When The Snakes Came
They followed me for months, licking at my heels and slithering along my fleece blankets as I slept. But, before they came, it began as a single moment of fear lodged in my stomach. That’s what I told myself, anyway, but the nightmares were relentless as soon as I hit the pillow at night. Maybe a night on the couch wouldn’t be so bad? If it could stave off the leathery snakes spiraling seamlessly through my dreams, then maybe I could find just one night of peace.
That was six months ago. The snakes were vindictive and calculating, I realized. They’d simply drop to the floor with soft thuds and lightly caress my sleeping form. Their bites painlessly pierced my skin and paralyzed me where I slept. My voice would catch in my throat, my bloodstream trickled with ice, and the snakes would encircle me slowly. Taunting.
As the months passed, they’d slide into my mouth and cut off my oxygen. I’d choke in my sleep and wake to my own stifled groans. Tears would dot my pillow each dawn after surviving these nightmares.
Then, I could feel a quiet, small shift. It was carried on the winds through each day that passed us by in court and it followed me home as makeshift, invisible armor. Each time I confronted him and lit up the courtroom with my voice, the snakes would lose their hold on me in turn. They’d run at the sight of my narrowed, wild eyes and bared teeth. They’d run to the shadows in the nooks of our house. Their hisses, one by one, were slowly snuffed out with each new day.
Then, all at once, my dream body hovered over the porcelain lip of the toilet. I shook in cold sweats as I vomited a painstakingly steady stream of cold black. As the summer fell to calm cool nights, my nightmares would show me more dead snakes curled up in hidden crevices, cowering and weak. The last of them, one who managed to evade me time and time again, lay dead at the bottom of the attic one fall night. His body gave way to a spindle of blackened thread and snapped teeth, as if he’d been burned at the edges by the fire I’d created within me all those months ago.
I haven’t dreamed of a single black snake since.