Toxicofera

Gina arrived at Emma’s doorstep in an oversized sweater that was fashionable in that ugly sort of way… and completely wrong for the current summer heat.

“Mail call.” Gina lifted a pair of reusable canvas shopping bags.

“You’re my second favorite delivery person after Amazon Prime,” Emma said.

Gina raised an eyebrow that was micro-bladed into a perfect peak. “Does Amazon Prime come with a visit from your sister?”

“I think they’re working on that feature.”

“Get out of the way,” Gina said on top of a laugh, shouldering her way into the house.

Emma closed the door and locked it, then shook the door by its handle just to check. When she made it to the kitchen, Gina was already sorting soup cans and boxes of organic macaroni and cheese into the cabinets.

“How were you planning to eat tonight?”

“Um, it’s called Prime Now.”

“Do you get an affiliate fee?” Gina yanked open the fridge and inspected its contents with a souring expression.

Emma crossed her arms. “It works great. They leave the package on the porch, knock on the door, and leave. I get my stuff and no one has to see.”

Gina pursed her lips, nostrils flared in a silent emotion. She tossed a mold-lined jar of marinara sauce into the trash can.

Emma reached past her little sister for the fridge handle and closed the door. “Just because you caught me between shopping days doesn’t mean I’m festering in here.” While Emma may have been a homebody, she wasn’t a failure. Emma Branston was a peer-reviewed science writer in Herpetology Quarterly and the North American Ophiology Review.

Gina brushed a hand through her hair, a nervous gesture for someone who didn’t mess up their perfect blowout lightly. “I get worried about you, cooped up in here with just your monsters for roommates.”

“The monsters I keep are better than the monsters out there.”

Gina’s expression soured further. She busied herself unpacking the rest of her delivery, and Emma decided to let her; all people had their ways of comforting themselves.

“You want coffee?” Emma laid the back of her fingers against the outside of a third-filled carafe — her morning leftovers. Lukewarm. Not preferred, but acceptable.

With a flick of her fingers, Gina silently dismissed the offer. Emma didn’t know her sister to turn down a mug.

Emma poured her own coffee in an acceptably clean-passing ceramic and took a sip for fortitude. “Show me.”

Gina checked in on her often, but only ever showed up fretting when she was trying to overshadow her own problems with Emma’s.

Jaw grit, Gina pushed up one of her oversized sleeves exposing blued skin beneath.

“Christ — ”

“He just grabbed me too hard. That’s it. It’s not — ”

“Don’t you dare say it’s not a big deal. What happened to the plan?”

The plan had been derived after the last time Gina had shown up on Emma’s doorstep with bags of groceries and bruised skin. Plans to leave her husband strategically. Move money to a separate account. Secure a lawyer. All checklisted and businesswoman-like.

“It’s more complicated now.” Gina’s hand settled on her stomach.

Realization punched Emma in the gut. A child was the kind of thing that tied you to a monster for the rest of your life.

In the middle of the kitchen, with just slats of light through the gap of the blinds, Gina broke down in tears. It was a strange vision of her sister; Gina usually made Emma feel like the younger one in need of comforting.

It was all over rather quickly. Emma hugged her, of course, but the burst reigned back into sniffles as Gina whisked off to the bathroom to “get herself together.”

Emma dumped her lukewarm coffee down the sink.

When Gina returned, there were no tells that she had been crying except for her red eyes, something that couldn’t be fixed by a pep talk and concealer. “You put the sheet over the mirror again,” she said.

“Don’t make this about me.”

“When’s the last time you left the house?”

Here was the thing about Gina, like a prey animal, when she felt vulnerable she tried to make herself look big.

“If you just came over here to be a bitch, you can leave.”

Here was the thing about Emma: she did the same thing.

“Fine.” Gina snapped up her canvas bag and dumped out the unpacked groceries. A jar of salsa rolled over the counter edge and cracked at the weakest angle on the tile floor.

Emma hadn’t been able to suppress her flinch.

Red leaked on the floor.

“I — ” The evidence of destruction has short-circuited Gina’s anger. Had short-circuited her words even. She grabbed a bunch of paper towels.

“It’s fine,” Emma said, but it felt like they had come from someone else’s vocal cords.

They stood across from each other, sisters, mirrored. When they were twelve and ten, people used to mistake them for twins. Side by side now, people didn’t suppose their relationship anymore.

With a hand, Emma couldn’t control, she touched the side of her own cheek. She could cover the mirrors, but she couldn’t hide from the feel of the scar tissue.

Gina tossed the broken jar in the trash and kneeled to wipe up the mess.

Only because Emma didn’t quite feel like the inhabitant of her skin at that very moment, was she able to say, “Haven’t I already learned the lesson about cruel men for us?”

Gina threw away the stained paper towels. She didn’t answer, and then she did.

“It’s too late. I’m stuck.”

#

Things that laughed or cried, mocked or pitied, stared or refused to look at Emma at all: babies, children, and adults of the species homo sapiens. Things that didn’t, the so-called monsters of the suborder Serpentes.

Emma dropped a frozen mouse into the first tank in the makeshift serpentarium her attic space had been transformed into. The luridly striped coral snake uncoiled from its nap under the heat lamp to seek out its meal.

“That’s right. Dinner time.”

Next was the cottonmouth, then the black mamba. She stopped before the home of the inland taipan, a speckled olive green, looking cozy draped on a rock and not at all like one of the deadliest snakes in the world.

Snakes weren’t cruel. They didn’t have the captivity for it. They killed to eat, to defend, to survive. There was no malice involved. Just nature. In that way, they were better than humans, who may never kill someone in their entire life, but were cruel enough to point and whisper and stare and pointedly not stare. Cruel enough to keep Emma in hiding.

No, snakes weren’t cruel, but she would need this one to be.

#

The extra key was masking-taped under the ornamental frog in the flower bed. If any of the neighbors saw her entering the house, Emma made sure they wouldn’t be able to nail down her build or even her gender in the shapeless coveralls she wore, thick gloves up each forearm, and a hoodie hood pulled up over her head. Her work outfit, complete with safety gear.

She closed the front door softly behind herself, the roiling of her stomach already settling by the fact of being indoors again even if the house wasn’t her own.

Emma had felt like gagging the entire drive here in her old car, kept licensed and insured for purely sentimental reasons. In the hopes that she might be brave enough to go out in the world again. Maybe travel. Road trip to the Everglades to seek the rarely-sighted pygmy rattlesnake.

The lights were off. She crept upstairs without them.

Gina was gone for the half-week. A series of Facebook posts storylining an alibi: Work trip to the “Women in Business” conference in San Diego, hashtag girlboss.

In the bedroom, the husband slept. He snored like a chainsaw, face smashed sideways into the pillow.

Taking one steadying breath, Emma stabbed the syringe into his neck and thumbed down the plunger. When he awoke, as people did when they had a needle jabbed into their person in the middle of the night, it was already too late.

He tried to get out of the bed, but collapsed back on it, his body failing him.

Emma drew back her hood and sat down beside him. The husband’s eyes were desperate. Moving and desperate.

She reached out and turned on the bedside lamp so he could see. So he could know.

She held up the empty syringe in his line of sight. “What you’re experiencing right now is the paralyzing effects of oxyruanus microlepidotus venom. It’s said one bite has enough strength to kill a hundred men. But you’re just one.”

Emma curled her grip over the bare syringe, evidence she would be taking away with her, and tucked into into her pocket.

“As you experience your blood vessels and muscles hemorrhaging as you slip into death, I want you to know that you never had me fooled.” The perfect husband with his prince charming jawline and 401K. “Maybe the rest of the world doesn’t know what a monster looks like, but I do.”

She laughed, and it choked in her throat, a hard knot. It was a cruel twist because she knew how the world acted when it saw her.

Emma removed her glove and waited for the husband’s pulse to stop under the press of her fingers.

#

Leaving should’ve been the easiest part of the whole venture. The breaking and entering, done. The morally dubious act of god-like justice, complete. Stepping outside her own house without vomiting, endured. She even accomplished it without any witnesses.

None but the faces in the photographs. Emma picked up the silver-framed wedding photo from the bedside table. The laugh lines around Gina’s eyes revealed her smile as real. She had loved this man once. Maybe, cruelly, still did.

Emma dug the palms of her hands — one gloved, one not — into her eye sockets. She couldn’t leave the body for Gina to find.

She turned around, dropped her hands, and stumbled back in shock at what her eyes met when she opened them. Set within the frame of a vanity mirror was a face: skin twisted and foreign. Her own.

The memories flashed — why she kept her mirror’s at home cover — and she was stumbling.

Her heel caught on the edge of a throw rug and she fell, landing hard on her hip. Through her pocket, a needle pierced her thigh.

Emma reached into the pocket and yanked the syringe free. It scuttled somewhere on the floor.

Too late.

An inland taipan’s bite would kill a human being in forty-five minutes or less, but Emma had specifically concentrated the venom for tonight’s vengeance. Over-effective overkill that might’ve just meant there was enough residual venom left to do her in too.

Too late.

Her legs failed under her as she tried to stand. To find a phone? To call for help that would likely be too late? To flee? So at least Gina shouldn’t have to find both of their bodies?

Too late.

She tried to drag herself on before the paralysis reached her arms. Her heart. But only managed past the bedroom doorway. She gave up face-first on the floor. It was cleaner this way, perhaps, when the villain died at the scene. No one would suspect Gina of the crime. And she’d be free now of two burdens.

Too late.

Anyway, hadn’t Emma come here believing that all monsters should get their comeuppance in the end?

#

This story was originally published on Medium by me.