Thoughts Too Heavy To Carry — By Holley Cornetto

As the screen door slammed behind us, Momma called out a warning about swimming in the creek. “You’re likely to fall in and drown,” she said, “or get eat up by a cottonmouth.” She’d worried about snakes since I was six and she’d found me in the backyard hugging a rattler like a doll. “A miracle you didn’t get bit,” she’d told me over and over since. “Snake bites are mean; their poison seeps through your veins to your heart.”

Her warnings didn’t stop me and Leticia from heading down to the creek in our Walmart bikinis and neon flip-flops.

The August sun beat down hard with the promise of sunburn. I pushed Leticia’s sun-bleached locks aside and lathered her with suntan lotion that smelled like coconut and places I’d never been. We left our flip-flops on beach towels spread over boulders and skipped across stones to the waterfall that rained down into a basin deep enough for swimming.

Leticia’s brother Benji had shown us the falls three summers ago. He found them when he’d visited an old fishing cabin a mile away that belonged to Louis Crawford, a deacon at the First Baptist Church. Crawford was a pious man with enough amens and hallelujahs to spare. That summer, he’d invited Benji out fishing. Shortly after, Benji had gone off to college with a scholarship sponsored by Crawford’s business.

Leticia nodded to the ledge jutting beneath the rushing water. “Dare you to climb up.” 

The rocks looked like knives, ready to peel away the pruny flesh of my feet. “I ain’t crazy. You go.”

Leticia grinned, like she’d been waiting for my permission, and started to climb. As she scaled the rocks, her foot slipped, and my heart skipped a beat. She turned and flashed me a Barbie-pink thumbs up.

“Alright, show off. Get down before you kill yourself.” Something long and thin, like a skinny strip of muscle, brushed my leg. I glimpsed the scaled form gliding in the water alongside me and screamed.

I was still screaming when Leticia hit the water.

I hadn’t seen whether she’d jumped or fell. My fear of snakes forgotten, I plunged into the deeper water. A flash of straw-colored hair floated to the surface. Floated, not swam. Terror gripped my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs. I turned her over in the water. A halo of blood smeared across her forehead.

I dragged her to the shore and placed my ear against her chest to listen for breath.

Splashing from downstream caught my attention. Deacon Crawford was headed towards us as fast as his arthritic old knees could carry him.

“She okay?”

“I can’t tell if she’s breathing.”

He knelt and placed his head against her chest--the way I’d done.

“How’d you find us?” I asked.

“I was fishing, just down the bend.” A Nikon hung on a nylon strap around his neck, the kind with a telescopic lens worth more than Daddy’s old pickup. “I’ll keep an eye on her while you run and get help.”

My damp feet slid around my cheap flip-flops, blistering the soft flesh between my toes. I ran past Crawford’s cabin and arrived at the main road, bent over and panting. The Meyers’ rusty four-door sedan slowed and rolled down the window. “You okay, Missy?”

Through panting breaths, I told them about the accident.

“We’ll call for help,” Mrs. Meyer, a boisterous woman wearing too much rouge, assured me. “Do you need a ride?”

 I couldn’t leave with Leticia still by the creek. I’m not sure whether I answered before I turned and ran back through the woods.

My ankle caught a root sticking from the ground, busting the thong of my flip-flop and sending me to my knees. I screamed in pain and frustration and tossed the ruined sandal aside.

I limped through the forest, careful not to put weight on my swollen ankle. In the distance, I saw the dinky little shack that was Crawford’s cabin. I hobbled over and rubbed my arm against the window, smearing grime from the pane. I could make out a folding card table with a camping stove, and a cot in the corner. I couldn’t see more.

I leaned on the cabin wall, making my way around the building. My feet were cut and bleeding, and I was certain Crawford would have boots somewhere. I tried the knob and found the door unlocked.

Inside was a snake’s den.

Momma had warned us about rattlesnakes, copperheads, and cottonmouths, but she’d never warned us about the other kind of snakes – the ones hiding in plain sight, wearing their Sunday best, sitting in the church’s first pew. Those snakes still bit, but they didn’t just poison your body; those snakes poisoned your soul.

I froze, my hand halfway to the pair of boots lying by the door. Pictures of children lined the walls--not the kind a deacon ought to have. When I saw me and Tish in our bikinis, I nearly puked, and then I realized what bothered me about Crawford’s sudden appearance. When he’d come running to help, it hadn’t been a fishing pole in his hand. It had been a camera.

My skin writhed as I bolted from the cabin and limped back to the swimming hole, ignoring the throbbing pain from my ankle. Crawford was standing over Leticia with his back towards me. I couldn’t see his hands.

“What are you doing?”

He stepped back and turned to face me with a plastered-on smile.

Tish’s bathing suit was disheveled. Crawford’s camera lay on the ground near his feet. “What’d you do to her clothes?”

“The straps broke when I gave her CPR.” He cast a furtive glance towards his camera.

When his gaze landed on the boots I wore, the phony smile melted off his face.

Sounds of branches breaking cut through the forest. In moments, we were surrounded by EMTs loading Leticia onto a stretcher and carrying her towards the waiting ambulance.

Agitated, Crawford excused himself when the others left, leaving me alone with beach towels, sunscreen, Leticia’s flip-flops, and thoughts too heavy for me to carry home. 

A snake postured by the water, its gaping mouth a shock-white threat. At least cottonmouths were honest. They warned you of the danger they posed.

How long had that man been taking pictures of us?

With Momma’s words bouncing around my skull, I extended my hand to the snake. It sank its fangs into my flesh.

I kept my eyes locked on the snake as the venom coursed through me like fire, seeping through my veins to infect my heart. Just like Momma had said.

More snakes lifted their heads from the water to watch. “We’re kin now,” I told the one that had bit me, and, obediently, it coiled itself around my arm.

Together we turned towards Crawford’s cabin, the wet grass writhing in our wake.

AUTHOR BIO:

Holley Cornetto is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and holds an MFA from Lindenwood University. Her fiction can be found in magazines such as Daily Science Fiction, Dark Recesses Press, and Flame Tree Press Newsletter as well as anthologies from Cemetery Gates Media, Eerie River Publishing, and Kandisha Press. In 2020, she was awarded a grant from Ladies of Horror Fiction. In addition to writing The Horror Tree’s weekly newsletter, she regularly reviews for Booklist, Ginger Nuts of Horror, The Horror Tree, and Dark Recesses Press. She can be found lurking on Twitter at @HLCornetto.

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