Horror - Novelette

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. The Slithering Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

THE SLITHERING

A small boy pointed an orange laser pistol at his sister. He squeezed the trigger. A spinning light flashed as the kazoo-like sound zipped. The sister fell, thrashing on the sunbaked asphalt amid the mysterious fluid stains, the fading black rubber marks, and the reflective bits of long-ago shattered glass.

“Get up. You’ll get dirty and then you’ll have to explain to your father why he doesn’t have a good daughter that stays clean and minds her manners,” a woman said. She had a square face and wore a baby blue shorts and vest combination, featuring a matching hat with a wide brim. Plastic bangles in a rainbow of shades jangled at the wrists.

The shot daughter stood up as told, but being good was somebody else’s business. She pulled a pink laser pistol from behind her back. “You die now, doody brains.” She squeezed and the light flashed while the weapon roared its zipping cry.

The boy, the brother, the doody brains, took the shot and stumbled. Like any brother playing a game of imagination, succumbing to his sister is not the objective. He did not fall.

“I shot you, pee face!” sister screams and squeezes again.

There is mugginess on the air. Stagnant around the hazy gasoline atmosphere.

“You two, behave!” the mother shouted and started around the side of her long Cadillac Seville. She wore brown leather sneakers, sensible mom shoes, beneath the too blue outfit.

The boy groaned and grunted, the invisible laser beams filled him with action. He began shaking, moaning, tongue out, a full-fledged standing seizure, grandstand mal. Slowly his arm rises and the orange laser pistol points at girl.

“I shot you, dink, doodie, pee brains!” The third kazoo siren called out and before the boy could squeeze in retaliation. He stumbled backward. Here he was, the victim of imaginary intergalactic pistols at dawn.

His body continued beyond the acting point and slammed with a thump into the side of a silver Chevrolet Cruze.

“Michael, you little… I’m so sorry about that. His father’s in the hospital and they’re just acting out, the little shits. I think they’re scared,” the mother said.

“Am not!” shouted the boy, doody brains, pee face, dink, as he rose from the side of the Chevy. The steel body thumped outward in thanks, contours jumping into uniform. The magic of conglomerating plastics with steel.

The address brought Kaci Moonie out of a thoughtful trance, back down from memory lane’s reverie. Seeing the brother and sister and the woman in her baby blue outfit—easy and affordable fashion for moms the world over—carried with it a flashback.

It might’ve been a false memory or it might’ve been a hint into a life forgotten. She saw herself and boy with a finger gun, outside a similarly bleached gas station. There was a mother in a lime green jumper and python print sandals. High quality fakes. The woman called to her, Eve, you’ll dirty your Sundays.

Kaci smiled at the real-time mother. “No worries, it’s a rental.”

The woman nodded and then gathered her family. The glass door littered with ice cream, potato chip, and energy drink advertisements opened and a steel bell jangled. Adam Coots stepped out wearing a curious frown. His eyes followed the Cadillac as it rolled away from the lot before settling back on his fiancé.

He’d attempted to explain the importance of retaining approval from his parents, but mostly the explanation failed to manifest into anything more than blabbering. Kaci didn’t mind, this was a show of empathy on her part. The kind of understanding that suggested a workable future, a long one.

To ease the strain he put on himself, she’d attempted to explain how she didn’t truly understand, but wanted to understand. Families, real families, were a subject you learned easiest firsthand. Otherwise, it was important to be open and subjective.

To Adam one family was like another, mostly, and he smiled as if to suggest, what’s to understand, they’re all weird.

 Given up at the age of four, Kaci’s adopting parents divorced and she began a steady bounce. New girlfriends and wives, new boyfriends and husbands. In and out of homes until college. She appreciated Adam’s need to keep his family happy because she didn’t have anything left of her real family. Sometimes when she longed to know her past, she ran a gentle touch over the aged and stretched ovular scare tissue on her wrist.

This was from her first life, the life before adoption. She knew this because neither faux-parent placed blame of the mark on the other faux-parent. Old times, a mark of mystery, the period that fluttered the first fixed memories. Still, tidbits lapped at the shore now and then, topics laced and littered with information connecting reality and potential for imagination.

Since when are memories trustworthy anyway?

“Ready to go?” Adam asked as he rubbed an absent touch to his forehead.

“That bite still bothering you?” Kaci asked and pulled the pump nozzle from the tank. The pump’s computer printed out a receipt while she screwed the plastic cap into place.

“Yeah, I feel like it’s growing. Probably stop growing if I could stop touching it. I can’t. I’m trying not to touch it at all. It’s like have a canker on my face.”

Kaci imagined Adam reaching a long tongue to his forehead as she snatched the receipt from the pump.

“Do you really think your parents will like me?”

“How could they not?” he said and started the car. It was so quiet that he’d double jogged the ignition twice since leaving the airport parking lot.

“Umm, I blurt out horrible things when we hump,” she said.

He smiled and shook his head.

She continued, “Oh, sometimes if I eat too much cheese I get really gross gas. I’m impatient with stupid people and yet, I obsess over affluent dullards that make sex tapes and give their children directions or numbers for names. Oh god, they’re not like Trump supporters, are they?”

“I doubt it, to them all politics aside from their own is devil business. No, they’re just… besides, you’re no different in that stuff. I mean cheese can give anybody gas.” Adam reached over and squeezed her knee as he drove. “Granted, your ass does have a way with poison that Mengele would commend.”

“Adam!”

He took his hand back. “Sorry, that was the wrong kind of funny. But seriously, cool it, ok? They’ll like you. You’re very likeable.”

Outside the window was a world of trees and little else. A crow perched on a high branch staring down at a seagull picking at something in the ditch. More trees. Another crow. More trees. A rabbit hopped into the long grass and out of view. More trees.

“Fine, but what about animals. They hate me, only cats and Jody’s pot-bellied pig put up with me.”

“No, remember that African thing at the zoo?”

Kaci rolled her eyes. They’d gone to the San Francisco while visiting the city for a week. In a glassed-in viewing area, an entire family of small animals followed her along the glass, stopping when she did, scooting along to catch up when she moved, and whining when she left.

“Right, how could I forget the badger thingies?”

“Meerkats, weren’t they?”

“No, it was something else. Who cares? What I remember were those monkeys. Remember the monkeys?” Kaci reached along his thigh and squeezed the tip of his dick. The monkeys had been frantic, horny with action.

“Hey, get out of here,” Adam said slapping her hand.

 Kaci retracted her touch. “Ok, but I need to know. So stop changing the subject. You never want to talk about them and in two hours, I’m going to meet them, so spill.”

He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Fine,” she said in a pout, but quickly regained focus. “Let’s play a game. I’ll tell you something funny about my mom and you tell me something funny about your mom, deal?”

Adam remained quiet.

“Deal?”

“Fine.”

Kaci began. Her mother for the purposes of her stories was her faux-mother. Only in her head did the term faux-mother mean anything, outwardly, she put the old times away. Things of thought, not expression. “Ok, so when I was really small I doodled because I saw my mom doodle on things. All of her doodles were of animals. In her planner, on pizza boxes, in the telephone book, and anywhere else boredom met blank space. No big deal.

“In the second grade we had to supply our own workbooks. I’d filled mine with my name. I was so proud of my smooth printing that I covered every page with Kaci Leila Moonie. It was only a month into school, so I needed another workbook and I thought my mom would be upset about the wastefulness, or something. She used to get pissy about things, all things. Anyway, so I started looking around in the basement for paper I could staple into my booklet and I found a box of my mom’s college stuff. I found binders loaded with paper. I pulled them out and her familiar animals were in the corners of most of the pages, but they were different.

“Every single horse, monkey, cat, dig, pig, elephant, and lizard had a tiny penis. No balls, just a tiny baby penis for every animal. Ha!”

“Then what?” Adam asked either missing the humor or looking to delay his turn with the metaphorical conch.

“Itsy-bitsy penises are funny, although I didn’t think it at the time. I yelled at her and tried to relay a message my teacher gave to some the boys in class that wrote in textbooks. She got really mad at me and then feeling stupid about, I think, took me shopping for more school supplies. It’s not really the point. The point is the tiny penises were something funny my mom did. Now your turn.” Kaci was nearly out of breath when she finished.

“Is your mother a pervert?”

“No more than me! Now your turn, something small and funny.”

Adam grimaced. “Fine.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Fine! When I was a kid, I used to bowl in the league in town. My parents would drop me off and I’d go in and play games with the other kids. I’d gotten pretty good and in my third season, I was on the Rockets. Every year the league manager mixed up the teams based on how good or bad players were the year before, and if there were any new players, he sprinkled them throughout.

“Like I said, I was on the Rockets and we were in the semi-finals and my parents finally decided they’d come to watch a game. I saw them at the start, they waved and then I didn’t see them again until after I’d finished my final frame. I was good, but not the best, so it was the ninth to throw. The score was close and then the last boy on the other team, the Grizzlies, got up and threw. A boy on my team nudged me with a smile. A finger guided my sightline to a pair of weirdoes with their faces planted on the floor, sliding around every time the pins crashed.

“I thought I would die. It was my parents and there was my mother in her stupid snakeskin purse and my dad in his filthy work boots sliding around the floor feeling the vibrations or something. They’re freaks in public, at home it wasn’t so weird… or, I guess I didn’t know any better.”

“Oh God, that’s fucking crazy. What did you do?”

“I ran. I found out at school that we won and then next weekend the Rockets beat the Giant Spruces for the championship, even down a player. I had to hear it at school. I haven’t bowled since.”

“Christ, that’s nuts,” Kaci said understanding why her fiancé avoided vocalizing his past. Still, they were to marry and she was about to meet these people.

“I know.”

“Are they like wacko hippies? Were they getting energy from the floor?”

“Something.”

Adam fell silent as Kaci mulled it over. Her eyes returned to the outdoors. “You still owe me a funny one. That was just sad and weird. I bet kids made fun of you.”

“No, never. Nobody said a world. The kid that nudged me was homeschooled, so I guess he was the only one that didn’t recognize my parents. I think people were afraid of my family.”

“Ok, now you’ve got to tell me everything. I mean Jeeesus.”

Adam stared forward and focussed on the road.

“Not gonna offer a nugget for free? I get ya. We’ll go like Hannibal and Clarice, we’ll make the lambs scream.

“I have a sad one I’ve never told anybody but my mom. After my parents divorced, they both jumped into new relationships. Well, my dad had been secretly with his girlfriend for months and my mom wanted an even score. She started dating this guy from her work. I don’t know how it started. He was with the security company that did stuff at her office I guess.

“Anyway, they’d been together for months and I kept jumping back and forth between Mom and Dad. And one day, Gary, the security guy, was there and my mom said he was going to spend the night. No big deal, he slept over and it was fine. We played Clue and then I had a bath and went to bed.

“In the middle of the night I got up because I heard something funny in the living room. The sound was super weird at the time. I had to be quiet in case it was my mom because she’d order me right away back to bed. It wasn’t my mom. It was Gary, and he was watching television and shaking. I only saw his silhouette around the light from the video on the screen.

“All through school we had teachers telling us right and wrong and to tell someone if there was something that made us feel bad. So I ran to my mom’s bedroom when I saw myself on the screen. Gary had a hidden camera in the bathroom and filmed my bath time. I was nine.”

“Holy crow, that’s sick! I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Adam said. His expression was valid given the news and Kaci appreciated that, but the bath time thing could’ve been so much worse. “That’s disgusting. What did you mother do?”

“I whispered the story to her and she sat up and whispered back to me and I repeated, Gary’s watching me in the tub and I’m naked. She didn’t understand, but she got up and flicked the light switch in the living room and Gary jumped up started and tried to yank up his pants. The goof fell down on the coffee table. He’d finished, the proof was all over a washcloth he’d used as a catcher’s mitt.

“Mom chased him out of the house and made me promise never to tell my father or I’d never get to see her again. I promised. I know it should probably bother me, but it doesn’t. I kind of feel sorry for Gary.”

“How, how could you possibly feel sorry for some pervert watching child pornography?” There was fury in the question.

“I doubt Gary would watch child porn if it wasn’t what he was attracted to, people don’t choose what they love. They just love it and it sucks for people that love the wrong things. Once you get over some great god law of masterful design, you’re left with the true imperfect things and the imperfect things they do. We’re like monkeys escaped from the zoo.”

“So you think your mother’s boyfriend should be allowed to record children in the bath tub?”

“Hell no! That’s not what I said. I said I feel sorry for Gary because what he loves is wrong and hurts people. He’s probably in prison or hurting someone and I bet he feels guilty, or at least he should feel guilty,” Kaci said, her gaze had returned to Adam’s face as he stared forward. The bump on his head had grown since the gas station. “Tons of people fight impulses all the time. Gary was an adult, there is not reason he couldn’t control impulses.” Kaci paused, then said, “That thing on your forehead is getting worse.”

Adam’s fingers explored with ginger touch. “Maybe it’s a stress bump, a manifestation of you meeting my parents.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Kaci patted Adam’s knee. “We won’t be making this trip often, will we?”

He shook his head.

“See, no biggie. Your turn, you owe me a funny story about your parents.”

He inhaled and exhaled in a huff. “All right,” he said and trailed off in thought, returning a breath before Kaci asked if he was still kicking. “When I was small we lived in a private community. I think it had to do with church or Jesus. This was before we moved to the farm.

“Our community had this tradition where we settled with ourselves for one month, like no outside contact at all. I think it was supposed to be a cleansing thing. A one-month commune vacation without leaving home. I was eight and it was the quiet month, October, and Dad went out to the shed every night. He said he had some huge project that needed finishing. I don’t remember what it was supposed to be because he wasn’t building anything.

“Now my mother was serious, mega serious about the month off, and she didn’t care that it was October and didn’t know a thing about baseball.”

Kaci laughed recognizing where the story led. She and Adam were the same age. October, when they were eight, was also the same October the Toronto Blue Jays flew into Atlanta and left with the World Series Championship in pocket. Kaci grew up just outside Toronto and Adam grew up in southeastern Georgia.

“As a kid, I took the word as truth, every story my parents and the pastor drove home from the community’s version of the Bible. I believed there was a Hell, like real fire and torture Hell, for anyone not following the rules.

“I went out to the shed to ask my father a question and there he was, disobeying the rules of the community and God. I rushed back to the house to tell my mother that Satan had my father. She raged and stomped outside. She always wore something in snakeskin, shoes, belt, purse, always at least one thing, usually more. For years, she had these cowboy boots of black and green skin. She wore those as she stomped out of the house in her underwear and a t-shirt. I thought for sure my father was a dead man. I thought she’d kill him and cook him for supper and his soul was about to shoot right down to Hell.

“She got to the window and I think he saw her shadow or sensed her fury because he shot to his feet and instead of yelling at him, she turned away. I followed her out onto the gravel road and down to where the pastor lived.”

Adam shook his head and smiled at the thought of his mother in her white underwear, baggy shirt, and big boots. “She charged into the pastor’s house and started into a tirade, my father was outside, catching up, calling for her to stop, begging her. My mother quit shouting. I was so scared about what the pastor was going to do. I think in most cases the penalty for disobeying the laws was a shunning, a big deal in small communities. But the pastor was quiet and Don Sutton was in the air, explaining through the pastor’s tiny radio that John Smoltz had to face Roberto Alomar to start things off in the top-half.”

Kaci clapped. “Ha! That’s great, then what happened?”

Adam frowned. “We moved a month later. My mother thought the whole community was full of liars and heathens. I never liked the farm, but at least I got to go to regular school and take science classes.”

Kaci looked out the window again as a memory fluttered. This one seemed more false than most, her imagination piecing together the old time before with bits of Adam’s story. She saw herself and a man in a shed full of cages, cheering on voices from a portable TV. The man had a lumpy head and dark yellow eyes.

She shivered at the image. “How much longer?”

“An hour yet,” Adam said and he absently fingered the bump on his forehead that had become something of a nub. “Your turn to tell a story.”

“You’ve met my parents, it isn’t the same.”

“I met them once and your mother was drunk and your father was busy trying to pick-up the college girls.”

Kaci sniggered. “They were both drunk, I’ll have you know. I don’t think they’d seen each other for close to a decade. One of the nannies always dropped me off for visitations. Also, what grown man can turn blind to young women in graduation robes? Super sexy, right? Maybe he’s really into bright minds.”

At the time she did not find her parents amusing, in fact she found them both painfully embarrassing. Dwelling on the past had gone rotten. She had a few extra tidbits and pushing Adam too much never worked. Instead of forcing chatter, she increased the volume on the radio and averted her gaze back out the window as the airwave friendly rock, pop, and R&B songs filled the car.

Kaci leaned her forehead against the window. Tree after tree zoomed past in green and brown blurs. There were crows and gulls, some roadkill, and ditch trash, but little else to look at. Suddenly, as if dropped from the sky, the trees stopped and asphalt and cement filled her vision.

“Hey, is this the town where you went to school?”

She turned to Adam as she asked. He rubbed at the nub. It had grown more. His eyes had reddened and his cheeks paled.

“Yes,” he whispered.

“You can’t be that nervous, are you?”

He remained quiet.

“Come on, talk to me.”

He cleared his throat. “I haven’t been home in so long.”

Kaci rubbed his leg. “I know, but…”

“No! You don’t know. When I went off to college they told me they never wanted to see me again. They told me I wasn’t one of them and that I was a disappointment to them, and to God. You don’t know what it means to me that they called. Remember we did the cards and I did my parents’ without you. I told them all about you and how we would be married and I really wanted their blessing and that I miss them.” A few tears rolled Adam’s cheeks as he spoke. “I knew you wouldn’t understand about that since your parents…”

Something snapped in Kaci. “I wouldn’t understand? My parents basically tossed me away. I don’t even know who they are! I miss the idea of real parents just as much as you miss your freaks!”

Neither spoke for a close to a minute.

Nickelback’s Chad Kroger moaned a motivational ballad about following dreams and Kaci broke into laughter. The rental cleared the final bits of town and resumed the treeline view.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing… everything. We are, your parents, Nickelback, the ninety-two Blue Jays and Braves, your bowling team, Gary, all of this. We’re bound to fail if we don’t loosen up about life.” Kaci leaned over and kissed Adam. “Also, once we’re back in the city, you’re getting that bump checked out.”

“Damn right I am. I thought it was a bug bite or a jumbo pimple or something, but, holy moley is it big.”

Kaci laughed again. “Holy moley?”

“Getting into the swing, my parents are deeply religious and swearing is not a good idea. My mother rammed soap bars into my mouth until I was seventeen and she only stopped because I left.”

“Holy Christ. I mean holy moley.”

Adam smiled. He wheeled the car from the pale two-lane highway onto a pale gravel road barely wide enough for two opposing automobiles, should they roll with their right-hand wheels in the grass. No traffic approached for the four-minute trip to the farm.

“Here we are,” Adam said, his voice was shaky.

Kaci gazed out to the wide-open space, the tall farmhouse, the small shed, the red barn in need of a paint job. She wanted to ask if there was a rule about red barns, a Biblical law perhaps, but she didn’t ask. The laneway was a little better than a half-kilometre and as they drew closer, both Adam and Kaci soaked in the ill repair of the place.

“Did it always look like this?” Kaci asked.

Adam shook his head and parked in front of the shed. He kicked open the door and hit the trunk release. “Oh, one thing. I’m about ninety-nine percent sure of it, but I’ll bet we’re sleeping in separate rooms. We’ll pretend that’s normal and…”

“Pretend that we haven’t bathed each other like kitty cats or that sometimes you like me to suck you off and put my fingers in…?”

“Cripes, enough,” Adam said. It wasn’t funny and the nub on his forehead throbbed, verging toward unbearably.

“I’m sorry. I’ll behave, but it’ll cost you when we get back.”

Adam ignored her and hopped out of the rental. Both started toward the trunk. They each had a small suitcase, Kaci thought it strange when they packed, but now understood it. Two suitcases was part of the ruse, the good Christian boy routine.

“Hey, what kind of church are they anyway?” Kaci asked as she followed her future husband toward his childhood home.

“Uh, was Pentecostal I think, but they pray from home. They did last I knew, it’s a little weird. The old church, I mean, the community one. It broke up for legal reasons a few years after we left.”

“Wait,” Kaci stopped, “why didn’t you get into this in the car?”

“I kind of hoped we’d crash, I think. Nothing serious, just that we’d never get here. I’m so nervous…”

“Yeah, fine, but what about your parents, it’s not like really scary stuff, just embarrassing, right?”

Adam turned to face the house. He couldn’t look at Kaci when he said it. “My parents are snake-handlers. I was a snake-handler growing up.”

“Fuck off,” Kaci whispered.

“No swearing, come on. It’s not as if they keep snakes in the house.”

Paint, chipped and peeling in long oblong strands, revealed greyed wood beneath the outer coats. Kaci glanced over Adam’s shoulder wondering if he should open the door that he must’ve opened about a million times, or simply knock. There was a note and he did neither.

Gone for night. Emergency out of town, make yourself and your friend at home. We will be back in the morning. Spare bed made up in sewing room.

“Weird,” Adam said. “They must’ve joined a new church or gotten in contact with the old family… crazy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You can’t have an emergency out of town unless you know someone out of town. My father has brothers, but they hadn’t talked since my mother and father went away. So he’d said, but that was like a million years ago.”

“Shall we? We can get all the swears and doing it out of our system,” Kaci joked.

Adam looked up at the stern and harsh house, built on laws and order, God’s word and Satan’s promises. The idea of defying the rules of the house gave giddy caterpillars in his belly the power to transform and flutter. He opened the door and held out a hand so that Kaci could enter first.

He leaned in to whisper as she stepped by. “I’m gonna fuck your brains out.”

Eyes bulged with anticipation as she brushed by, rubbing her ass on the front of his pants. Adam followed her inside. It started in the kitchen, the table and floor, and moved into the dining room, on the hardwood first, but then rolling about the thick knit rug. Finally stripped fully, they made for the living room and Adam’s eyes bulged as he erupted into Kaci’s wet chasm after twenty minutes of sweaty pumping.

Kaci raised from the couch, a brown corduroy monster from sometime in the seventies, and stepped toward her strewn underwear, her thighs roughened and sticky.

“What are you doing?” Adam asked.

Kaci looked back and saw Adam had his cock in his hand, glistening, attempting to ready himself for a round two. Furiously, he slid the conglomeration of his fluid and her fluid along the shaft and over the bulbous head.

“Aren’t we a little home-front horn doggy?”

“To the upstairs!” Adam shouted and Kaci chased behind him, naked, jiggling, and free of worry.

They started in Adam’s boyhood bedroom, moved then to the sewing room and the washroom. With a moan and a splash, they fell back sweaty and raw. Kaci sat on the can while Adam remained on the floor, her bangs clung to her forehead as if she’d climbed out of the pool, but she didn’t smell of chlorine. Instead, the fishy primordial scent coated them both like rejected perfume attempts.

She stood up. “Shower?” she asked.

He rubbed at the nub on his forehead. It was growing again. “Yeah sure, but there’s one more room.”

“What?” Kaci thought all the sex was great, but by the end, she’d begun to dry out on rub of things gone on long enough.

“Don’t worry,” he said as if reading her mind. “We’ll go slow.”

“Who are you?” Kaci asked and started the shower.

After a dutiful shower, Adam took Kaci’s hand and led her to his parents’ bedroom. The house possessed him with urgent need, he had to affront the past and cause the equivalent trouble he should’ve as a child, even if nobody would ever know.

Kaci lay back on the made bed. Adam crawled up between her legs and started a slow methodical tongue treatment. As much as they’d washed, he still tasted himself, vaguely, alongside her blooming glaze.

Looking about her while embracing the familiar lapping, rimming, pushing, Kaci scanned for photos or paintings, hoping for the small town kitsch she saw sometimes at flea markets. On the wall at the end of the bed was a Jesus with his arms out and palms up as if catching raindrops. Snakes wound his hands, shoulders, and neck. The image sent a shiver through her body and Adam took it as a sign that he’d hit something. He attacked without much success.

“My turn,” Kaci said and they traded spots.

He’d gotten hot dog hard but no more. Firm but without the essential bone for boning. Kaci snuggled next to him. They napped until late afternoon and she awoke rejuvenated. Adam was asleep and she slid down and took him in her mouth. He awoke and grew, as if dreaming of Popeye’s spinach.

“There it is,” she whispered and crawled atop and rode.

Adam moaned and his face scrunched in strange excruciating expressions.

“What? What?” Kaci asked, she’d stopped moving.

“Headache, but keep going, keep going,” he said rubbing his forehead with his right hand, her clitoris with the thumb of his left.

Kaci bounced in an effort to bring about quick finale, for him, hers could come another day. Twice was plenty already. It wasn’t quick, but it happened eventually, for both. His splash caused a sensational stir bringing about a wash of pleasure for her. She cried out and a door creaked closed behind them.

Adam moved his hand from his head and the nub was a full bulge. The skin had darkened from bright red to brown. Kaci screamed and rolled off Adam, instinctively clinching to hold in the sperm chowder trying to drip free.

 She grabbed for a towel and held it beneath her raw and tenderized lips. “Adam, your head… the door, too,” she gasped.

“Don’t worry it was only the closet. It’s an old house and we’re bouncing around.”

“Maybe we better take you to a…”

Adam folded his arms over his bare chest. “I’m not leaving until I talk to my parents. I have things to ask them, things I remember and don’t understand.” He fingered the bulge gently as he spoke. “I can’t go until I understand.”

Kaci didn’t argue, as it was obviously important and perhaps there was expired penicillin in the cupboard to hold him over until they returned to the real world.

Dressed and medicated with a Claritin and three antibiotic pills from a blue container dated almost three years earlier, Adam stood over the stove stirring the small pot of chilli he’d found in the refrigerator. It smelled divine, different, but perfect.

It tasted as good as it smelled.

Adam finished most of his bowl and leaned back registering the meat. “I think this is squirrel or badger.”

Kaci stopped and let that sink. She was hungry and it didn’t matter, not right then.

“Did you often eat little animals?”

“No, only on special occasions, Christmas, Easter, the Shedding.”

“The Shedding?”

“Snake thing, don’t worry. I’m thinking we’d best call it a night early, what do you say?”

“I’m not so tired, but I have a book. You feeling all right?”

“I’m tired, that’s all. We’ll use the rooms my parents deigned for us. They don’t need to know of the debauchery this afternoon… Imagine if they came home early and saw us. They’d never speak to me again.”

“But they didn’t. I can clean up. You can go on up, whenever.”

Adam finished and thanked her before retiring to bed with his suitcase. Kaci washed the dishes, went around straightening the sex bumped objects, fixed the sheets in the master bedroom, and finally visited the washroom before she went off to her plotted space in the sewing room.

She checked her cellphone off and on, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Then she checked the clock and finally set aside A Westlake Hard Case Crime paperback and killed the lamp. Sleep came quickly and dipped into the topic of the day, prior to all the fucking. The old times and her mostly trustworthy memory.

Sweltering, everything wore sheen as if a mist hovered beyond sight. The moisture came from within, sucked out by the impossible heat. Trees, rocks, grass, and dirt, sweat poured forth, and Kaci watched from little girl eyes as a young woman stood before a young man and rubbed his face while chains held his arms and legs firm to a wooden post. The sun overhead pounded fire onto the red world until a shadow stepped in and offered a slight reprieve to Kaci.

“Don’t think we can’t smell it in you, devil,” the woman seethed.

There was a comforting breeze that drew close at Kaci’s side. Small hands wrapped small fingers around her small arm.

“Boy, don’t you sense evil? All Eves balance on a pin, ready to fall for the easy stance on firm ground. When Satan whispered, what did he say?” the woman said as the boy clung to Kaci’s side.

A massive black snake slithered on the red dirt between the woman’s legs. Kaci stomped and growled. The boy let go, fearful of her rather than the snake.

Kaci’s heartache rode so true and deep that it awoke her from the dream. Darkness cloaked the sewing room still, meaning she needed to attempt more sleep.

“Dreaming of a brother you don’t have,” she said instantly understanding the feeling of closeness lingering from her dream. The world had obviously mingled with her imagination to create a myth.

“Brother you do,” a soft, slow voice said from the end of the room. “How did you find him? The devil, I reckon.”

“Who’s there?” Kaci pulled the covers tight to her chin.

The light switch flicked and showered the room with a yellow glow.

“Our Adam would never do what you did today, all over this home, ‘less the devil came to play. We are the children of God and you’ve drove our son to malicious sin. Doubly sinful on such an important day.”

There was a man at the end of the bed. He wore a white shirt with the buttons open to his hairy naval. The shirt was old and worn to translucent. He had grey hair and long thin scars criss-crossing his forehead and bald scalp.

He stood from the bench where he’d been and pointed a long black rifle. “Get up, devil.”

Kaci shook her head in fear. The man yanked the blanket from her hands and any perception of safety offered by the cotton departed as she slid to the edge of the bed. She wore her pajamas: shorts and a t-shirt. The ancient t-shirt read STOP GHOSTWOOD Save the Pine Weasel.

Her feet found floor, but her legs were weak and shaky. She wondered if this man was Adam’s father or some maniac that knew Adam. The realization struck that she and Adam had at least one person watching them the entire day while they soiled almost every room in the house.

“Where’s Adam?”

“He’s with his mother, ready, the first shed is always the hardest, but I reckon if the good Lord sees fit, He’ll forgive Adam what you made him do. If not, Adam will understand why we pick our fruit careful like. How did you find him?”

The entire time the man spoke, the rifle directed Kaci toward the door with twitchy wrist flicks. She moved as instructed.

“I didn’t find him. I think you’re maybe sick. Please, think this through, you’re misunderstanding and overreacting. We’re in love and…”

“How did you find him, devil?”

“What? We met in college, at a, at a bar, a coincidence,” Kaci stammered, but that wasn’t exactly right.

She’d set out, restless and looking for something after a telephone call from her father. It was a few minutes to midnight. She decided to walk to the café three blocks away for a bowl of ice cream. Before she got there, she found herself suddenly thirsty and intrigued by the sounds coming from within Little Steady. She stepped into the blues bar wearing the least flattering outfit she’d ever worn out of the dorm and ordered two beers. She didn’t want two, but destiny overtook and she strode across the bar to a lonely man sitting at a table. He had tears in his eyes and an empty bottle in front of him.

Kaci sensed the words rather than thought them: Maybe it’s for the best she’s gone. Adam lifted his head and forced a weak smile. That was years earlier and they’d been together since. Such a strange chance meeting. Never before had she been so oddly bold, especially not sober and ready dressed for farmhand day labor.

“There is no such thing. There is one master and one trickster, everything happens for a reason. You know, I smell that trickster on you. I didn’t for a long time, but mother, she always smelled it and she always saw it. Down, move.”

Doing as told, stepping down the stairs, she wanted to scream for Adam. She wanted the entire scene to be some poorly considered joke, a gag on the new girl in the family. Unfortunately, it didn’t feel that way.

“I’d blast you back to Hell right now if it was possible. I’d burn you up, devil,” the man said as the tips of the barrels stabbed into Kaci’s back.

A dull pain shivered inside and she increased her speed. At the direction of the shotgun, Kaci moved toward the door where they’d first entered the home, where she’d lost the first article of clothing during their marathon of sensational decadence.

The heavy wooden door sat open a crack and she stepped outside into the night. From the side of the house, light, horribly red, came from within the barn. The cracks let the red spill in long ominous streams through the night. She didn’t need another nudge. She knew where to go.

The grass was soft under her feet and the gravel was the polar opposite, hard and painful against her soles. From within the barn she heard a constant hiss and pushed through a tremendous heat.

“Go on then, just like last time when those unbelievers stole you and sided with Satan,” the man said.

A scream bubbled from deep in her diaphragm. The man was nuts. Whatever he thought he knew wasn’t fact. It was insane fantasy, a fanatic’s wealth of craziness. Instead of screaming or fighting, she pulled open the wooden door and stared into the disarming light.

“Eve,” a voice hissed from within.

That voice. It was a history lesson. It brought forth the dreams of the old times before her adoption. It carried all the memories she’d cast aside as fiction and all the memories her brain buried beneath rationality.

“Mother, you’re my mother,” she whispered. A push from behind moved her along.

Hisses bounded as the floor swayed and slithered away from her. Snakes circled and climbed onto the mother for protection.

“Look’it! They know you’re evil!” shouted the man.

Adam was across the room. Kaci’s her heart flooded with different, battling emotions. The loudest of which was disgust. They’d shared so much, shared everything. They were of a split egg, Adam and Eve, the coming of serpent’s reign. Sister and brother, twins, all of the wonderful wedding ideas sullied by putrid closeness.

Wrong love.

But oh how she loved him still and those emotions screamed seeing him chained to a post, the bulge in his forehead massive and blackened. Suddenly, she fully understood the ugliness of impossible and unfortunate attraction.

Wrong love.

“Down, on your knees, devil,” the man said and the shotgun’s stock struck hard against the back of her knee.

Kaci fell and saw anxious serpent rush and turn tail as she made eye contact. They were skittish, but only of her. These were the holy relics of tradition long foregone in a modern world aching for civility.

“Oh Lord,” the mother started, her voice raspy and booming, “you’ve called out to us and delivered our Adam to the true faith. He is of your embodiment, written in your image, please keep his will strong, and his power straight. Satan is sinister and relentless, our numbers are few, but with Adam comes a new home, just as the Christ, the second serpent son led our souls into the promised land. Here! The rebirth of your first serpent son, the rebirth of Adam’s true self can close the gates and block the dark man’s entry!

“Shed! Shed son of the serpent in the sky, shed!”

“Adam?” Kaci attempted to rise.

Adam shook and struggled within his flesh.

The barrel stock struck into the center of Kaci’s back and she fell, wincing. Snakes of all sizes and shapes slithered and hissed. They grew frantic with the theriomorphic display of Adam’s evolution. His head and scalp bulged further and the heat in the room intensified as if burning away anything impure or unwanted. Thick, heavy sweat clung to Kaci like slime.

Adam screamed and his voice choked away into a hiss as his skull split and a fat brown serpent’s face burst forth. The chained body slumped like an empty snowsuit.

“Let the Lord lead you!” shouted the mother.

The weapon wielding man cheered in agreement. From the floor, Kaci eyed the slithering monster’s approach. It was incredible and massive. It hissed, revealing dripping yellowy fangs and an unhealthy interest.

“Adam,” Kaci moaned and closed her eyes, awaiting pain and demise. The heavy slither drew closer. A hiss rang louder than the chorus of miniature voice boxes surrounding her. King of the serpents. Vibrations traveled through the floor. Kaci shook with fear.

“Adam, please,” she sobbed and opened her eyes to the heat of an unhinged jaw and a sharp, knife-like, tongue stabbing at her face.

That quick movement sprang a rapid, thoughtless voice she knew belonged to someone else, the same voice that offered a drink in a blues bar years ago.

“Adam, think of the things I’ll do. Think of the pleasure. Think of our love. This is not natural. The nature of man is not serpent, you’ve fallen from logic, and you need to take it back. I can help you.”

The tongue slashed again and fangs sunk as the incredible jaw came down over Kaci. The bite pierced her shoulders and dragged her home. The voice bubbled despite her urge to cry out.

“You do this and we both die. Taste me, Adam. I taste wrong because you are not right. You are not a serpent. You are a mammal, a man, my love, my brother. Stop this madness, Adam.”

The fangs retracted a half-inch.

“You love me and I love you. Woman and man.”

The fangs retracted further and the mouth reeled in reverse. Kaci slid loose as Adam’s body jerked back, fighting an internal demon.

He shot away in a crooked arch. Reptilian attack rainbow. A heavy mannish cry rode above the hissing. The man, the vessel father, dropped his rifle with a clank.

Kaci turned her eyes to Adam devouring his father, his fat slimy jaw rode over the flesh and bone, and that flesh and bone thrashed from within while acids broke the man down, forcing poison into the lungs, searching for oxygen.  

“Adam, this is Satan! The work of the Lord is hard and long! You must stop and heed the message!” the mother shouted.

Kaci existed as a sidekick within her body. Something lifted her. A smile stretched. She howled with laughter. The figure inside Adam ceased its fight and Adam coiled sleepily.

“Eve, evil,” the mother said. “Children!”

The fearful snakes rushed forward and snapped their jaws, tiny poisonous fangs clamping onto Kaci as she rose from her knees. Snakes had attached and clung to every inch of flesh. She wore them like tassels as she approached the mother in a slow, but steady amble.

“Devil! Devil! Adam, please!” the mother shouted.

Adam was sluggish as she turned to face the scene. The snakes latching and then falling away dead from the venomous sweat coating Kaci like caramel on Halloween apples. More snakes leapt and clung only to eventually fall. Her laughter flowed into a heinous cackling, filling the barn as the hissing died away one snake at a time.

Confused, Adam forced his body forward. The weight of his father was a tremendous burden to digest and transport. Adam watched, helpless. Kaci leaned down over their frightened mother. The old woman looked pathetic in her ceremonial sandals made from an old python friend, and neck to thigh denim. Vest and shorts, ratty off-white tee beneath.

Kaci bent forward, knees to the floor, and kissed their mother with fiery breath. The final, wilful snakes fell away, dead.

Beneath Kaci, the vessel mother stiffened. Shook. Crumbled.

Kaci rose straight and peered onto the fat ten-foot snake wearing the eyes of a man named Adam. She smiled at him, almost apologetically. The instinct and the voice the brought them together fuelled her motion and words, but deep down she bore burning love and pity.

Adam focussed past Kaci and to his mother, knowing now that he’d made a mistake. She was ash awaiting a strong breeze to blow her into a million fragmented memories.

“Adam, poor Adam. I will never forget what we had,” she said and reached down to pull his heavy snake face to hers. His tongue jutted and rode against her tongue.

A great river of fire swelled within Adam, hardening his veins. Erasing him.

Kaci dropped her fiancé, nothing more than an ashy pile, and stepped out of the barn.

~

For all of the hours driving and flying she thought of the trick her father showed her as a small girl. As she practiced then, it became obvious that she’d used it many times before and would use it again in the future.

Take a memory you don’t like, think of it five times a day, but in a favorable way. Do that for a week and the bad memory isn’t so bad, you might even turn it into a good memory. Eventually, it will never bother you again.

She’d do that concerning Adam and everything else in the barn, but not until she spoke to her father. There was something she recalled on the night the excommunicated snake-handlers rescued her from death and became her faux-parents, took her on a long trip north.

Into the home. Her father was single again so there was no worry of startling some poor girlfriend with the sight of hundreds of fang marks all over her face. She’d worn a great deal of cover-up, but people stared when she passed through customs, sat beneath a scarf on the plane, and stopped for food on the road. She didn’t blame them.

“Dad?” she called out.

“In the den, Kaci,” he called back. He wore a smile on his voice.

Kaci stepped through the familiar home and into the den. Her father had a book on parasitic love stories in his lap. His smile faded as he drank in the image of his faux-daughter.

“So Adam was that Adam?”

She spied him, equal parts furious and curious. “You knew?”

“Not really, but I wondered if it would come. You can never know about these things.”

“But why, and…” Tears fell.

“Don’t cry honey, it’s over now, yeah?”

She nodded.

“You remember the trick?”

She nodded again.

“Good. You hungry?”

She shook her head and turned away, she made it to the kitchen before she heard his voice again.

“Praise Satan!” he called out.

“Praise Satan,” she whispered.

XX