I collect sentences and pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up. It’s about how books connect with your life.

***

“Perhaps I ought to howl more often.”
———Alix E. Harrow
——--The Ten Thousand Doors of January

I shared a stage with an author whose books made me cringe.

Before our shared stage, I read the author’s work. They had dropped the N word into one of their stories, where it was as relevant to the action as the color of the rope at a lynching. I slammed their book shut. This would not pass. This time I would speak out against modern literature’s gratuitous comfort with slurs.

During our shared stage, I was chatty and collegial, mesmerized by my own charm.

After our shared stage, the author bought my book, and I signed it with accolades about our time together. Next time, maybe next time, I’ll howl.

The August heat squeezed between my husband and me like the third person on a date. Holding hands and sipping Cokes, we plodded through our annual visit to the state fair. We trudged through the barns and the pens. Climbed on tractors, looked at cows and then sheep. Humidity glued tee shirts to midsections, defeating our efforts to conceal muffin top and paunch. Comfort trumped dignity on state fair days – it laid bare spidery veins, wrinkly knees, and wiggly arms.

Ben held his ice-filled cup against his forehead. “Ready for the goats? They’re next up.”

A bead of sweat traced a path down my nose.

“No. Let’s find some A.C.”

“Right behind you, Puddin’ Cake.” He patted my rear, and I was twenty again, that magical age before gravity got personal.

We slipped into the nearest building with glass double doors, not caring what might lurk inside. Cold air blasted us. We soaked it up for a moment and then drifted toward a nearby crowd.

Ben grabbed my arm. “Watch out.”

I sidestepped a tortoise the size of a hassock. It retreated into its shell, leaving only the point of its snout visible … and leaving me wondering what on earth it was doing there.

We edged closer to the front. A pre-teen boy held court behind a conference-sized table. A terrarium on the table was crawling with tree frogs the color of lime sherbet. The boy reached in and offered the frogs to the crowd, like hors d’oeuvres. He held one in my direction.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe if I do this I won’t scream the next time a toad shows up while I’m weeding.”

“Yeah, he’ll just sit in your hand.” He placed the cute little critter in my palm. The frog, unaware of the rules, crept toward my elbow.

“Oh, no. Oh, no. It’s moving. I feel its claws.”

“Lady, hold your arm level, and he’ll sit still.”

I did. The frog did not. It headed toward my face, onto which, if I didn’t take evasive action, it would spew chartreuse slime that would have to be removed with Ben’s power sander.

My voice climbed an octave – “It’s still going” – for every centimeter the demon scaled. “Get it off!”

Somebody screamed. I couldn’t tell if it was the frog or me. But boy rescued beast just in time to save it from a lethal dousing of Coke.

Onlookers smirked. Ben nudged me toward a neighboring table. Five-gallon jars sat on top of it, with signs attached. Mexican Redkneed Tarantulas. Hissing Cockroaches from—.

“Good Lord!”

At the far end of the table, a man chatted with spectators, while a massive snake—an eight-foot albino boa constrictor, according to a nearby sign—twisted itself around his outstretched arms.

A woman standing next to me pointed to the boa. “Is it poisonous?”

“No, no. Do you want to hold her?”

Do you want her to hold you would have been more accurate.

The woman shook her head and jumped back, stepping on my foot and crashing into three teenaged girls. Laughter rippled through the audience.

I sympathized with that poor lady. One childhood summer, a fifth-grade bully named Frankie had terrorized me with the garter snakes that slithered around our neighborhood. Leaping from behind a lilac bush, Frankie would throw a writhing serpent at me, then laugh and run away. Because snakes were plentiful—and Frankie persistent—I hated that summer.

Since then, fear of snakes launched by fifth-grade boys had matured into mid-life anxieties. I was afraid of turning the wrong way onto a one-way street. I was afraid of absentmindedly walking into the men’s restroom. I was afraid of standing in the express line with too many items in my cart. I longed to be brave, to sweep in on a white stallion and rescue myself. But I was afraid of horses.

The man inside the boa surveyed his audience, and I tried to disappear by studying my shoes. The strategy failed, as it had in eleventh-grade geometry whenever I hadn’t known the answer.

The teacher looked right at me. “How about you? Do you want to hold her?”

“Me?”

Without permission, my head nodded yes. My stomach countered, Are you crazy?

The snake charmer moved in my direction. “Come on around to this side of the table.”

“You gonna do it?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know.”

What? I could not have said that, because I most certainly did know that I would not do it.

But … on the other hand. A coward dies a thousand deaths. I had nothing to fear but fear itself. Today was the first day of the rest of my life, dammit.

My mutinous left foot took a step. Me? Hold a snake, on purpose?

“Maybe,” I said to Ben. The right foot joined the mutineer. “Yeah.”

He pried the Coke from my hand. “Terrific. I’ll hold your cup.”

I walked around the table (giving a wide berth to the hissing roaches) until I was face-to-face with the man and eyeball-to-eyeball with the snake.

“Hold your arms straight out at your sides.”

I stood like a scarecrow.

The man unwound the boa from his chest and arms. With one hand under its head and the other supporting its midsection, he draped the sinewy reptile across my shoulders.

“Be still,” he said.

No problem. The snake felt smooth and cool. Of the two of us, I was the clammy one. It lay across my shoulders, no doubt bored by just another day at work. I was sorry I’d ever gotten out of bed and certainly regretted passing up the goats.

The boa weaved and wound its way along my shaking limbs, reptilian muscles rippling as it explored the wobbly terrain. The coils gripped like steel cables, and my outstretched arms ached with the effort of keeping the weight aloft. I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, and contemplated the void, while the serpentine body wrapped around me. A casual squeeze would have snuffed my tiny flame.

I can’t believe Ben let me do this.

The outside of me froze, while the inside quivered. Heart raced and temples pulsed. My palms were sweating like a cold bottle of beer, and my mouth was as dry as granola without any milk, and the butterflies in my stomach were quaking as they flew.

Then the boa flicked her tongue.

With that flash of movement, the sense of weight on my shoulders receded. Motion took the foreground. Threatening mass morphed into shape-shifting mercury.

An imprisoned breath escaped my lips. I saw Ben giving me a thumbs-up, and then I turned my head slightly to get a better look at the creature I was wearing.

The boa slipped and glided. She undulated around my arms in a liquid dance, controlling me with the grace of a tango partner. A ginger widow’s peak branched into delicate honeycombs that wrapped her creamy skin in a mantle of lace. As she loosened and tightened her embrace, flecks of gold from nose to tail flirted with the dappled sunlight in the room.

Yet, at the same time, her smoldering power emboldened me. It incinerated all pretense of reticence. It destroyed any notion of decorum. Blazed away the remains of afraid. I was Wonder Woman, vanquishing my foes after bouncing their impotent bullets off my bracelets.

Muscle fatigue finally overtook my craving to prolong the moment. Mouthing a silent thank you, I nodded my readiness to be released. With her keeper’s assistance, the boa unwound herself from my shoulders and returned to his. She flicked her tongue three times, and then she settled.

I strutted back around the table, hands on my hips.

Ben punched the air with his fist. “Yes!”

“Wow … that was … well … ” I pursed my lips, searching for the words until the desire to speak slipped away on a sigh. I grinned, danced a little jig, and kissed my sweetheart.

“Honey,” he said, “you just earned yourself a corndog.” He draped his arm around my shoulders, handing me the Coke.

After we stepped outside, I cast a longer shadow in the afternoon sun. My stride lengthened. Under the steamy summer sky, my cool was impermeable.

Frankie never would have touched that boa.

I collect sentences. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.


***

"She always made spaghetti when she had to cook in the middle of the night."
———Barbara Robinette Moss
——--Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter

Mother, a second wave feminist, didn’t teach me how to cook.

When I came home after being married a year or so (I married him because she had disapproved), she asked me to help with dinner. I reached for what turned out to be the wrong pan. I clutched the pot to my chest and prayed the stove would tell me the next step. The stove did not.

Neither did she.

She slapped hamburger into a skillet. As I backed out of her way, she glared at me. “You can’t even make spaghetti? How do you feed your husband?”

I withered.

After she died, I divorced and remarried. (Dead, her opinion carried less weight.)

The other night Ben said, “Honey you don’t have to cook anything for dinner, I’m just going to forage.”

I hated cooking, but I was pissed. Forage? Hell no. Not on my watch. Of course, I had to cook dinner.

I put my hands on my hips. “You’re not doing me any favors, you know.” I pooched my lips. “I still have to make dinner for myself. It’s just as much effort to cook for one as for both of us.”

What was his problem?

Didn’t he hear Dead Mother slap hamburger into the skillet? “You can’t even make spaghetti? How do you feed your husband?”