A Snake Falls to Earth, page 3
That’s why, all this time later, Rosita’s story was still largely incomprehensible, except for a few phrases:
“Homeland/home”
“She was in pain”
“The healer”
“The nightmare”
“Animal people”
Animal people.
Everyone knew they had left Earth thousands of years ago after the joined era, but considering their prodigious lifespans, Nina had to ask the question.
“Dad!” she shouted. “Daaaad!”
His response, also shouted, came from the kitchen: “Whaaat?”
“If I fail this project, it’s your fault!”
“Why? I bought you green poster paper!”
“Your side of the family has the life span of parrots! It all begins with Rosita. Is she actually a bird person? Are we descended from spirits? Is that the big mystery of her story?”
A series of audible footsteps indicated that her father had gotten tired of their loud back-and-forth—he’d probably had a busy day at work, considering his fondness for amiable hollering—and was crossing the hallway, which always creaked like the floorboards in a haunted house. He dropped onto the overstuffed recliner near the window and looked down at Nina’s homework. “We’re not one-sixteenth parrot people, no,” he said. “That’s thankfully impossible.”
“What should I do? I can’t write ‘lucky genes’ under Rosita’s name.”
He shrugged. “Just leave her birth date off the poster. If your teacher asks, explain that Rosita doesn’t got reliable records. It happens.”
“It’s not the truth, though. We know our family history, and that’s more reliable than a birth certificate.”
“Play with the wording. There’s no need for lies if you’re clever. How about this: Rosita doesn’t got reliable paper records.”
“Yeah …” Nina chewed the end of her marker before drawing a big question mark in the space under Great-Great-Grandma’s name. “You know, she oughtta be in a world record book, Dad. There has to be evidence to prove her age. What about more pictures?”
In response, he rolled his fingers against the recliner armrests, drumming a soft beat into the fabric. With a start, Nina realized that her father did the same thing on airplanes—and flying made him nervous.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head, smiling now. “Rosita would’ve hated that. Remember when we tried to make her a Picture Place account?”
“Heheh. Yeah. That was a disaster. She never did trust the Internet.”
“Oh, the Internet was all right.” He stood and ruffled Nina’s hair as he strolled back toward the kitchen. “She streamed all her old telenovelas online. It’s the attention Rosita hated. Social media. Targeted ads. Some people don’t want to be known by the unknown, believe it or not.”
“Her Picture Place account was going to be private.”
“It’s my fault,” he admitted, the volume of his voice increasing as the distance between them grew. “I might’ve told her about hackers.”
Nina called after him, “What should I put as her career?” In her long life, Rosita must have done a dozen or more odd jobs to earn money and survive, but she’d always described herself as a storyteller. To Nina’s knowledge, though, she’d never earned a wage for stories.
“Entertainer,” her father responded, now back in the doorway. He glanced at his wrist, checking the time on his smart watch. Although its square-inch screen was too small for his fingers, it obeyed voice commands. The watch’s AI could even tell jokes and pretend to hold conversations; sometimes, Nina got low-key jealous of the watch’s company. “Don’t forget to call your mother,” he reminded. “It’s a halfway decent hour in the middle of the ocean.”
Nina hoped there’d be a strong connection; the last time she tried to contact the ship, the onboard Wi-Fi went down. Of course, Nina spent hours in a state of panic, convinced that the research vessel and all eighty souls onboard were at the bottom of the North Pacific. Thankfully, her mother sent a comforting message as soon as the Wi-Fi returned:
All’s well, my darling.
There’d been a one-minute gap. Then:
By that, I mean “As well as can be on a 4-month cruise with strong-willed scientists from 15 different nations.” I wish I could describe the arguments I’ve translated. Needless to say, the situation became very tense after the galley ran out of sweet biscuits. I can’t wait to return home.
Love you—Mom
She’d be back soon, and for one season, they’d be a family together again. Then, Nina’s mother would return to the Pacific. It was all for the money, she claimed. No translation job in Texas could pay even half the salary of the ocean gig. The family certainly needed it. But sometimes, Nina wondered if her mother really enjoyed the adventure too.
Honestly, who could blame her?
Finished with her work for the night, Nina shoved her school supplies under the coffee table—it was messy, but at least nobody would trip on a marker—and moved to her bedroom. There, she dug through a pile of old journals in her closet, looking for a bright green spiral notebook, her third-grade diary. She found it near the bottom of the pile, the cover decorated by dinosaur stickers and loops of glitter glue. If Nina recalled correctly, she’d written several entries about Rosita then. Maybe, the wisdom of hindsight could extract secrets from that year. If nothing else, she wanted to refresh her memory about the events leading up to the story. Something had sparked Rosita’s memory of those Lipan words. Nina’s parents believed the spark had been medicine. Maybe that was true. People said strange things when they were in the dreamlike fog of IV-delivered morphine. But Nina suspected that something else had first reminded Rosita of la historia.
The fish, for example. The talking fish.
Nina opened the diary. She’d survived a hard-core gel pen phase in third grade, exclusively writing in absurdly colorful ink, as if completing math and spelling worksheets in neon shades of pink made the schoolwork more exciting. If nothing else, the habit taught her to think carefully before she wrote, since gel pen marks could not be erased. Still, as Nina flipped through rainbowy entries, she noticed several scratched-out sentences. A whole page from October 1 was obscured by a whirlwind of frustrated blue scribbles. Nina paused, trying to remember that day. It must have been a bad one. She held the page directly under her bedroom lamp and concentrated on the order among the chaos. With effort, she could still read the original entry:
Philipa is really gone. Now, all my friends have moved away. Kevin and Julio kicked ants at me during resess. I’m easy prey. Alone. I went to the swingset and flew back and forth until I felt like throwing up. The movement is bad for my stomic but at least nobody can hurt me when I’m in the air. In stories from the joined era, people could fly. I miss that freedom almost as much as I miss Philipa. Is it possible to miss something you never really experienced though?
Nina keenly remembered when her best friend moved to Iowa. Philipa’s plea: “Don’t forget about me.” Her tearful response, a promise: “I won’t.”
As if fleeing the memory, Nina rapidly flipped through her diary, passing the new year and the ides of March. On April 7, Rosita was hospitalized. That day, using deep maroon ink, Nina had written:
After Grandpa died, Grandma moved into Rosita’s house. Its weird how a tragidy can save a life. Rosita still gets drinking water from a old well on the ege edge of her massive yard. She says it tastes better than anything from a sink. To me the well water has a flavor like seltzer without bubbles. Some people like that. Anyway, this morning, Grandma woke up and could not find Rosita in the house. She got worried because snakes like the footpath to the well. Its sunny and warm, which makes reptiles happy. Usually Rosita takes a walking stick and taps the ground so copperheads, rattlesnakes, and cottonmouths know shes coming but its possible to get bitten anyway.
Grandma went outside. She shouted “Rosita! Where are you?” She probably shouted that a hundred times because her voice is horse hoarse now, like she gargled sand. Grandma looked behind the oak tree and in the long grasses. Then she found Rosita’s flask near the well, and the water bucket was still lowered. So Grandma leaned over to look into the black water. Do you know what she saw? A HEAD OF WHITE HAIR! Grandma says she thought poor Rosita must be drowned.
But Rosita looked up and said “I can’t climb out. Throw down a life vest.” (In Spanish because she does not speak very much English). Right away, Grandma got a pool floatie and called 9-1-1. Then she called Dad. Guess who arrived first? Dad. He was 20 minutes away but he drove so fast, he got there in 15 minutes. Right away Dad looked into the water and shouted, “Rosita what are you doing in a well?” She was too weak for talking so Dad climbed down using a rope and made sure. Grandma was safe. He says The water was warm up top but biting cold at his feet. Its a good thing not all of the well was that cold Dad says or hed be in the hospital now, too, with hipothermia.
“I saw a little girl down here,” Rosita whispered. “She had such frightened eyes. But when I tried to rescue her, the girl became a fish and swam away.”
“How?” my dad asked. “Theres nowhere to swim.”
“Down. I think shes still there. Under our feet.”
After the EMTs and fire service came, everyone—including Rosita—decided that the fish girl had been a hallucination. A figment of dementia or mental stress. Then they got to focusing on getting Rosita better. But Nina was starting to put faith in a stranger possibility.
Nina flipped past the last day of third grade. Next came entries detailing her vacation and sweltering days spent indoors, holed up in air-conditioned sanctuaries like her bedroom or between the fiction shelves of her father’s bookstore. All summer, she’d waited for messages from Philipa. Messages that never came.
On August 19, Rosita passed away. The entry for that day was written in black:
My great-great-grandmother is no longer with us dead.
Following the single-sentence entry, Nina had filled three journal pages with a copy of Rosita’s story, replete with the jumbled-up nonwords from the app. Looking at them, Nina felt like she’d been handed ten pieces of a hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle and tasked with describing the full image.
She’d have a better chance with a reference. Similar stories, perhaps, or a more thorough understanding of Rosita’s early life. Maybe Grandma could help with that. After living with Rosita for decades, she probably knew the woman’s history better than anyone else in Texas.
Nina pulled a blank journal from her closet. Across its red cover, she wrote one word: Evidence.
t started with a beat. Clack, clack, clack. Like two drumsticks tapping against each other before the beginning of a rock song. However, the song never began. Just clack, clack, clack. I couldn’t pinpoint where the sound originated from. It seemed to echo off the trees, bombarding me from every direction. Confused, I stopped walking.
The sound stopped, too.
When had the forest become so quiet? Even the white noise of bird chirps was gone. Earlier, I’d felt avoided. Now, I felt alone.
Well. Almost alone. The drumstick tapper clearly sensed me, because the moment I resumed walking, the clacking started again. What irony. Only minutes earlier, I’d been desperate for company, but now I was so afraid to meet the beat maker, I started to run. Look, there are sounds that warn of danger. For example: thunder or a rattlesnake’s tail. The clacking was scarier than all of those sounds combined. It accelerated. In the air, I tasted something profoundly wrong, as if it came from a different world. The chemicals did not resemble anything I’d sensed before. That’s the only way I can explain it. They didn’t belong to a mammal or a reptile or an insect or a bird or a plant. Still, my brain classified the chemicals as organic. Something living. What else were there?
Monsters.
Shoot.
I didn’t even know where to run. It could be approaching from any direction. So, I went very still.
Again, the clacking stopped. I wondered if that meant the monster had stopped too. Maybe. The sound certainly resembled wooden shoes tapping on a hard, flat floor. Thing is, the forest ground was soft and spongy. There, footsteps weren’t sharp. I doubted that the monster was actually running around and tapping a pair of drumsticks over his head. Perhaps, it was carrying a bag that clacked with every stride, the same way my rucksack thumped as it bounced against my back when I ran.
If that was the case, the monster moved when I moved. Stopped when I stopped. Which implied the creepy thing had to be tracking me by vibration, either through sound or by feeling my footsteps.
To test my theory, I stomped the ground once.
Clack, clack, clack.
At that moment, I would have easily traded my whole rucksack for a pair of wings. I’d fly away and go so high above the canopy that I could see both horizons, as well as the blue thread of the river. In the sky, a day’s journey by foot can be made in a couple hours. No wonder winged animals rarely transform into their false forms. The ability to fly is a gift.
Heck, as a bird, I could’ve made friends with the nasty robin and joined his team of forest protectors. Instead, I was trying to will my empty stomach not to rumble in case the sound attracted my hunter.
Birds almost always had an escape route: up.
Wait.
Technically, so did I. Cottonmouths aren’t little boa constrictors; that is to say, we don’t like to chill on branches. But in a pinch? Sure. We can climb a tree.
Nearby was a towering, ancient white ash tree. Slowly, I removed my rucksack and looped its strap over a low branch. Then, I eyeballed the distance between me and the trunk: one long jump. There weren’t any convenient handholds or footholds for my false form. That was fine. I climbed better without hands and feet, anyway.
When I transformed, my clothes, shoes, and spectacles plopped onto the ground, and the monster made another inquisitive pair of clacks. I disentangled myself from my white linen tunic and grabbed my spectacles by one ear hook, carrying them in my mouth as I slithered with my head held high toward the tree. The monster made another hesitant clack, and I worried that it was very near. How else could it hear my movement? I practically threw myself at the trunk, gripping it tight with my muscular body, and zigzagged upward. A couple feet up, I heard a shrill, repetitive braying. If the monster was trying to scare me, mission accomplished. But I wouldn’t be startled into a rash decision. Wouldn’t try to flee on the ground. Tightening my grip on the trunk of the tree, I continued the grueling but steady journey upward. Soon, I passed the lowest branch. It was sturdy; my heavy bag still hung from one of its ends. I didn’t stop there, though. The higher, the safer.
The monster didn’t wail again, but when I was ten feet above ground level, I heard it clack-clacking in little bursts, as if it were scurrying back and forth, searching for a lost trail. I climbed faster, slithering in loops around the narrowing trunk. There were loads of branches at this height, and I could’ve made any one of them my perch, but I’d chosen a whopper of a tree. It must’ve been hundreds of years old. Maybe thousands. If I could reach the highest branch, then nothing on the forest floor would be able to sense me. And even if the monster realized that I’d escaped up that tree, how could it follow me? The high branches would snap under its weight unless it was the size of a squirrel.
I passed a bird nest full of little white eggs. Late bloomers, like me. They’d hatch in the late summer, if at all. I wondered how many of my siblings had survived their first day of independence. How could all of them thrive in a world that was so vicious and uncaring?
I was a nontuplet, born in a clutch of eight others. The most daring sibling, my sister Sona, hopped onto a passing ferry at the age of ten and never came back. She didn’t even wait for Momma to make her a gift. The others left home between the ages of eleven and fourteen, their departures staggered, such that everybody left alone. My sibling Bleak was gifted a pistol and a holster; Pilot, Al, and Fourier got kayaks; my brother Elvin really, really, really wanted a flashy outfit, so Momma sent him to the tailor in the dammed town, and he marched into the sunset wearing a vibrant silk shirt, blue jeans, a silver and turquoise bolo tie, and a twelve-gallon hat. Everyone else got handwoven blankets. I guess all those gifts were supposed to improve our chances at survival. Even a flashy outfit, on the right person, can open doors to safety and good fortune. However, if my first day and a half were any indication of reality, Momma couldn’t give us enough gifts to even the playing field against the world.
I reached an elevation above most of the other trees, but there was still plenty of ash to go, so I continued climbing. Sixty feet above the ground, the vertical body of the tree was so thin, I could wrap around it at least twice. At last, eighty feet high, I lifted my head and peeked above the shell of delicate green leaves at the top of the ash tree.
From my vantage point, I could see previously hidden details of the forest: the mushroom-shaped, domed heads of deciduous trees mixed among conical conifers. Gray clouds huddled along the western horizon. It was raining in a not-too-distant part of the world. I searched for signs of community, such as cooking smoke or road-shaped gaps in the canopy, but did not find anything promising. No river, either. Of course, the world was a bit fuzzy. I tightened my bite on the spectacles, considering my options. If I transformed, my extra weight would snap the tip of the ash off, and in the unlikely event that I survived the fall, I’d probably land in the open mouth of the monster. Instead, I squinted and tilted my head, trying to force sharpness into my vision. There was a south-to-north gap in the green patchwork of leaves, a narrow line of emptiness that resembled a seam in the very fabric of the forest. It was difficult to be certain, but it might have been a sign of a trail. Something narrow, perhaps worn by the same set of feet over a period of many years. Wherever the path led, it led somewhere, which was a lot better than my track record of going nowhere. Once the monster had lost interest in me, I would head toward that path.
