Rattlesnake Mothers
Don’t Nurse Their Young
by Colin Alexander
Mama was always saying how she’d sacrificed, but she’d been robbing me since I was born.
I was real sick. Mama said it was because she wasn’t supposed to have children.
When people came by she called me her “miracle,” and it made me smile through the cracked plastic ventilator.
“You’re a full-time job,” Mama’d say. That meant she couldn’t work at Walmart or go part time at the Dollar store like other moms at the park.
We did charity drives. The trailer’d fill with aerosol and singed hair, then she’d wheel me out to the suburbs, bringing the big oxygen tank.
Sometimes it was lymphoma, sometimes my bones.
“Real complicated,” she’d say. “Doctors can’t pin it down.”
Mornings I’d feel fine. I’d spring out of bed, forgetting my walker. But at night, Mama’d hold me in her arms, and when she kissed me I’d feel a wave of nausea, like my bones were empty, and I knew I’d never run on real grass or throw a ball like other kids.
Life was brittle and dreams were small.
Things changed when Mama met Wayne.
It was during one of those charity drives. Wayne didn’t put any fives or tens into the bucket. He wrote Mama a check with a gold pen, and afterwards he took us for ice cream.
“She’ll have sherbet,” said Mama. I hated orange sherbet, but couldn’t stomach milk, so I tried to smile while Wayne made googly eyes at Mama.
Mama always said “I gave up my figure for you,” but Wayne liked her figure just fine. We moved into his house, where I had a whole room to myself painted amoxicillin pink.
He had a barn. Horses, too.
“Can I pet them?” I asked, looking at Mama.
“You’ll ride ‘em some day,” said Wayne, and he was right.
Soon as we moved to Wayne’s, I got better. Mama stopped putting me to sleep, and I felt lighter and lighter until I could carry myself upstairs, no oxygen or nothing.
Hunger returned. Wayne served second, even third helpings.
“It’s a miracle,” said Mama, cupping her hands to her mouth, Wayne hugging her from behind.
Wayne gave me my own horse. She was black and white, so I named her Dolly, short for Dalmatian.
He taught me to sit tall in the saddle, to grip Dolly’s reins, and to squeeze with my thighs when we galloped.
Wayne also taught me to watch for rattlers.
“The mommas shake like maracas,” he’d say. “Folks can survive a bite, ‘cause they’ve got control. The small ones, the babies hidden under rocks, kill. Can’t stop their venom.”
I loved Wayne from the start. He was pudgy, with red hair that didn’t quite cover the sunburnt patch of skin in the back. He wore western shirts with pearl buttons, and I liked the way they shined.
After teaching me to ride, Wayne stopped. He’d watch me practice jumps, but didn’t mount any horses himself.
“Back hurts,” he’d say.
He lost his fat. The sunburnt patch on the back of his head got larger, and when the wind caught his western shirts they looked like sails pinned to a scarecrow.
They said I was gonna have a little brother. Mom and Wayne were both there, so I guess that was before the ambulance. But I wasn’t happy about it, so I suppose I’d found the box.
A dozen photos. It wasn’t Mom looking the exact same in all of them, it was some of them were old, falling apart along the edges. One of the black and whites looked like it’d been etched in silver.
After the ambulance took Wayne, I asked about them.
Mama thumbed through the photos, looking like she was thinking about the ice cream shop that’d closed, and how we couldn’t go back.
“Wasn’t supposed to have kids,” she said. “My kind just…exists. Then you showed up.”
She pointed the edge of the silver photo at me, the one where she wore a corset. I was taller by then, but I was still skin and bones while she was thick and full of life.
“I can live a long, long time with a man to feed off,” she said. “But when you arrived, the men dried up, so I lived off what I could.”
I looked at my spindly arms, blue veins like streams searching for a dried up ocean.
I stared at the photos, then at Mama, and I must have made a face, because she slapped me so I tasted blood.
“Didn’t I put a roof over your head?” she asked. “Didn’t I feed you, get you a new wheelchair when you needed it? We survived. And now look at us.”
She gestured towards the high ceilings in Wayne’s house. We could barely stand back in the trailer.
“What about Wayne?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“He put it down on paper. We’ll still have the house when he’s gone.”
“How will you…eat?”
She smiled, putting her hand on her bulging belly.
“You don’t have to worry anymore,” she said.
I started crying, and she held her arms open, like when she’d put me to bed all those nights. I hugged her, but when my hands got ‘round, I clasped them together, holding tight.
Mom’s knees buckled after I kissed her, but she fought on the floor. I wrapped my legs around, clamping down my thighs, feeling whatever was warm inside her drawn into me.
I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted; I didn’t know how to feed back then, just how to gorge.
They said it was her heart.
Wayne was a mess when he came back from the hospital, but the color was already back in his cheeks. He did his best not to cry when I was around, but I heard him through the walls.
I forgave Mama for all she had to do. I hope my little brother, rest his soul, forgives me.
Better the world eats you up whole than piece by piece.
The Molotov Cocktail 