Milk Snake

1.

 

The old man sat opposite me in a large maroon armchair. He smoked roll-up cigarettes that he kept in the front pocket of his shirt. His head was nearly bald and the skin on his face and neck was corrugated like a gravel road. His house was a miniature hospital. Pipes lined the floor around his chair; they led to a large white machine that fed him oxygen and other essential ingredients for life. When he wasn’t smoking he was eating and when he wasn’t eating he had an oxygen mask fixed to his face. I think he was defying death to the last second. Sickness had never stopped him before so why should it now. The way he stared at me with minimal movement, with that mask over his face, made me wonder if he was dead but his blinking deep blue eyes always betrayed his pretence.  

‘Have you heard of the milk snake?’ he began, questioning my lack of useless knowledge.

‘No.’

‘What’s fascinating about the milk snake is the story behind its name. You see, farmers believed that the snakes took milk from their cows, so they named them milk snakes. I mean, if your cows aren’t giving you enough milk why not blame the bloody snakes!’ He laughed, choked and coughed, ‘the snake’s name is a myth, they can’t milk a cow!’ He looked at me expecting a reply.

‘Of course,’ I said, trying to find a fragment of relevance in his words.

            He was giving me his blessing. He knew death wasn’t far away. It was so close he could see the tentacles about to lurch out and rip him from reality. I was his hope; the boyfriend of his only daughter. He was reassuring himself about my character.

‘Why do you blame your father?’ He said suddenly after a minute’s silence.

‘My father? What about my father?’

‘He was angry, wasn’t he?’

‘What?’

‘He hit you.’

‘You don’t even know my father.’

‘No, I don’t. But I know you.’ He glanced at the sliver of light breaking through the drawn curtains. He felt for the right words, as if he knew it was a sensitive subject. ‘Always remember son, your past is in the way you act.’

Smoke drifted up to the stained plaster roof. I felt as if the smoke was eating away at me like acid; morphing me into the old man, wrinkled and ill.

 

 

2.

 

            Esther talked to anyone. She once told her life story to a bartender. ‘My father thinks I’m studying geomatics!’ she had said waving her hands flamboyantly. ‘It’s a crock of s**t!’ She then looked up at the amused man slowly drying a glass. ‘Oh I’m enrolled, but I’ve never set foot in a university. He sits in his chair so pompous, so proper, and so damn civilized. I care for the old man; I just don’t do what he says.’ She laughed as she tapped the barman on the shoulder, a vain effort to thank him for listening, as if he had had a choice.

It was a long time ago when we first met. We were young and immature. Not innocent just insolent. I was sulking behind a jug of beer. I saw her dancing in front of the DJ. She blended in with the array of flashing, multi-coloured lights. She moved frame by frame towards me.

            She sat next to me and I spoke. I spoke because I had nothing to lose, and I was drunk. She wore faded and ripped pieces of ornate op-shop clothing.

‘Can I chat you up?’ I slurred.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ She asked, pulling back in bewilderment.

‘Because you’re different.’ I tried to focus on her, I moved my head and my vision was a few seconds behind.

‘What if I’m not?’

‘I just said you are.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Look. I just know you’re not normal. You’re eccentric and I like that. I know that wherever we go or whatever we do that we’ll have fun. No matter what, there’ll always be good times.’

‘I’ve never met you.’

‘You met me just now.’

‘You know nothing about me. I might actually be dead boring behind this facade.’

‘You’re not.’ I said firmly.

‘I see us old and grey, sitting silent throughout the day in our respective chairs; me reading a Mills & Boon because I don’t get romance from anywhere else and you reading Inside Sport – not because of the sport. You know? Silent: not a word between us, that’s not different, that’s not exciting.’

‘Words aren’t everything.’

We sat on in a silence that wasn’t awkward. We drowned something similar to sorrow, perhaps it was pain. We breathed the same breath and became thoroughly absorbed in one another. We were on the same path and we collided – head on, condition critical. We were vagrants, searching for soothing with not a clue where to find it.

We held on to each other for dear life as we crashed back into the world. We screamed at each other, we scratched and cut, we tore each other open, we pulled out the filth and we never once thought that we would ultimately save ourselves.

That night, I walked her home under the ceiling of darkness. Street lights guided us through the maze of cracked footpaths that led to her house, and I spoke about my childhood for the first time.

‘In a glass bottle the mist made droplets that clung to the walls. Morning sun shone through the glass, the inside became hot and excruciatingly humid. Father, the man who punched and left me bloodied on the floor, picked up the bottle. He threw it. The glass shattered against the dark red brick wall. “Dog-headed b*****d,” I yelled from an immense darkness. The sun never found me, I cried in the shadows of a desperate pernicious loneliness and all the time the water dropped onto my forehead. Drip, drop, drip, drop…’

I fazed out.  I faded and she held me. We wobbled. We held each other up.

 

 

3.

 

‘I know Esther was a drug addict.’ His voice echoed from behind a wall of thick white smoke. ‘I know that you were too. Whenever she visited me the skin below her nose was red like she had a permanent cold. She was weak and thin, she didn’t work and I don’t have a clue where she lived.’ I nodded cautiously. ‘I gather that you pulled her out and she pulled you.’ I tried to see through the stained old man, like he saw through me, but he was cloudy glass.

‘She never got her geomatics degree, did she?’ I nodded again. ‘A parent can see the truth, clear as day, but that doesn’t mean they accept it.’  

We ate small shrivelled muffins that he seemed to enjoy. They were rock-hard and bitter with a minty aftertaste; I thought they tasted like a dentist’s drill. In between small bites of his muffin he chewed on 85 percent cocoa chocolate. It looked like chocolate, smelt like chocolate but tasted like tar. He loved it, only because his tastebuds were utterly ruined by lifelong smoking. It was the only chocolate powerful enough to penetrate his senses.

He stopped talking. He sighed and turned on the TV with a huge, square remote that sat on his arm rest. ‘Oprah. I like Oprah,’ he said with a mouth full of muffin. Part of my weekly chore was watching Oprah with the old man. She was alright once you got used to her, and so was he. The three of us sat together every Friday for an hour. We all enjoyed each others’ company, even if the conversation was one-sided.

Oprah’s murmuring voice was somnolent. My eyelids pulled together like magnets.

When I awoke Oprah had made way for Humphrey Bear. He danced along to If you’re happy and you know it. He waved his hands with happiness fixed on his face.

I glanced up at the old man; he stared straight back at me and never blinked. His shimmering blue eyes – the eyes of a child, a cloudless sky, an ocean – penetrated my exterior and sucked me in.  

 

 

4.

 

I lunged for his phone. It was an antique black machine with large protruding keys like a 1980s computer keyboard. Esther’s voice was soft and emotionless on the other end. She was probably at a meeting, or in a rush trying to get to one on time.

‘Sometimes people get blamed for something they never did.’ I began.

‘Really?’

‘It’s like the poor old milk snake.’

‘What’s a milk snake?’

‘They got blamed for milking cows.’ My mind was swirling around in circles. I was panicking and talking too fast, the sentence became one word. ‘Have-you-ever-blamed-someone-for-your-own-faults?’

‘What happened?’ She sighed and murmured a sour laugh. She already knew.

‘It’s your dad.’

‘What about him?’

‘I think he’s dead.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything, he just stopped breathing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Words aren’t everything.’

 

Reviews

[Dave "Doc" Rogers]

Interesting work here. I like how the story went. I like the twists and the tie-in at the end. This was pretty good story making. It does feel like it wasn't finished ending as it did. But that could be just a hanging ending style. Overall, pretty good.

Might I suggest breaking the paragraphs with indents or separating lines.

Doc.