There is a little girl who lives in the belly of a snake at the bottom of the garden. It is a long, scaly thing with a great pale belly that stays close to the ground, and a great brown back that twists and curls, sucking its writhing form deeper beneath the wet ground where the leaves lay moist and moulding from last winter.

They say her Daddy put her there, fed her to it himself, skewered like fresh meat at the end of his rake. They say he still cries when he finds her clothes down in tatters and threads across the fenceposts. They say the mother tried once, to hunt the monster, to mount its head and stuff it in the shed, as if a corpse’s relic makes for any justice.

The snake has her too: she carries its venom the same way her husband does, thinking the childhood immunity granted by the two pinpricks at her thigh flows through him the same way it does her. Her little girl remains in the snake’s belly, hissing with her soft voice and smelling with her soft skin, curled in on itself in the damp crevices of the dark.

There is a little girl who lives in the belly of a snake in the bottom of the garden. He says she is happy there. And she supposes, in this cavernous hallway that is warm and wet and pink-fleshed and armored in scales, that it is more home than the embrace of the man who waits outside, sat on his porch with a bloodied rust-red rake behind him, and a polished gun in his lap.