W.J. Donahue, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life,” 7-3-2018
Writers: Attached are the first two chapters of a new novel, “Crawl on Your Belly All the Days of Your Life.”
I see this as a dark version of “When Harry Met Sally...” with a generous helping of snakes. Each chapter will be preceded by a vignette about a certain breed of snake (hognose snake, reticulated python, king cobra, etc.), including a brief description of its personality that somehow relates to the chapter. If and when published, each chapter would also include a sketch of its corresponding snake so the reader would have a fully formed sense of it.
Some of you might recognize the first chapter, part of which I submitted in 2016 as a freestanding short story. Back then, the primary criticism was that the unnamed main character—named Sid Carver here—was irredeemable. You will likely find him even less likable now, which to me feels like a good starting point for a longer work.
I would appreciate your thoughtful criticism. Thank you in advance for reading.
WJD
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Common Death Adder, Acanthophisantarcticus
Found throughoutthe sun-drenched forests and grasslands of Australia’s eastern coast, the common death adder ambushesits prey. A tawny hide enables this placid serpent to blend in with leaf litter on the forest floor and simply wait for a rodent, lizard orsome other vertebrate to pass by. So patient is this stout-bodied viper that it often remains perfectly still even when it senses the approach of a much larger animal, such asa human. As a result, accidental bites are quite common. The snake’s highly potent neurotoxic venom does its job all too well; as the name implies, a bite from a death adder often proves fatal.
Chapter One: Skeletons
Like any proper serpent, Sid Carver knew his gift for cold, calculated patience would have its reward. The only question: How to deliver the kill shot?
Two options scrolled through his mind. He could slither into a shadowed corner, just beyond the reach of the light, and hit the first warm body to pass by. Or he could remain perfectly still, as tight as a coiled spring, and wait for a more tempting target. This time he had only one acceptable course of action.
He just wasn’t sure what it was.
He sat toward the back, near the exit, trying to excise the smells of holy ointment and sickly sweet perfume from his nostrils. Row after row of mourners clad in black and gray stood in procession and waddled down the aisle toward the glossy metal casket. He spied a few familiar faces, most of them belonging to enemies, including one who had at one time or another threatened to remove his genitals or otherwise undo him. Heels clicked against freshly polished granite. A limp and ashen Christ, tacked to the oversized T behind the altar, judged the congregation through vacant eyes.
Gwen stood to the left of Christ’s spiked feet, beside a man with a rounded gut and a shag of salt-and-pepper hair. The man’s hand weighed down her shoulder, doing his best to look solemn between discreet yawns. Her face was tired, puffy and worn, perhaps from the trauma of losing a loved one or simply from the rigors of age—hopefully, he thought, not the result of the hell he had put her through.
Up there, an arm’s length from a corpse in a very nice box, she looked so unlike her fashionable and perfectly tended self. At least she looked unlike the perfect shell of plastic she used to show the rest of the world. Sid was one of the few to have seen her at her worst—ugly, venomous and barbaric, possessed by the rage of a woman whose affections had gone to waste.
“I’ll wreck you,” she had told him during a years-ago phone call he wished he could forget. “You’ll be homeless, hopeless, jobless, penniless—a complete zero, a fucking cripple. That’s all I want from this life: to light a match to everything you love and then listen to you wail as it crackles and burns.”
“Talk, talk, talk. You don’t have the stomach for it.”
He had regretted speaking the words—a dare, no less—as soon as they spilled out, because daring was a dumb thing to do to someone who could hurt you.
“No one will love you ever again,” she spat back. “You and that circus-freak fetish of yours. No one will understand anything about you. No one will even want to!”
“How could they after what you’ve reduced me to? I’m dust—nothing but bones and dust. That’s all I am now. A shell of bones and dust.”
Or a brittle husk of shed skin, he might have said, should have said. He would have preferred this metaphor had he taken the time to craft it properly.
Either way, she hadn’t known how to respond to the barb, which he had delivered, by his best guess, the better part of three years ago, give or take a month. He had done his best to strike the dates from memory, to remove the heartache and the name-calling and the otherwise atrocious behavior from the seasons in which these regrets occurred. Whole winters and summers never even happened, his brain tried to tell him, forever tarnished by the horrors they had taken turns committing.
Yet the memories remained,sometimes rising from nothing, usually at the most inconvenient times. What he’d learned. There was no convenient time to repeat your sins, even if only in memory. It was best to take something from each one, actually learn something, and become something better.
If only it were that simple …
“Fuck off and leave me alone,” he’d told Gwen as the phone call inched toward its inevitable conclusion. “Just leave me alone. Don’t call. Don’t email. Don’t text. Don’t send a fucking carrier pigeon.”
“That’s not at all what I had in mind. Just wait and see, you spineless fuck. Just you fucking wait.”
It was his turn to be speechless, mostly because of how calmly she had spoken the words. A threat, to put it plainly—a promise to put him in a position that would have him begging for mercy, if not welcoming death. His mind had conjured visions of her, Gwen, standing on his front step of his family’s home in Stony Creek, Virginia, her slight knuckles rapping against a pane of painted-red oak, waiting patiently until his wife, Lydia, answered the door so she, Gwen, could hurl a cup of acid in Lydia’s face or plunge a butcher knife into her breast or, more likely, blast her with both barrels of a shotgun before Lydia had time to realize she was in a prolonged war she didn’t deserve to be in. He imagined her, Gwen, standing in his humidity-controlled basement with a flamethrower hitched to her back, setting fire to each coiled member of his beloved collection—“that oddball menagerie of yours,” as she called it, on the rare occasion she bothered to acknowledge its existence.
“You want to get dirty, just say the word,” he seethed. “I know everything about you, too, you bat-shit whore. I swear to God, you come after me, after my family, after my business, after my snakes, and I’ll end you—every-fucking-thing about you.”
He’d slammed the phone, cracking the plastic receiver. Then he’d noticed how quiet the world outside his office door had become. His employees must have heard every word. He’d been too enraged to even think about modesty, realizing after the fact it hadbeen one of the few times in his life he had given serious thought to murder: the hows, whens and wheres—details and specifics, the art of it all, where he could find X amount of the right kind of acid to dissolve her butchered bones.
Then the waiting began. In the weeks and months that followed their final phone call, he had hurried to the house phone each time it rang, done his best to intercept the mailman to make sure every incoming package was exactly as advertised, let his eyes rove the street for slow-moving cars with tinted windows—staving off every imagined assault. He fought this silent war for six months.
His vigilance died the day he had found a new trauma to contend with: the murder of his niece, just fifteen years old, strangled by a jealous boyfriend and left to rot in the woods, her body discovered by an old man and his dog just a few steps from a leaf-strewn trail less than a mile from her parents’ front door. He never forgave Gwen for not calling, for not offering him her heartfelt condolences.
Less than a week after his niece’s funeral came his birthday, and again she said nothing, did nothing. Ghosts.
The war had reached its end, quietly, mercifully … yet regretfully.
Then everything changed, five days ago.
Contact, by way of a call to his office, delivered by Gwen’s sister Bertie, the one who never liked him, the one who’d labeled him “a real weirdo,” the one who had promised to tell his wife everything, the same one who had vowed to remove his testicles, along with other precious parts that made him uniquely masculine, several times throughout the two-year-long affair with Gwen. Bertie’s promises of ruination continued, in the form of thoughtful and particularly threatening dissertations, delivered by email after email, long after Gwen had pulled away from him for the last time.
“I’ll cut your cock off and grind it up for the pigs to gulp down,” she had once written. Such colorful invective would have made him laugh had he thought she didn’t actually mean itor had it been meant for any hapless sap other than him. She kept at least three pigs in a sty in her junk-strewn backyard, after all.
“Gwen’s dad died,” Bertie had said in the course of their brief conversation.
“He was your dad, too.”
“Obviously. The funeral’s on Friday.”
“I’m so sorry, Bert. How is she? How are you?”
“I know she’d want you there. For some awful reason.”
“Did she tell you that?” he asked, hopeful.
“She didn’t have to. She’s my sister, stupid. She’s always been a glutton for punishment.”
“How are the kids?” he asked, referring to Bertie’s twin daughters. They would be thirteen by now. Maybe fourteen. Their names eluded him.
“So the funeral’s on Friday,” she repeated, ignoring him. “Saint Christopher’s, the ostentatious church down the street from my mom’s house. You remember?”
He nodded, though he couldn’t picture it.
“You know the place?” she said, insistent.
“Sure, sure. I’ll be there.”
“Friday. The service starts at eleven.”
He had met Gwen and Bertie’s father once, an awkward brunch at the parents’ house in Rougemont, an hour across the North Carolina border. There would never been an invitation for a second meeting, even though the affair had limped along for another six months.
“Bertie tells me you’re married,” the father had said from his seat at the table’s head, stabbing away at a ham steak.
Sid dabbed at his lips with a napkin, offering, “Did she?”
The overprotective sister, always stirring up the slop, always playing the foil.
“Is she wrong?”
“It’s … complicated,” Sid’s had said, and the response went over about as well as a fart at a tea party. Gwen hadn’t spoken a word the rest of the brunch, hadn’t lifted her eyes from the table. Sid was unsurprised when Gwen’s father hadn’t offered to shake his hand when he left forty minutes later.
None of that mattered now. So much time had passed—years—it might as well never even have happened. But there he was, sitting uncomfortably in the belly of the beast, while Gwen’s father lie dead in a box at the front of the church. Part of Sid wanted to let one rip right then and there, as a final parting gift to Gwen’s old man.
His eyes moved away from the tacked-up Christ and toward the cellphone resting in his lap. The clock told him the time: 11:38. Gwen must have seen him by now, all alone at the back of the church, loud in his smartest suit and most garish tie—obnoxiously orange, as flashy as fish scales, impossible to ignore. He wondered what she might think of him, how life had changed him since they saw each other last. His hairline had receded in the past few years, all that remained a little grayer, and he’d put on a few pounds—fat and happy, or at least happier—but she would no doubt recognize him. He was happyto be disentangled from her and she from him, free of all the lies and tears and insults and excuses and every other shitty thing that defined their time together.
Hoi
How quickly their love story had gone from pure to sour.
He squinted to glimpse Gwen’s left hand and that of the suitor behind her, checking for wedding bands, to see if she had somehow broken the pattern and found someone legitimate, compared to someone like Sid, who was perfectly willing to deceive his wife and risk wrecking his family and his livelihood—in other words, a weak-minded demon eager to destroy lives for no good reason other than it helped to pass the time.
Part of him hoped she had settled into a healthy and clean relationship, building something with the right one rather than indulging in a pre-polluted mess. Another part wanted the suitor to be nobody special—just some guy, another asshole—so if and when he finally got up the guts to walk down the aisle, proud and strong and forthright and fully recovered from the damage, to tell her how sorry he was about her dad, there would be the slimmest of chances she would wrap her arms around him and beg him to love her again. Forever this time, or, if not forever, at least once more, to relive the devilish times, and the lovely times, they once shared.
Another wave of stink stung his nostrils. He eyed the woman sitting all alone three pews up. Shock-white hair, pencil-thin neck, inconsiderately bright floral dress—she was the source of the nauseating perfume that reeked of dead, rotting flowers.
“Take a bath,” he whispered.
A memory jogged his brain—a conversation with Lydia during a drive to their son’s junior high school one February night at the height of his affair. Gwen, having grown increasingly impatient at his inability to ask Lydia for a divorce, had threatened to show up to the drama club’s performance of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which his thirteen-year-old son, Tern, was playing the role of Brick.
Back then, everything set him off, including his wife’s insufferable perfume.
“I hate that musk you wear, especially when you wear so fucking much of it,” he’d told her. He twisted his wedding ring around his sweaty finger, over and over, wondering how easily he could spring it free. “Why you feel the need to stink up everywhere you go, I’ll never understand. Just to announce your presence, I suppose.”
“You’re turning into a real prick, Sid. You know that?”
“I’ve always been a prick. It’s just taken you this long to notice.”
Oh, Lydia. Always suffering the worst of him.
The procession had begun to thin, only a few more pews to empty—four, maybe five on each side, including the shriveled old woman who reeked of dead flowers—until it would be his turn to stand and follow suit, one foot in front of the other.
Don’t be the last one. Don’t be the last.
Being the last to the coffin seemed too dramatic, too traumatic, too insulting, andhe figured there was less of a chance she would slug him if other mourners fell in line behind him. Then again, she always did have a thirst for the eye grab, a flair for getting attention. He’d lost track of the number of restaurants she’d either stormed out of or stayed in her seat only to hurl things at him: a full glass of ice water with a lemon wedge, every warm roll in a bread basket, the butter dish, a serrated steak knife. The white bumpy scar on his right hand—a defensive wound—had yet to fade.
He had no way of knowing which way her mood would swing. So he waited.
A sob in a too familiar voice echoed in the cavernous church. He watched Gwen’s face contort, and her hand rose to preventthe congregation from seeing her runny nose. Out of reflex, he placed a hand on the pew in front of him and inched out of his seat, to be by her side. Despite everything, the honest part of him wanted her to need him just as he once needed her—and, he realized, as he still needed her.