Stories From the Fall of the Empire
Copyright© 2011 by Harvey Havel
Chapter 4: A Mother and Her Son
As her ten-year old son slept soundly in the cot next to hers, she awoke with a start in the cold sweat of the dark desert night only to have a vague premonition, or perhaps it was an hallucination, of a shiny, black cobra slithering its way through an opening in the tent. Her bed under a draping white canvas burned as hot as a prison cell in summertime as she saw the snake’s black-scaled body slide underneath her cot. By then she had understood that the snake had found a new home beneath her and that the only way to do away with it was to wake her son and ask him to kill it. Only then would it no longer interfere with the bliss of the otherwise serene life they shared together.
But before she could ask this of him, she considered that perhaps her own fears towards the snake were the greater problem and not the snake itself. Perhaps she shouldn’t be so afraid of a slinking beast she couldn’t control. Maybe she should wait patiently until it decided to slither back to the desert on its own.
She tried for hours to sleep that night but continued to hear it coil and uncoil, rattle and hiss intermittently, as though it had slid back out into the open, its slick body on the verge of slipping through one of the looping ridges in her tangled bed-sheets. At one point she even felt the reptile’s forked tongue probe her soft brown cheeks with all of the slime and wetness of a diseased French kiss, and when the slithering of its body and the rattling of its tail became too much to bear, she disentangled herself from the sheets and reached over to her son who slept soundly on the next cot.
She loved her boy deeply and wanted nothing more but for him to rest before the laborers took him to the oil fields later that morning. Yet the snake continued to fester in the sand beneath her, and images of bloody snakebites up and down the length of her arms provided enough incentive for her to poke the boy’s back until he too awoke from the snake’s loud hisses.
Her son then looked at her with all of the timidity innocence usually gives a boy at such a tender age, and he trembled at the thought of venturing underneath his mother’s cot to quell what had threatened them. But his mother had been suffering all night as a result of the snake’s stubborness, and while the boy certainly didn’t want to fight this poisonous creature, he understood that he must fight it in order to save his mother’s flesh from its razor-sharp fangs. The boy took one look at her suffering, and suddenly no other option existed but to do battle with the snake. With nothing but a bed-sheet tied around his waist, he crawled underneath his mother’s cot to where he immediately confronted the opacity of the cobra’s milk-white eyes scanning him through the darkness, its fangs dripping wet with bone-yellow venom.
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