I know that the earth is a coiled snake

 

I look for shapes until I make them appear. Vibrant patterns and sinuous geometries

emerge, imprinting their path on the ink, the stones, the pink clay. The shapes tie themselves to the matter so that I can see them. There are other nearly scientific ones that they keep in the anthropology department, in the books full of crushed bone dust, broken fangs, digested feathers. They wait in the burrows beneath the earth, in the newly formed hills, in the museum. I search the back of myself, until I make her appear.

 

When I was thirteen, Andrea and I were wandering the vacant lot behind her house together, awaiting the revelation of some mystery. The people in the neighborhood would throw their old household items there; tires, cardboard boxes, cans beer, splintered wooden planks now rotted from moisture. When too many objects were accumulated, all of them piled on top of each other, the feeling arose that we would find a nest of coiled snakes of all kinds underneath them. Anacondas, milk snakes, mambas, rattlesnakes in the dense summer air. She knelt in front of the pyramid and cracked the dry earth by pressing into it with her knees. She saw that I couldn't get closer and gave me a challenging look, her Virgin of Guadalupe necklace swinging rhythmically against the rubble. Impatiently, she clicked her tongue against the dark arched roof of her mouth and lifted the planks of splintered wood. A baby viper was hidden at the bottom and looked back at her with black beaded eyes, a pair of tiny obsidians. With its forked tongue it touched the air tinged with the smell of Andrea's gooseflesh skin.

 

Days later, she could perceive a supernatural snake. In her bedroom, a cobra the size of the room appeared, unfolding the vertebrae that crowned its head. I’m not afraid, says Andrea in the dark. The shapes emerged in it, like Gallic roses sprouting amidst the snow, like when a puddle of gold blood encompassed her body in a dream, like feathers pouring from the sky. It lies there like an enormous open wound in the night. The cobra opens its jaw and a droplet descends from one of its fangs in which she sees her own reflection, a poison that consumes and feeds her at the same time. The next day, she wonders if she’s pregnant from the droplet that was born from that fang, like when she feared getting pregnant from tap water. Or did it announce her death? She senses an endless prolongation in her stomach, a void from which all things will emerge, all the names prior to hers. The poison in her stomach, the antidote in her stomach, the darkness in her stomach, the light in her stomach. Suddenly, a vast premonition. She has forgotten how to be born.

 

At night she will return with the trill of all the rattlesnakes ringing in the distance and sense a name previous to her own in her throat. The name clumps there, behind her tongue, buried in the earth of her body. She feels the absence of what should have been hers wrapped in the humid grounds of her room and begins the descent towards her birth. I’m not afraid, says Andrea, I’m not afraid.