Members Only by Sameer Pandya

Author:Sameer Pandya
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358100508
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

As I walked from the car to our front door, the sky was orange and pink from the sunset. Inside, the house was surprisingly quiet. I rummaged through the fridge, made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and headed to our bedroom. I needed to get out of my wet shorts. As I left the kitchen, I noticed a thick, coiled snake right outside our back door. It didn’t move, but every few seconds its forked tongue slithered out of its mouth.

I quickly walked down the hall. The kids’ doors were open, but the lights were out. Eva was in bed, reading.

“They’re both asleep and it’s barely eight,” she said, smiling. “What are we going to do?”

“Come. You need to see this.”

We walked into the living room. Eva stopped when she saw the snake, then leaned down to get a closer look.

“The rattle is missing. But that’s definitely a rattlesnake.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I can feel it,” she said, pointing to the prickly hair on her arms.

Uncoiled, the snake would have been several feet long, as thick as a baguette. It was full and mature.

“What now?” I asked. I’d grown up on the sixth floor of an apartment building in Bombay. In matters of wildness, I deferred to Eva.

“We have to kill it,” she said. “If it thinks this is its new territory, we’re in trouble. It’ll start laying eggs.”

“Kill it?” I asked. “Are you kidding? Let’s call animal control and have them do it.”

“It’ll be gone by the time they arrive. We have to do it now.”

“Maybe it’ll just go away.”

“It won’t. It’s here now.”

As we were discussing its future, the snake slowly uncurled and slithered away, as if it knew that its life was under attack. We watched it head into a thicket of Mexican sage to the left of where it had been resting, and we rushed out another door to the yard to see if we could find it. It was gone.

We went back inside. Eva checked in on the sleeping kids and then went into the bedroom. I could sense her agitation.

“We should’ve killed it,” she said. “The kids can’t go in the yard now. I’ll always think it’s lurking. I wish you hadn’t waited.”

“Waited?” I asked.

“Never mind.”

“Say it.”

“You deliberated about what to do. We should’ve gone outside right away.”

“I didn’t sign up for this. You were the one who wanted a house with a little land. This isn’t my childhood. If it were, we’d still be living in a small apartment in an overcrowded city.”

Eva stared at me.

I walked into the living room to get myself a pour of something warm. I quickly turned and went back to the bedroom.

“It’s returned.”

“In the same place?” she asked, jumping out of bed.

I nodded. This time, we both went outside immediately and armed ourselves with gardening gloves and a shovel. Eva was in her pajamas and had slipped on her rubber boots.

“We have to cut its head off,” Eva said, making practice lunges with the shovel.

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