By Steven Blake
The boy opened his eyes into darkness and gasped for breath. His face was
hot and wet as if showered with hot cooking oil. He tried to move his arms but
he was stuck and he thought about the programm at school he watched about
butterflies being cocooned. He tilted his head down and twisted his
shoulders. He was right, he was cocooned. A sour, dank stench clotted the
air like toxic gas. He couldn’t scream… he could barely breathe. He felt like a
chunk of ice dissolving into water.
Before long, he was moving, dragged along craggy, hard ground. Then he
was still again and every second was harder to breathe.
Before he lost consciousness, he remembered falling out of the tree and that
his mother would be pissed off at him for not getting home in time for Uncle
Callum’s birthday party. He remembered hitting his head. He had climbed the
tree to get out of the heat. The sun was nothing like it was back home in
England. No, this South American heat was different, a torrid, choking heat.
Then his mind was a jumbled mess of pain and dizziness.
***
‘You’ve gotta be joking. Cal, stop the car, stop the bastard car,’ Mal Hendy
said, grabbing the driver’s arm.
‘What is it, you found him?’ Lisa said from the back.
Callum had already seen it. The snake, curled like a giant piece of spaghetti,
a huge chunk of its body swollen, had sprawled out in the sun beneath a tree.
The Land Rover stopped. Callum and Mal got out from the front. Mal
chucked Callum a rifle. They approached the snake.
‘That’s a big fucker,’ Callum said and looked at Lisa getting out of the car.
She saw the snake and screamed. Mal grabbed her, pulling her into his
chest.
‘Shoot it?’
Mal nodded.
Callum, one eye closed, aimed his rifle at the snake’s head and fired. The
gunshot ruffled birds from nearby trees.
Its head erupted, pouring blood on to the sun-baked ground. Callum and Mal
shared a dreaded look.
‘I’ll do it,’ Callum said and squatted down.
Lisa wasn’t looking, she had her face buried in Mal’s chest, crying.
Callum pulled a bowie knife from a leather holster on his belt. Before he cut
the snake open, he looked with dawning terror back at Mal and Lisa.
‘Do it, Cal.’
He said nothing and turned back to the snake, putting his knife on the
smooth, swollen skin. He gritted his teeth, hoping that this was a wild goat or
a boar and not his nephew. He ran the blade along the skin and it burst open
like a sack of water.
Callum, staring in terror, scurried back. Lisa screamed, and gaped at her
young son covered in a transparent glop, his face a misshapen mask of
dissolving jelly, sliding from the snake’s stomach.
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