By Abigail Pfeifer
On a heavy and adamant August day, June Cole was on her way to hell.
Her Uncle Marty seemed to think so, at least.
“Friends,” the big man addressed his sweating congregation, “I hope you have not forgotten to be wary of where you place your feet when you walk.”
Marty was using his holy voice, one so resonant and deep that it made it difficult to form any thoughts beyond ‘perk-up’ or ‘listen’ when he spoke.
“Perdition is one misstep away,” he pushed on. “The devil is that crack in the sidewalk on Main Street. He’s hiding two doors down on your neighbor’s back porch.”
June pinched the inside of her thigh as she felt her eyelids drooping toward the warped floor. She’d heard this sermon so many times, it was beginning to sound like a lullaby.
She was also still a little hungover from the night before, and not in any place to be looking out for sacrilege on her daily commute.
Sometime later, Marty wondered, his sunken eyes roving over the rows of pews, “Do you have faith?”
June’s uncle was now walking down the aisle of the sanctuary, peering into the faces of Oak Bend, Missouri (Miss-ur-uh if you were local).
“Do you believe in your savior? The one who laid down his life for you?”
Heads turned to watch as he moved through the stuffy room. Marty slowed in front of the pew where June sat with her parents. He placed a wide hand on the back of the bench and June’s gaze traveled from it up to a face so like her father’s, if you took away a few years and added a glint to the eyes that made them hard to meet for too long.
“And you, my niece,” Marty said to June, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Do you?”
There was a creak as someone shifted on the pews’ old wood. The air was impossibly still, her uncle’s cologne impossibly present. Swallowing, June glanced past his looming form and caught sight of a wooden box, perforated with tiny holes. She hadn’t noticed it before that moment.
How hadn’t she noticed?
Marty seemed to nod at her imperceptibly, then swept a hand toward the altar and the crate. June stood. She didn’t look back at her silent parents. A few scattered claps rang out, uncertain until eventually, the whole church was tentatively applauding.
They knew what this was.
As she followed her uncle to the front, June had the dim notion to simply refuse. To push one word past her lips, to turn around and throw open the double doors and let the sun wick away her sweat.
But it was only a wistful thought, not an actual option. Never an option. Not after Marty had strode into the Cole’s unlocked house the spring before and seen June sharing spit and a tallboy with Irene Lester on the living room sofa.
He’d told June that she had to start taking church seriously, to return to the path of light or else she’d be sent to a summer program in Oklahoma that would require her to do so with no exceptions or any of Marty’s self-proclaimed flexibility.
So June spent nearly every afternoon at Our Good Savior. She swept the floors, and scrubbed the ancient bathrooms, and sat with her neck craned over a Bible in Marty’s office while he leered from his desk. Her family thought that Marty was doing June a favor, letting her get community service hours for school. June’s mother was thrilled she was showing interest in something. In anything at all. Her father simply maintained that it was about damn time she got off her ass and participated in the real world.
They believed it was her second coming, her rebirth.
Marty wasted no more time sliding the lid off the crate. The sound that reverberated against the close walls as it hit the ground made June flinch. Her uncle slowly reached into the box and drew out a snake, striped red and white with warning colors.
He proclaimed, “A member of God’s kingdom will never harm the faithful.”
The copperhead’s tongue poked out of its head and flicked up and down curiously as it tasted the air. It tried to slide out of Marty’s hands, but they just reappeared in the reptile’s path.
“My friend here is one of us. Sprung from the palms of our creator just as man was. And all of us look the same from on high.”
June’s cheeks burned. A bead of perspiration trickled down between her shoulder blades. She could feel the congregation holding its breath, morbidly enamored and unable to look away.
“This,” Marty implored, “is something my dear niece knows to be true. Let her show you the mercy of our Lord.”
June’s stomach flipped, and she had to fight to keep her feet planted as her uncle stepped closer. He nodded to her hands that hung disbelieving and stubborn at her sides. She forced them to move, then to stay still and steady with her palms facing the ceiling.
Eyes squeezed shut, June braced for the leathery body, for the fangs that were sure to sink into the soft spot between her thumb and pointer finger. A weight met her skin. June sucked down breaths. The snake did not try to escape her grip but instead began to travel up her left arm. She clenched her teeth so hard she thought they might crack. Its head was nearing her shoulder. June did not dare to confirm with sight what she felt.
She wondered what they’d tell the paramedics after it had bitten her and an ambulance came wailing into the gravel parking lot. Perhaps that it had been a hiking accident. Marty would find a way to keep it quiet, make a way to not let the true story leave the sanctuary. Serviceably, in the front row reserved for friends and sycophants, sat Sheriff Sam and his wife.
June heard a gasp from the crowd, then, and knew she was done for. When she opened her eyes, resolving her last image to be something other than the back of her eyelids, there was no snake. Marty was gingerly letting the thing slither back into its box. With no further hesitation, she turned on a heel and shakily sat back down in her pew. Everything was blurred and fuzzy at the edges yet somehow too sharp at the same time.
June didn’t hear the rest of the service.
When it finally came to a righteous head, she practically shoved past the retirement home crowd as they mingled by the doors in her haste to clear out.
Her father’s truck had never been such an agreeable sight. June was to drive it after church to her job at Gerry’s Grocery and nowhere else while her family took the SUV back home. None of them knew she’d gotten her shift that afternoon covered, and they didn’t need to. June opened its driver’s side door and hauled herself onto the stained seat. The engine caught once, twice, then roiled to obnoxious life. She put the car in reverse and whipped down the drive before the rest of the churchgoers could so much as unlock their vehicles.
June spotted a few clusters of them in her rearview as she did so and imagined their hushed conversations, their feigned pity, and loathing eyes.
That one’s a real waste of space if you ask me.
She drove to the swimming hole. June was laid out on a rocky shore, surrounded by underwhelming bluffs and the smell of dead fish, face turned toward the sun, already feeling the angry red skin of tomorrow and not caring. Her shirt was balled up under her neck like a pillow. June let her eyes drift closed.
It could very well have been the March prior, Irene beside her, joint on the gravel between them burning to nothing, water quietly lapping at limestone. June remembered one of their last excursions before…. Before.
“What are you gonna do?” Irene had asked then, clouds of warm breath escaping into the chill night. “After graduation, I mean.”
June peered over at her, brow knitted. Water gurgled and shifted somewhere. “I don’t know,” she’d answered.
Irene pulled her jacket tighter around herself. “I do.”
“Oh, yeah?” June reached over and flipped Irene’s hood onto her head.
The other girl was looking straight ahead. “Sure.” She paused, then continued. “You’re getting out. You’re leaving.”
It was silent except for the chirps and calls of a few early spring bugs.
“…Why are we talking about this now?” June wondered. She wanted Irene to meet her gaze, but she was focused on something June couldn’t see.
Irene didn’t offer anything else.
June chewed on her thumbnail and exhaled, long and slow. “I’d take you with me, you know,” she conceded. “If I could.”
June wished she’d taken her finger out of her mouth before speaking, but she probably couldn’t have said the words without some type of barrier between them and her.
“Would you come?” she mused, Irene still a mute silhouette.
At last, Irene faced June. “Yeah, I’d come with,” she whispered, reaching out to touch a chunk of June’s hair that had fallen out of its braid. “If I could.”
June opened her eyes. She sat up, hot and pissed off. She thought about commandeering the truck and taking it to Illinois or Arkansas, or wherever Marty had ensured the Lesters fled to.
June got to her feet, attempted to skip rocks, and valiantly failed. She waded into the cool water, pebbles digging into the soles of her feet. When a mosquito landed on her slick skin, she flicked it off, then walked back to the truck and blasted the AC until the sun began to set.
She kept peering into the footwells, monitoring the backseat, searching for forked tongues and scales and beady eyes in the hollow spaces.
As the day came to a close, June drove back to the church.
The late morning worshippers were hours departed, and she knew Marty was home, watching his wife labor over Sunday dinner like always. June slid out of the car and made for the double front doors, always unlocked. She shoved them open and swung a sharp left to Marty’s office.
After some fiddling with an old gift card and her house key, she was in. June flipped on the light and it buzzed to fluorescent life. The crate was on the dusty desk, set atop a scattered mess of papers and legal pads. She checked the lid, then lifted the box.
On her way out, June tried to make the damaged lock look as inconspicuous as possible, though Marty would surely notice it was not as he had left it. He would surely realize what had been taken and deduce the identity of the blasphemer first thing in the morning.
She brought the box to the edge of the woods behind the building and set it on the patchy grass. Tilting the crate so the lid was perpendicular to the ground, June knelt, then slid the piece of wood free. The snake was still inside, and it moved reluctantly to the vast opening of its enclosure.
June reached out a careful hand to stroke its back as it slipped over dry summer dirt and into the trees. She watched until the reds and whites were swallowed by leaves and shadows.