Rattlesnake Baby

by J Saler Drees

After Rattlesnake Baby rocked her interview with the famed talk show host, pregnant women went seeking the bite. One woman lost her baby. Another nearly died. Others’ hands and legs swelled up to the point of bursting before the antivenom entered their veins. They wanted their children to be heroic, they told the baffled media representatives. Like Rattlesnake Baby. They wanted their children to have powers.

Put a stop to this, Rattlesnake Baby’s mother told her. You shouldn’t have announced to the world your gift on that show.

But Rattlesnake Baby was tired of keeping it a secret. Why should she be burdened with others’ stupidity? Not like she was accountable for their actions. Ever since she could remember, her mother told her the story of how she was bitten by a rattlesnake when thirty-eight weeks pregnant, walking along the creek behind their house. Summer and the snakes come out to warm. She didn’t see the one hiding under the rocks. How fast its strike, fangs digging right above her ankle, and just as quickly extracting. She cried out, the trees and sky around her beginning to whiten and blot. But instead of passing out, she stumbled and crawled toward the road, dragging her foot behind her, already swelling and too painful to walk on. She only thought of the baby.

You came wailing out of my womb with venom smooth in your blood, her mother always reminded her.

Your protection, shielding you from the harms of the world.

And Rattlesnake Baby believed her. It was the reason she could run into burning buildings and pull the asphyxiated from the smoke. Why she could shove a car off a pedestrian crushed underneath. Why she jumped into the river and thrust a child out from curling eddy and into air. Why not share with everyone it was her rattlesnake blood that gave her the strength? She felt it, didn’t she, beating deep and safe in her being, like the earliest memory.

But then a baby was born prematurely with crumpled limbs and stricken lungs, the mother just bitten by a diamondback.

The next morning, Rattlesnake Baby’s mother insisted, Go to that hospital and see the baby.

Why would I do that? she asked. She stood posed by the fridge, wanting breakfast.

So this all ends.

Why’re you making who I am a crime?

Her mother lifted her skirt and pulled down her sock to reveal the scar on her ankle, the one so familiar to Rattlesnake Baby. As a child, she’d press her fingers onto the two little indents just above bone, how smooth they felt, white and hairless, like shining stars. Even now, the two marks gleamed pure against her mother’s veiny, aging leg.

Have you looked at the footage of the women bitten by rattlesnakes? her mother asked.

I try not to, she admitted. The bulging limbs, the blackened skin swelling and splitting, the required surgery where tissue had to be cut away and removed, made her nauseous.

Does my scar look anything like theirs?

Rattlesnake Baby shook her head, afraid at what her mother was getting at. She’d heard you never recover from a rattlesnake bite. That the surrounding area of the bite is haunted with hurt, and your respiratory system is forever impacted, possibly other organs too, depending on how long it took to get the antivenom. Yet in all of Rattlesnake Baby’s seventeen years, her mother never showed any difficulty breathing, or any pain around the bite area.

A lightness in her head, the same lightness she felt if she considered a different take: her mother on that day, pregnant and walking along the creek bed, delicately stepping over a rattler stretched sun-drunk on stone. But Rattlesnake Baby didn’t like this quiet version. What it meant. So she never dwelled on it long, and the lightness ceased, the thickness of the rattlesnake blood pooling back into her marrow, making her whole.

Now she turned from her mother and the exposed scar, so beautiful and bright, against the morning light streaming from the kitchen window.

I’ll go, she said. But only if you tell me why. Why’d you make up such a story?

She heard the swish of skirts falling back down before her mother replied, her voice hushed. It gave you courage.

Rattlesnake Baby walked toward the door without looking back, wondering if you must lose something to find yourself. She felt the lightness again, like she could float away, the anchor of venom releasing her.

J Saler Drees currently resides in San Diego, land of the Kumeyaay. She adores rattlesnakes and encourages everyone to leave them be. Seriously, do not touch, period. They’ve been here since the Pliocene Era, so we know who’s survived longer.