if there was gonna be a funeral.

A bit though, he held back for the tattoo. It was an endless gordian knot of lithe black bodies in bold ink, twisting and writhing up his legs, around his torso, down his arms, with the tips of black tails flicking out at a wrist here, and behind his ears there. He got fangs inked onto his face, too, not wanting to risk snakebite piercings in the cages, not wanting his reminder of strength to be just another weakness for cruel hands to snag on.

Then he brought the rest of the money he’d made - enough for a boy’s new pants, and a mended wall, and food through Pa’s time laid up with a broken leg - and he folded it in his pocket and walked with it to the center of town. He’d been near here a few times before, when he was a boy, and Alec, but he was neither of those things now, and he saw the world with new eyes. Harder eyes.

The men in black jackets sat smoking on their porch, and he walked up to the biggest of them; a man he’d seen around town sometimes and knew to be dangerous. He handed over the money and said, “This is everythin’ my Pa owes, and I want you to take it and know I don’t owe ya nothin’ before I say what I’ve gotta say.”

The yellow-eyed man looked him over, curious, and took the money. “Alright, then. You don’t owe me nothin’.”

“Good,” Viper said, chin jutted, fangs less a threat and more a reminder he could bite if he had to. “Because I came to say I want one of them jackets.”

Madeline White is a farmer and artist living in rural NY with her partner and horses. By day she squeezes wool art and animal care into the space left over from her corporate grind, and by night she writes grimdark fiction as a break from her cottagecore reality. She has work in Sincerely, Departed by Voices from the Mausoleum, and can be found on Instagram and TikTok as @light_in_the_grimdark and Twitter as @LightInGrimdark