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.

As his body vanished beneath the bed, the mother prayed and prayed for the safety of her only child. She wailed and chanted old ghazals in the traditions of her ancestors and promised to be a better mother to him, should he emerge from the darkness alive. She heard his body struggling in the sand, the snake’s coiled tail rattling uncontrollably, and the ubiquitous hissing as it spit back its corrosive venom in its own defense. She cried long, soft tears, gnashed her teeth, and pulled out her hair in anger, fear, and regret. At one point she covered her head with pillows, if only to dampen the sounds of the hissing, spitting, and struggling that soon became a waking nightmare that slowly chewed on the fragile fibers of her soul. The cot then quaked, its steel frame banging frantically against the wall, until suddenly, all became quiet and eerily still.

The tired body of her son soon crawled out from under the cot, his hair caked in dirt, his back and spine poked with fresh bloody holes, his joints swollen, and his skin febrile with sweat. There was no more hissing or rattling. Nothing could be heard but the cascading desert wind outside. Her son slowly crawled back to his side of the room. He lay on his back as his mother rushed to his side to check if he were still alive.

He seemed to be half-sleeping or in some sort of trance. He didn’t move much. He lightly breathed in and out, in and out, his thin eyelids closed and his muscles trembling. His mother then called his name softly and even went so far as to shake him a little. And when the boy finally awoke, his two opaque and milk-marbled eyes beamed at his horrified mother who gasped at the sharp, white fangs that filled the spaces where his teeth should have normally been. His fangs dripped with the blood of a cobra, and with his forked tongue he hissed, “Yes, mother, I killed the snake. I finally killed the snake.”