Ian 4

Ian,

I was never very good with first impressions.  

When a snake bites you, you make an incision across the skin, from puncture to puncture point.  If the bite is in an area that you can reach with your mouth, you draw the blood from the wound orally and spit it out in rapid succession.  If it’s on the extremities, you have an increased chance of survival.  The object is to remove as much of the snake’s venom as you can before it is processed by the respiratory system or enters the brain.  Adam says all that is an old wive’s tale, but Nick swears it works, and here we are with no doctors around and I don’t even like hiking and what do we both do?

The snake, somehow blameless and only following his nature, might deliver to us some collective genetic memory stored in it’s poison that makes us both certain of the travels of the life of all reptiles, from a world of violence to a world of submission.  It’s a joke, see?  It looks back with its slit eyes and smiles to ask, “Did you really need those legs anyhow?  I mean, I don’t.”

Where were you bitten?  I think mine must’ve been here, on the arm, in the place I would have gotten a tattoo if I had one at all, and had been born a sailor.  I think I was, once, but the tattoo is gone, and the snake found me while we slept on the floor of this prison.  I won’t live very long now, because the venom will be close to my heart, and time will be very short, and it doesn’t seem like I was bitten first.  Your eyelids are already flickering dim, but I have my fingers on your ankle, and we can make a circle if I’m well enough.

The point of the circle is to become a dragon.  

No one came for you, but I knew where you were.  The stove never worked there, because you were a ghost and couldn’t fix it.  The bathroom had blue tiles.  If you could operate any of the knives, you would have killed yourself.  It was hot in the summer, and cold in the winter.  Clyde was supposed to come, and he never did.  I spent the winter there.  I hurt a boy...don’t fall asleep yet.  If you do, I think we might die.

The point of the circle is to become a dragon.  

Dragons, they don’t die.  They just start again from nothing, or maybe nowhere.  And you’ve been that, and there, if anything, or anywhere.  It should have been an angel that did it, and I’m...not an angel.  But I play one on TV.  Snakes, and their relative existence to me or any other woman on the planet, are connected intrinsically by the root to the desire to look at a person whom I’ve never met, and put my mouth on the freshest wound they have bleeding.  But I am so very much a brother’s keeper kind of girl.

I really don’t know what all this fuss is about, I mean you seem fine.  The light from hall comes down clean like a blade, and I hear you in the bathroom coughing up the phlegm from your bronchitis.  The color it is would probably match your eyes.  From where I’m curled under blankets and sweating into my hair, I can feel my heart pounding a promise to all snakes on earth: I can do better.  Don’t leave me alone here, please, even if I am crazy.  

Love,

Annik