By Lori Brack

Once there lived a girl who went after all her tasks as if she were killing snakes. Pulling up the covers at night, dusting crumbs off her lap after breakfast, stroking the chin of her pet cat—all difficulty. When the girl walked to school, she felt her feet in her shoes. When she stood at the easel set up by the teacher, she peered so deep into the thick paper, she could not lift a brush because it was so heavy with color. 

But she was a lucky girl, too, because her mother did all the work—cleaning and cooking, washing and baking. Her father went into the wide world to keep the house stocked and his family fed. 

One day, the girl’s mother stopped doing the labor as she always did, larded with scorn for anyone who did not toil equally. She went out. The woman left in her mother’s place carried a fat satchel. The girl asked if she would permit a peek inside. She asked as if her tongue was glass, taking care to pronounce each word just so.

“You may,” said the woman who was not her mother, the woman who looked familiar, who smelled like the aunts. “Be careful, because what’s inside may not be meant for girls.”

The girl, with care not to wrinkle her clothes or dent the carpet, not to leave a trace as her mother taught, knelt on the floor and clicked open the latch. So far in her life, the insides of bags and closets, spaces under tables, and hollows inside lilac bushes held safety or beauty, like the little brass horse on the shelf in her mother’s closet, the cherry-sprigged handkerchief folded at the bottom of her grandmother’s Sunday purse, the white and lavender perfume of April. So, she plunged her hand into the woman’s satchel, expecting the same kind of treasure. 

Her fingers encountered something wispy and soft, big as a sigh. When she drew it out, a black spider poised on her palm with all its legs, blacker than any darkness and delicate as a baby’s hair. The spider looked at her with its black eyes and eyes and eyes. She looked back until she couldn’t bear it, until a barb rose in her throat, and she shook the spider off her hand. She couldn’t stand to watch where it landed, but she did look up at the woman, who regarded her with what could have been cool condemnation or calm acceptance. 

The girl who went at all tasks as if she were killing snakes sat awhile, the apparatus of her mind turning, and tried to decipher the meaning of the woman’s gaze. She settled on disapproval because she knew well how it felt to be looked at like that, but this did not stop her from putting her hand back into the gloom of the satchel a second time. Her fingers found a hard disk, smooth and thick in the middle. She brought out a peppermint, red stripes blurred into the white, its edges rough. She saw it was a candy, already sucked. It bore the signs of some other mouth, faintly sticky and furred with lint. She sniffed the peppermint, and around its sweet aroma detected the breath of a crone, like the inside of a sock. 

The woman’s expression did not alter as the girl flung the mint from her hand and heard it click onto the floor and roll under the beige sofa, ordinary as mist. She would have liked to unwrap a fresh candy and pop it into her mouth to get the taste of disapproval out. So, once more she put her hand into the satchel’s open maw, hoping to encounter something she could use. After a thorough rummage through all the dark corners, she closed her fingers around a cool and slender something, no thicker than her girlish thumb. What is it? she wondered, hoping it might be a stick of horehound for her to lick, and so she drew it out and out and out, its length stretching the longer she pulled.

It was the color of the undersides of leaves, and its skin shimmered and rippled in the daylight. At last, when it was thoroughly outside the satchel, the snake, whose head came at the end, turned to her with eyes blurred by a milky haze. The skin around its neck was loose and beginning to dull. It frightened her, but she felt sorry for its blindness.  

Just at this moment, she heard her mother’s step outside. The woman whose satchel it was, in a flurry of scent the girl nearly recognized, seized the snake and swallowed it in a flash, the last flick of green tail just passing the woman’s lips as the girl’s mother came through the door. Then, just as quickly, the woman snatched her bag, nodded at the mother without a backward glance, and disappeared into the daylight.

You have noticed that though she had practiced all her life for such an eventuality, the girl did not kill the snake, even though she had rehearsed such murder as she tied her shoes, sipped her milk, and returned her library books. So it is a good time to wonder whether the snake was ever in danger, even as it was eaten, and to speculate on the identity of the woman with the satchel. 

What if the girl kept the spider, the peppermint, and the snake a secret from her mother forever, exactly as she is doing now? And what if, in her hand, she might conceal—like a small magician—another thing she discovered and palmed? What if it is a shiny silver coin that pulses and vibrates, a charm she will hang onto for decades because she knows it will pay for her own valise and all its contrary impedimenta, the true apparatus of her sex?