When she was seven years old, Lottie killed her first rattlesnake. As long as she could remember, her grandfather had instilled in her that The Good Californian killed the rattlesnake, spared those behind him the danger of snakebite, the venom sapped from their future. She thought it was allegory until she came face-to-Western-face with a Mojave rattlesnake in the scrub out by the foothills. They heard it at the same time, that dry shimmer, and he crouched down, bearing witness. Lottie was terrified, but knew better than to show it. Her grandfather said no words of encouragement, offered no help, merely reached into his breast pocket for a hand-rolled cigarette and lit it with a boot-struck match. He was leaving her to it this time, testing her. You’ve got time, now, he’d said, once before, it won’t kill you quick, but it’ll hurt you hard. She tried to bear this in mind as she crept toward the rattler, which wasn’t coiled and wasn’t awaiting her approach, was moving rather laconically. All the same, she was certain it would slip out from under her heel the moment she took the initiative to stomp.
The rattler was winding its way toward a shrub, seeking shade, tongue flickering in the heat. Until the heel of her boot crunched down on a cactus skeleton, its delicate frame shattering. The snake whipped toward her, tongue working like mad, soaking up her sweaty and young scent, this four-foot-nothing human child filled with unearned resolve. The curves of its body went tight, and it weaved its way toward her with a shiver of its tail, the menace of its rattle pervading the air.
Terror gripped Lottie, flooded her, an oasis of adrenaline that soaked her bloodstream. The snake flew toward her, intent on assessing and attacking, its mouth yawning open, fangs bared, aiming for ankles. It approached with astonishing speed, unexpected grace, and for a moment she wondered why she should kill a thing of such unrelenting beauty. But there was no time to think, there was no room for hesitation once the smoke of her grandfather’s cigarette reached her nostrils. She shifted her weight, she leapt, she landed. The snake’s head just behind the heel of her boot, the squirming spine wedged beneath the rubber. She barely had time to be shocked or triumphant that she’d hit her mark at all, for her grandfather let out a sharp whistle and she looked up, his pocketknife flying through the air to the tune of the snake’s furious hissing and rattling, its body a rope whipping beneath her foot. She caught the knife handily, flicked open the blade, and without allowing the moment that would cause her to hesitate she shot down and plunged the knife into the snake’s small, fragile skull. And all was windswept silence again.
Lottie stayed for a breath or two, proud of the heroic picture she made. The Good Californian. She knew the next step was to slice off the rattle, let it dry in the blistering sun, wear it as a talisman of victory over the landscape, but if this was the price for conquering, she wasn’t sure she was willing to pay it ever again.
Her grandfather stood, dusting the knees of his Levi’s, adjusting his hat so his sharp eyes were shaded against the noon sun. He took a long drag on the cigarette and dropped it to the sand, crushing it under toe.
“Better,” was all that he said.
Lottie moved into the house on her own, bringing only whatever would fit into the bed of her truck and tossing it onto the dusty back porch and around the narrow corners of the doorways. She tried not to metabolize emotion as she stepped inside, felt the familiar weight of the air and heard the same creaks of the floorboards. He’d had all the furniture sold at auction or dragged to the landfill, of course he had. She tried to be clinical about it, like he’d have been, accept it as property, territory, without affect. But twenty years or so hadn’t aged the memories at all, and the acute, familiar smell of dust, sweat, and fear brought it all blazing back.
With dull excuses, she stayed in the kitchen until sundown, sat on the counter and chewed on a peanut butter sandwich, her feet propped on a suitcase, mulling the empty space where a handmade wooden table had once been. She’d carved markers into one of its edges, one tick for each new moon. It was fully serrated by her final summer at the ranch.
She slipped off the counter and grabbed the fire iron she’d kept beneath her bed since she was eighteen. It was at least an ounce of security but had mercifully only come in handy for opening and closing the heating vents too high for her to reach in various apartments. Still, she let it swing by her side as she crossed through the house, traversing the contours she could never forget.
Every inch of the house was stripped. A wide glare of hardwood flooring stretched from edge to edge, and shadows on the walls marked where artwork and cows’ skulls had hung. Her grandfather would likely have torn the entire homestead down and given her nothing but the tract of land, but the ranch was on the state’s historic register. A diminutive kitchen and water closet. A comparatively sprawling living room.
Lottie shoved aside a box blocking the stairs and headed up, stooping as she passed beneath the second-story floor. The top landing gave her a shiver she shrugged off as she looked into the master bedroom, taking in its towering windows. This wasn’t the room she was afraid of—she’d never been allowed in. It was her own bedroom, just past the gaudy ‘70s bathroom. Swallow the fear, do not fly—an enduring heartbeat in the back of her mind for her entire life. She nudged open the door with the iron and found it just as empty as every other inch of the house. The wallpaper was peeling, and she could barely make out where she’d once scrawled her birth name in red crayon. She’d had to scrub hard. He never let her forget it.
Lottie did manage, when the tour was said and done, to plug in her television and access local broadcast. Small-town news, nationally syndicated game shows, telenovelas, infomercials for an astonishing diversity of knives. She’d been suspended from school once, when she was twelve, for bringing a jackknife to a behind-the-library kind of show-and-tell. She didn’t know it wasn’t okay, and until then her father hadn’t known what went on out there during her summers in the desert.
Now she fell asleep on the floor as a man with a poorly groomed mustache demonstrated the proper use of a butterfly knife, twirling it around in dizzying arcs.
It started with a boom.
Lottie bolted upright, the bare living room illuminated by the television screen. The mustachioed man still demonstrating the graceful leaping of the butterfly knife. Through gasping breaths, she tried to reason with her surroundings. For two decades, she’d only ever been back at this house in nightmares, and sometimes there was booming—a parasomnia she’d lived with her whole life. She’d woken to airhorns at night, to gunshots and explosions, to screaming neighbors, only to rise in the morning and understand there had been no airhorns, gunshots, or explosions, and the neighbors had moved out months ago. A side effect of anxiety, apparently, to hear massive noises in the night, auditory hallucination. Heard in the liminal spaces she knew might not have quite been real.
But this. There was no liminality.
Another boom from upstairs, like a steel-toed boot clomping across the hardwood. And no longer solitary. Distinct footsteps now, pacing across the length of the second floor. Lottie’s first thought was to run. Fly out of the house and never look back, abandon all hope, all her things. Her grandfather wasn’t there to train her toward fight; he’d never accepted flight was her default, had tried to force it out of her. He wasn’t there to catch her by the arm and fling her back toward danger. Swallow the fear, he’d spat between stained teeth.
The footsteps continued to pace, turning on a heel and coming back across the floor. In the logic of it all, she couldn’t figure out how anyone could be up there. The doors were locked, they’d have tripped over her things, and the windows were jammed. She slowly pulled herself up, groping in the dark for the fire iron, hardly believing she actually needed it. She knew, in the dim part of her mind, that she should call for help. But she crept up the stairs instead, toward the thumping steps. Swallowing the fear.
Lottie’s fingers curled around the fire iron. She braced herself for the final step, peering around the doorway, heart pounding, the drum of its white noise in her ears. She expected a man, large and intimidating, to be standing there, hands on hips, washed in darkness as he looked out the windows. Inch by inch, she looked deeper into the room, noting that the footsteps had stopped—he must have known she was there—but she didn’t call out. Her view panned the room, slow, waiting to reveal the figure in the corner, the iron held aloft, her breath held fast.
The room was empty.
The iron dropped to her side. Lottie stared in disbelief. She flicked on the light switch and the shadows scattered. Nobody was there. She crossed to the second bedroom, flipped on the lights. No one was there. The bathroom, with its buzzing fixtures, was also empty. Spine humming, she pressed her back to the wall of the landing and looked between the two rooms, but no one, certainly no one, was there.
Lottie pinched the bridge of her nose. She took a deep and steadying breath. Parasomnia, must be. Phantom noises, rather than phantoms proper. She left the lights on as she headed back downstairs, feeling it would ward off something. There was too much hanging in the air that hadn’t been illuminated for years.
She woke drenched in daylight and unimaginable pain, her neck immobilized, electric heat roping all down her right shoulder. Lottie’s eyes fixed to the vaulted ceiling, her breathing long, the handle of the fire iron still gripped in her fist. She kept expecting the footsteps to start up again, but the house was silent.
She twisted her head from side to side, testing the limits of her swollen muscles. A painful and depressing range, portending a difficult day. Already, again, the house was against her. At eight, a tetanus infection from a loose nail in her bedroom, leaving a jagged scar across her foot. At ten, a third-degree burn from the wood stove, another scar. At eleven, a broken ankle from a fall down the stairs. He’d splinted it himself, hadn’t allowed her to see the doctor until the summer was over, and neither told her father the truth. She never lost the limp.
The kitchen was a pitiful mess, boxes scattered and grocery bags draped across counters, and even if she’d known exactly where the kettle and coffee were, she hadn’t called to have the gas turned back on yet. She looked down at herself, her neck crying out. She ran a hand through her hair and guessed it was more or less good enough for venturing out for coffee and a bite.
This was the only desert she’d ever known, and after twenty straight years of city, she’d almost missed the feeling of sky and space, the deep quiet. She stepped out of the front door into the cutting morning light and could see for miles. Red, dusty, forbidding, and lonely. The highway delineated the end of the property, a spit of a two-lane desert road that hadn’t been repaved in decades, but it didn’t much matter since it was perpetually empty. It was easy enough to panic yourself into thinking you were completely alone out here.
She spotted a man running up the highway, breath pouring out of him in great plumes of mist, his head tucked, arms pumping like pistons. Even the mild curvature of his spine had Lottie’s own back aching, and she worked at a knot in the crook of her shoulder. The taut band of her trapezius popped every time her fingers slipped past it. The man blazed on, determined toward some goal, and it wasn’t until he got to the edge of the property that she felt uneasy, territorial. He looked up, looked over, and grinned at her. He held up a hand in a wave and she reflexively lifted a few fingers. Apparently, he took this as invitation and slowed his breakneck pace, trotted across the front land, rarely violated, and came to a halt a few yards from the porch.
“I’d say howdy, neighbor, but that seems a bit of a cliché,” he panted. “You’re the new kid?”
“How’d you guess?”
He waved a hand at the house. “We heard his granddaughter was moving in, but nobody believed it.” He held out his hand and approached. “Jonah.”
“Lottie,” she said, her fingers still working at her shoulder.
“I live just about a mile down the road.”
Lottie nodded, saying nothing, though this didn’t seem to faze him.
“How you liking the place so far?”
“Do you know where I could get a decent cup of coffee?”
The man nodded, still breathing heavily, and looked back the way he came. “Head on into town and take a left at the light. There’s a place about a half mile up.”
“Appreciate it,” she said, turning to head back inside.
“Hold on now, are you—?”
Lottie had to turn her whole body to look at him, her neck was so seized. He frowned at her. “Are you really living here alone?”
She chewed the inside of her lip and studied him for a good, long while. A deeply forgettable face, nothing remarkable about his eyes, his nose, his mouth. A shapeless void of a human, signifying nothing. “Take care, Jonah.”
Lottie could see how he’d have lost his mind here, finally. Fallen on his knees, rent his garments, and cried to the sky until the sun burnt him to a crisp and he toppled over in the wind, his skin a husk to be peeled away by the crepuscular creatures. In her visions of this, his ten-gallon hat, stained with cigarette tar, tumbles back as he lifts his head to yell and goes wheeling off with the wind. It’s perhaps too Western for the truth of the matter. But there seemed to be a glimmer of truth to the wondering of the footsteps last night—whether it wasn’t steel-toed boots, but spurs. Whether it wasn’t her grandfather still treading the boards.
He was a mean, restless survivalist who thought even this sparse town was too much civilization to bear. If he’d had his way, he’d have run through the gates of Death Valley and buried himself deep in the heart of the uninhabited landscape. There were still stone chimneys standing from other homesteaders, why should the federal government stop him from living such a life? It tried to stop him from living so much as this one. When he’d failed to pay property taxes for the twelfth month in a row, the deed unknowingly went to his son, Lottie’s father, who kept up the payments so he could keep up the charade. All alone out there, Dad, the dirty Feds can’t touch you. Dig your well, till your land. Never mind that there was still an electricity bill, a gas bill, trash collection. Her grandfather thought he was an island, the freest of them all.
It was only about five miles into town, such as it was, and it was a stretch where fifty miles an hour felt like a crawl. The landscape didn’t change. The mountains in the distance didn’t move, the brush replicated every few yards, the houses were so deep past the road it was hard to tell they were even houses. Joshua trees sprouted everywhere, feathered and foreign. Nothing of this land was of this earth.
The main street was tattered banners, shattered storefronts, a single stoplight. Once upon a time, it might have been known as a one-horse town, more myth than reality. It was a shock to see a handful of leathered faces peering out of doorways, a shock to see anyone at all. If things had remained as sun-bleached and stagnant as they seemed, these were probably the same faces Lottie had known as a kid. She couldn’t remember any of their names, but she remembered how they made her feel. Terrified, mostly, and unable to open her mouth to shout for deliverance.
A left at the light, a half mile up the road, a vaguely familiar roadhouse advertising biscuits and gravy on its yellowed marquee. Lottie pulled over past the place, already wary of the attention. She knew, all too well, of the territorialism of the desert, the skepticism, the way they’d look at her and swallow her whole.
The screen door snapped shut and her eyes adjusted to the dark room, bearded men hunched over 10 AM beers, eyes in the corner that hadn’t gone to sleep yet, a sun-creased woman with stringy white hair and pitch-black eyes tending bar. She watched, hawk-like, as Lottie crossed to a stool and sat down, steeling her confidence.
“Coffee, please.”
The woman poured it from a dented pot, hardly taking her eyes off Lottie.
“Something to eat?” she asked.
“Breakfast. Anything.”
Lottie stretched her neck, tipping it gently back and forth to reach its absolute limit. It didn’t get far. She couldn’t quite look up or down, only straight ahead, either at the woman or at her own exhausted reflection in the bar behind.
“I know you,” the woman said.
“Might be.” Lottie squeezed her neck with one hand, the coffee with the other.
“You’re John’s girl. His granddaughter.”
“That’s me.”
The woman let out a guffaw of a laugh. “I remember when you was—” She held out a palm. “Just the tiniest thing. Red cowboy boots, walking around like you owned the place.”
“I never owned the place.”
“You do now.”
Lottie paused, lifted her eyes to the pitch black of the woman’s gaze. “I do now.”
“God, you look just like his daughter. Same name, too, though I guess that’s no surprise. We all inherit the weirdest shit, don’t we. Was sorry to hear what happened to her, she deserved better than that. Been, what, ten years now? God, I prayed for her. She had a good heart.”
Lottie said nothing in response.
A few seconds ticked by before the woman said, “Something else for you, hon?”
How quickly it changed from skepticism to hon. At the mere memory, the mere ghost of her grandfather, of her dead aunt. Lottie shook her head gently. “Oh. Yes. Um—” She held out a hand, waiting for the woman to say—
“Starla.”
Starla. Lottie could dimly remember her from childhood. A sulky bartender her grandfather had perpetually flirted with, who barely seemed to put up with it. She always slipped Lottie a cookie to hide in her pocket, worried by how skinny she’d get by the end of every summer. You can’t live off this land, you just can’t, she’d mutter out of the old man’s earshot, not without a little help.
“Right. Starla. Man ran up on my property this morning. Name’s Jonah. Know anything about him? He seemed kind of—” She shrugged, as much as she was able. “Strange.”
Starla frowned. “I don’t know a Jonah. What’d he look like?”
“Nondescript.”
“Sorry?”
Lottie shook her head again. “There was nothing notable about him. He looked like anyone. Was running on the highway and came up to talk to me.”
“Running?” Starla laughed. “What, like, for exercise? Must be some city boy, they’ve been crawling out here for the past two years, you know. Anyway, I don’t know him.” Lottie frowned into her coffee. “Hey, you’re not looking to bring a Starbucks or anything out here, are you? We’ve had all these people coming up from Los Angeles and—”
Lottie laughed, sipped the sludge. It was bitter, it was thick, it had been on the burner since 6 AM. It was perfect. “No, this is just fine with me.”
“Good girl,” Starla said. “Glad to see old blood come back.”
By evening, Lottie had enough mobility in her neck and back to move a few things upstairs. The house felt quieter than it ever had. The day before it had the buzz of something new and old at the same time, but now it was just tired silence. She turned on the TV to have some noise, some tangible interruption, to remember there was life still out there.
She’d expected scraps of her grandfather around the house—cigarette butts, lost horseshoes, maybe even one or two of his knives—but the place had been gutted. There were phantom remnants, though. She remembered: This is where he kept his ashtray. This is where he kept his second-favorite knife. That nail hole in the wall is from where he tacked up rope. Now there was nothing to grip but a gruesome absence. Everyone, absolutely everyone, from her old life had asked why she didn’t just sell the place, but to Lottie, to even ask the question was a failure to understand her. Ownership mattered, he’d taught her that. She’d kept the name Lottie for the same reason: Ownership was control. Eventually, she knew, she could abrade the house to bury its past, just like she’d twisted the name to fit her shape. Strip the toxins, slice off the tail and wear it as an amulet. Eventually.
She sat against the wall, back and neck completely straight, while the air mattress puffed up. The sky outside the windows was the deepest, truest darkness. Meant to be a new moon tonight, she remembered. The only shadows were from starlight; otherwise, all was a deep and engulfing blackness.
He’d tossed her out there in the dark. Once, when she was twelve. Handed her a book of matches and a bowie knife and a thick jacket that reached her knees and closed the door on her. She’d whimpered on the back porch, matches clutched tight in her hand, and thought about crawling under the steps and sleeping there, but she knew what he wanted. He wanted to see a blazing campfire a half mile off, Lottie curled up beside it. So she wiped her face and marched out, until she reached a point where she could close or open her eyes and the view would be the same.
She struggled to make a fire; it was difficult to find anything to burn in the desert, and all the while she couldn’t shake the darkness. Couldn’t shake that something was just behind her at all times. Something was just beside her, was standing right in front of her. She felt watched, and whirled around to catch whoever—whatever—it might be. But if anything was there she couldn’t see it. Her eyes did not adjust. She managed to light a shrub on fire, but it burned out in a flash. It was all she could do. She ran from shrub to shrub, lighting each one until she was surrounded by a fast-blazing ring of flame, the peripheries of her vision glowing, the shapes of stones and cacti finally visible, their shadows reaching out long past her. She knew he was watching, knew he’d punish her in the morning for not surviving properly, but also for so carelessly destroying the landscape in the process. You leave carcasses, not ashes. Though she didn’t know what it mattered. She stared out in the direction of the house, daring him to challenge her for doing what she could to survive him.
The door slammed shut, rattling the house, and Lottie’s eyes shot open. The room was dark as it could get. All around her footsteps echoed from downstairs. The same footsteps, heavy and unnatural, crossing through the kitchen, through the living room, and back again.
Lottie clamped a hand over her eyes, breathing deep. Parasomnia again, it had to be. Doors slamming, especially, that was one she’d heard before. She tried to wake fully, let the liminal space slip away, but the more her consciousness crept aware, the more acute the footsteps were. They were exclusive to the kitchen now, pacing in circles. It didn’t sound like a robber, and there was nothing to steal anyway.
Sitting up was excruciating. Lottie could barely move her head, had to grope about the room with eyes darting wildly, looking for the fire iron. She felt its cold neck in the corner and gripped tight, inching around to the top of the stairs. There was light from downstairs, from the kitchen. She descended slowly, her back to the wall. The living room was empty, but the footsteps in the kitchen resounded.
She peered in, whole body braced, neck stiff and burning. Jonah was standing in the kitchen, staring right at her.
“That short for something?” he asked.
Lottie blinked. “What?”
“Lottie. Is it short for something?”
“What the fuck are you doing in my house?”
“I knew a Carlotta once, but that’s the only thing I think it might be short for.”
“How did you get in? What the fuck are you doing here?”
“It’s just a pretty name, is all. You don’t hear it very often.”
Lottie lifted the iron, as high as she could manage. “Please don’t make me hurt you.”
“Well. Welcome to town, Lottie, we’re sure glad to have you.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
He laughed, bright and casual, cutting through the edge of warning that laced his voice. “You meet Starla this morning? Woman’s a gem, been here for a hundred years, feels like. Knows everyone and everything.”
“She said she didn’t know you.”
“Did she now.”
Lottie rooted down, fixed her eyes to his. He stood so comfortably in the kitchen, like it was his, not hers. “I’ll get out of your hair, then. Just give me a holler if you need help, all right? That’s what we do around here. Can’t live off this land without a little help.”
He turned on his heel and left, the door banging shut behind him. Lottie held still, waiting for the door to swing wide again, for the strike to come. But there was silence. She leapt to the door and threw it open, stumbling out onto the porch, peering into the darkness to chase the vestige of him. But there was nothing there, it was too dark to see. The sky was peppered with stars, soft and dizzying, but anything beyond the edge of the porch was unadulterated abyss.
Dirt flew up behind her tires as dawn lifted the sky. Lottie screeched onto the highway and sharply corrected toward town, watching the mile markers. A mile from the house, it could have been any of them, but she slowed all the same, peered into the soft daylight as if specks of homes in the distance could give any indication of who they belonged to. As if she’d know, anyway. So Lottie kept her eyes on the road, scanning for joggers.
She blazed through the left turn at the light, her headlights sweeping across the roadhouse as she jerked her truck to a halt. Starla, keys in hand, looked at the truck in bewilderment. Lottie cut the engine and jumped out, slamming the door when her boots hit the dust.
“Oh, hon, you scared me!” Starla cried. “We’re not open yet; Dylan doesn’t come in to fix the food for another hour.”
“Who is he,” Lottie demanded, storming onto the porch. “I know you know everyone in this town, I know that’s your business. Who is he?”
Starla’s eyes pinged between Lottie’s, and Lottie caught a flash of the tenderness with which Starla had always treated her as a child. Starla knew what was going on at that ranch house, what kind of survivalist torture, deeply unfit to share with someone so young. She’d seen it with the Lottie before her and hadn’t been able to stop it. When the girl ran away, that was the end of that, until seven years later her tiny spitting image walked into her bar, in clean red cowboy boots. The little one squeaked out a hello and her name, when John corrected her. No, sweetheart, it’s Lottie now.
“You’re not sleeping, hon.”
“He was there. In my house. Two hours ago.”
“Who was?”
“Jonah!”
“Lottie, I swear to you, I don’t know a Jonah around here. Like you said, it’s my business to know everyone. I don’t know him.” Lottie’s breathing quickened, the world started to pinhole, and Starla put a weathered hand on her elbow. “We can call the sheriff. He won’t mind. Come on, now.”
Something was flickering at the edges of Lottie’s consciousness, some lining of explanation that brought everything, all of it, absolutely everything together. He’d just walked out into the desert? And died? He was built for surviving that, that was his life’s work. He knew how to suck water out of a cactus, knew how to trap jackrabbits, knew how to build a proper fire rather than set the bushes alight, knew how to kill rattlesnakes in his sleep. He’d taught her all of that, impressed it, because it hadn’t seemed to stick to the Lottie before her. Would have saved the Lottie before her. No, something had driven him to die.
The shuffling footsteps of a runner bloomed up from the road, and Lottie turned toward the sound. She groped for Starla’s arm, squeezing tight, unable to turn her head to look at the woman.
“Starla,” she breathed. “That’s him, he’s right there.”
Starla was quiet for so long.
“Right there,” Lottie said again.
“Honey, let’s get you inside.”
“No, no, that’s him. Right there.” She pointed straight toward the footsteps.
Starla put her hand over Lottie’s and looked out at the street. “Lottie,” she said gently, “no one’s there.”
“What?” Lottie whirled back to the road. Jonah had stopped in front of the roadhouse, panting, hands on his hips, training his eyes on Lottie. “He’s right there.”
“No,” Starla said. “No, honey, there’s no one there.”
Jonah grinned. Lottie let her hand slip away from Starla as she stepped off the porch, back onto the dirt. Jonah stood there, waiting for her, it seemed.
“Honey, this town’s full of ghosts,” Starla said weakly behind her. “It’s all right, just come inside.”
He was a blur of a human, nothing memorable about his face, his body, his clothing, his voice. She knew, she just knew, that if she could get close enough she could figure it out. Figure out what all of it had meant, from her brutal childhood summers in the desert, to how the other Lottie had died, to the way he’d walked out into the fringes of the world and keeled over. The answer was there, it just wasn’t close enough to be legible.
The sun crested over the mountains and beamed into Lottie’s eyes. She lifted a hand to block the light and saw Jonah in silhouette, a true void. She was too late to hear the rattling. To sense the danger at ankle height as she trod slowly past the back tire of her truck.
The fangs sunk into her calf, deep and luscious and quick. Her neck seized as she tried to look down, to witness, and all she could see was the flickering rattle. She hit the dirt, a fire spreading through her, and came face-to-Western-face with the rattlesnake. Coiled and shimmering behind her tire, its body shifted sensuously, its head frighteningly still, its eyes fixed on hers, tongue flashing. It was beautiful, this thing of dusty reverence, surviving out here in this scalding landscape, every inch of it built for dominance.
Jonah crouched down beside her, his head haloed by the glaring sunrise, his eyes piercing and proper. “You tried to run, Lottie,” he said quietly, the sound hissing from between his teeth.
She smelled a whiff of sharp, unfiltered tobacco, and flashed with fear. The snake bared its fangs once more, eyes locked to Lottie’s, rattle resounding as it arched slowly and elegantly. And then sight of it was lost, forever, to a blur.
***
Rumpus original artwork by Genevieve Anna Tyrrell
