My mom once told me, “You’re not pretty—you know that, right?” When I asked her through stinging tears why she would say that, she said, “Well, you have a horse face.” I was twelve.
She also taught me the names of all the constellations. On the nights my stepfather filled the house with liquor and smoke and she needed to get away from him, we’d camp together in the yard. Memories of her eyes: stars. I know they were the reflections from our camping lantern, her front-shattered cell phone, her cigarette lighter. You know that click of a cigarette lighter? That is the sound as the curtain of stars ticks down new degrees toward the horizon while we dozed side by side.
But in the mornings, I’d wake alone. I’d go inside, climb the stairs, and find her asleep in his bed, like our night with the stars never happened. Once, the tent collapsed from the weight of dew overnight, and I woke feeling suffocated, peeling the slick vinyl from my skin. She laughed at me from his upstairs bedroom window. I tried to laugh along. She said, “You’re doing that thing with your buck teeth again. Don’t smile like that.”
I did have friends. We traded horror stories: Stephen King books, Cryptkeeper tales, that Ally’s parents were getting divorced. That Tim’s mom beat him within an inch of his life at Thanksgiving when all four grandparents found him masturbating in the kitchen near the food. That my mom liked to call me names when I least expected it, especially when I was feeling tender toward her.
After graduation, Tim and Ally went straight to university, the same one. We didn’t have the money for me to go to college, and my mom knew I was sad. One day I came home, and she had a present waiting for me. A large white box with air holes along the top.
When I opened the flaps, out jumped the most precious potbellied pig, black and white with the sweetest pink nose. It wore a collar with a bell and a bejeweled nametag. I ran to my mom and hugged her. I could feel her body shaking. I thought she was crying, too. I thought she was moved. But she was trying to hold in laughter.
“What?” I asked. She flipped over the pig’s nametag so I could see that it was read Victoria. My name.
A few days later, I packed the pig in the white box and boarded a Greyhound bus to Maine, where Ally and Tim’s college was. They’d told me about this agricultural center nearby. For extra money, some students counted mealworms; others dyed chicken feathers for party store boas; others bred colorful toads in a room kept at 110 degrees, with manmade waterfalls, poisonous flowers, and songs from The Jungle Book playing through big, waterproof speakers. When I called, the boss said they needed a full-timer, and the job came with a bonus: a furnished tiny house behind the building so I could be on call during the night.
The first day, my boss, Gerry, led me back to what felt like a high school lab room with one long green wall. He asked me what size my hands were, and when I held them up as if to say, “I don’t know anything about my own hands,” he dragged in a crate of extra-large, lavender vinyl gloves and a metal welder’s helmet with a full-face mask.
Gerry snapped the helmet on my head and gestured to the green wall. Through the side windows, light was streaming in, making patterns like waves. My breath was steaming up the mask. When I wiped it away, I saw that the ripples were snakes. It wasn’t a wall but an enormous aquarium, filled to the brim with them, like green water slithering itself into knots. It seemed snakes were splitting themselves down the middle to create more snakes. I fell back, and Gerry caught me like he was used to new workers losing their balance.
“Here’s the aquarium ladder.” He climbed three metal rungs to the lip of the tank. A frenzy of tails coiled around his arm to hug him. “One at a time, you’ll bring them out and milk them. Wear five pairs of gloves and their fangs won’t penetrate. Keep the mask on and their venom won’t blind you.”
He demonstrated what milking the venom entailed just once. He grabbed a snake from the tank and held it over a bowl. He squeezed his thumb and forefinger on either side of its head, and a long reddish dribble plopped into the bowl. There was a squeak. “You’ll do a hundred, sometimes a hundred and fifty snakes a day. The venom we collect here is used in blood pressure medications. It’s important work.” I nodded, and he pinned something to my shirt. It was a nametag: Victoria.
Through my whole first day, I fixated on that nametag. I saw it in the reflection of the snaketank. I heard its edge rubbing against my smock, plastic against rubber. Climbing the aquarium ladder again and again, I saw it jump in time with my heartbeat. The reflecting, rubbing, jumping: it was my name, Victoria, in my mother’s voice.
When I went back to the tiny house that evening, I walked the pig along the river that ran adjacent to our tiny house. She was so smart, tilting her head at the strange shrimp that skittered along the surface of the water. I followed her eyes as they traced planes and satellites. She was very aware of heaven.
“I want to name you Galaxy,” I said. I pried her nametag from her collar, and she nuzzled into my hip, as if to say I see you, and you see me.
My mom used to tell me never be too good at a job because they’ll just give you more work, but the truth was I enjoyed milking the snakes. Soon I was milking two hundred snakes a day. I believed I was making a difference. They liked to get milked—they started wrapping themselves around my arms. I gave them names as I squeezed their green heads. One was named Shrimpy, one Ally, one Tim, one “Thanksgiving Masturbator” because it made me laugh and cry at the same time, and that was my predominant feeling at the time, that kind of crying laughter.
I must have started going too fast. I grabbed one from the tank and felt two long fangs penetrate all five layers of my lavender gloves.
I was dizzy before I got down the ladder. All I wanted to do was sleep. I stumbled out of the lab and into the field where my tiny house tilted and spun. The sky was full of cartoonish constellations in the shapes of shrimp and snakes. I was still wearing my welding helmet when I fell into my bed. Galaxy jumped onto my stomach and sniffed my head until I took it off. She kept snorting on my eyebrow. I was about to pass out when I felt her teeth bite down and tear a hole in the wet vinyl of my cheek—her commendable effort to wake me.
I told her I was just hallucinating because of the snake bite. She told me that the urgent care on Main Street was probably open. I thanked her and drove there on the agricultural center’s small tractor. When I arrived, a kindly doctor laid me down on a table and suited up. He asked what I wanted to do about my face, and he was so kind and attentive that all my pain from home and my mom rushed forward. For six hours, he listened compassionately as he worked to heal me.
“I’m done,” he said. He handed me a mirror.
Instead of stitches, I saw that he had given me a tattoo. He wasn’t a doctor. I was in a tattoo studio. The hole in my cheek was now the black eyeball of a horse.
“A horse face,” he said. “To help you remember your mom, now that you are far away.”
My body shuddered as though she were under my skin, shaking with that cry-laugh that last day I held her close and thought she’d been emotional over loving me. The mirror shook. The horse staring back at me looked like Barbie’s horse, a palomino the color of light caramel, her blond mane flowing and sumptuous. Then it was just my one leg shaking. I looked down and saw Galaxy was there, humping my leg as if to say, You are here, and I am here.
She and I were a big star on the map of this safe place: You are here.
I felt a calm rush through me. I gently placed Galaxy in my saddle bag and maneuvered my way out of the tattoo studio through the clapboard doors and onto the evening street, where tumbleweeds spun.
“Look up,” Galaxy said.
Above us were two bright constellations. One was in the shape of a small horse—Equuleus, the brother of Pegasus, born from a blow of Poseidon’s trident. The other was sparkling Serpens—the snake.
EQUULEUS [stars rearranging]: They feared me before they admired me.
SERPENS: [stars sliding across blue velvet]: Every healer comes through me.
EQUULEUS: Be speed. Take flight.
SERPENS: Shed. Heal.
TIM: You’ve been in town for three weeks already? Come stay with me.
ALLY: OMG, I have been so worried about you. Your mother has been calling me. At least send her a note to say you’re fine.
GERRY: You have been our best snake-milker.
VICTORIA: Mother, the stars are so bright here. I won’t be coming home.
GALAXY: Look—the horizon isn’t fixed. It splits and splits snakelike, making new roads in the air.
I gallop toward it, my skin shedding from my body, fluttering behind me like a saddle blanket made of stars.
Diane Zinna is the author of the novel The All-Night Sun (Random House) and Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss, a forthcoming craft book on the art of telling our hardest stories. Her short work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Brevity, CutBank, MER, and elsewhere. Since 2020, she has led the free online class Grief Writing Sundays. Meet her there or at dianezinna.com.
Image: shutterstock.com
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Heavy Feather Review 