by Leslie Lutz

Merrill told herself the dark thing was a dream, and it didn’t return, although the noises did. Each night, she’d wake to the sound of dragging on the other side of the wall. She thought she was back in New Orleans, six years old again. Her mother had hired a man for just one day, when the copperheads had nested against the bricks underneath her bedroom window. Merrill wasn’t allowed outside until he’d finished. Not until all their little heads had been severed and the venom had bled into the earth. A week later wildflowers grew there, but she wouldn’t touch them, afraid that her family would die if she brought them in the house. 

Wildflowers. She turned on her side. Something heavy, being dragged, on the other side of her bedroom wall. The shovel’s slap, a slur of mud, the workman pulling a thirty-pound snake from the earth.