Dry Skin and Soft Bones

(This story was created for submission to the Metamorphosis of the Mind Vocal challenge. The topic for this challenge was to use layered metaphors to describe a time of transition.)

In my dream house black rat snakes slithered in and out of the stone foundation. They’d huddle in the basement rafters, using the joist edges to slough the scales from their writhing frames. The dry skins dangled from the ceilings like decorative streamers. We collected them in the windowsills until we ran out of space.

On warm days their sleek obsidian bodies soaked up the sun as they lounged on the deck and patio. I’d watch, mesmerized by the slow, smooth rhythm of their movement across the surfaces, bellies gliding over rough gray cement and newly refreshed red paint.

I joked offhandedly about being queen of the snakes, but I understood the snakes did not know I existed. My pale white limbs and their lack of grace betrayed me. My curves gave me away.

They paid their rent. They ate mice and pests. They defended their territory, ostracizing the copperheads to the road and neighboring farm.

This was their land.

They lived here long before me. Likely long before any humans.

And I’ll leave and they’ll reign on.

—-

In thick black letters I scrawled “Dream House” with a Sharpie at the top of a crisp white sheet of printer paper. Below it, I listed the characteristics my partner and I desired in a home. Our 950 square foot, two bedroom rental on a noisy street had served us well for several years, but I longed for expansion. I missed the quiet of the country I’d known in my youth, the taste of a freshly picked berry from my own backyard, the smell of fresh air on line dried sheets without the hint of city smog. I put the list on the refrigerator in our tiny kitchen, quietly manifesting a home with adequate cabinet space and natural lighting. I could taste it on the tip of my forked tongue.

The next spring the Dream House appeared on the local real estate market— 11 acres of woods and streams, perched on a hill overlooking a pond. My stagnant blood began to flow faster in anticipation of idealization. I brought my sister to the edge of the hill to share in my dream. I solicited her expertise on where to place a garden and we talked of the beauty of the land.

Before the waking dream could unfold a family tragedy struck. Six days before the closing I received a phone call that my sister’s blood had stopped flowing.

My own blood turned cold.

In my grief the land cradled and comforted me. I wore it like a skin. It let me in and let me wallow. It sang me to sleep with cricket chirps and bullfrog croaks and woke me with gentle sun rays. It grounded me, barefoot on thick pillows of moss. After the funeral, as the bouquets of sympathy flowers began to wilt, I threw them one at a time into the pond, singing my sister's favorite songs, and watched them float away.

In cold weather snakes and other reptiles conserve their energy by entering a kind of hibernation state called brumation. My time in the dream house was my own brumation, a settling in and buckling down. A time for rest and recovery until the outside world calls again. The quiet of the forest and the passing of time built a callus over my raw ache, lessening the sting of grief. From my house on the hill and watched the geese fly over in formation, heading for warmer weather, envying them.

So much energy was spent licking my wounds of grief that I didn’t notice new wounds developing, though honestly I never really could make any sense of the end of love. I was prone to pouring ever more of myself into relationships with time, especially as they eroded- a walking sunk cost fallacy. I assumed love would find a way. That naivety could only carry me so far. After more than a decade together our structure began to crumble. I patched the holes and propped up the foundation as well as anyone might, but the frogs croaked in warning that the end was coming, sooner or later.

What a cost, to find yourself trapped in a dream you made for yourself, like a golden cage. Each mortgage payment dug beyond my pockets and into my soul, strengthening the attachment to the land and the grief it was healing me from. The relationship, too, was my home. Both practically and emotionally, I couldn’t afford to leave. The cost of leaving seemed too great, and the idea of more loss unacceptable. I dug my heels in to daily strife and desperate optimism and squeezed every last drop out of making it work. Each day brought drier skin and softer bones.

Spring after spring the peepers arrived to deliver their nightly opera and soft blue eggs appeared in newly built nests in the planter by the door. The forsythia I planted sparked in bright yellow blooms. The snakes came out of brumation to roam their dominion once again. All the while I was chasing a dream, an illusion of domestic bliss against a backdrop of a house that felt increasingly less like my own.

On a late winter evening following a particularly heated argument we began to exist as ghosts - passing ships without interaction or acknowledgement, sharing a space neither wanted to forfeit, even if we now recognized that inhabiting it together was a dream that had failed us both. The walls vibrated with an energy and a realization that loss was inevitable - I could lose my relationship and my home and find whatever existed on the other side, or I could eat myself alive like an ouroboros. The stalemate lasted for weeks before, at last, I was able to swallow my ego and accept the loss. I left my skin in the rafters and slithered off into a new life.

—

Many summers later on a hot September evening I met my match on an afternoon sidewalk in my new neighborhood. He recognized the pattern of my scales, and he caught me. I wrapped my tail around his forearms and winded up to rest on his shoulder, and I stayed.