An old fear

 

 Does the old serpent look back on its life of shed skins and… sigh?

No herpetologist has ever heard a snake sigh – no doubt for sound biological reasons having to do with snake anatomy. But the sighing old serpent has a cartoonish plausibility, and takes its place in my imagination along with all the other cartoons.  I’m that serpent, and those shed skins are mine, sort of.

Which is a serpentine way to get to this: when I was a child, it seemed that children were always finding dead bodies. Murdered people lying  sprawled on building sites. Horribly mutilated victims in forests. Skeletons of long ago suicided men in creek beds. Criminal statistics in backyards, or near picnic sites (the parents dozing, outstretched on the picnic table benches, the Colonel’s bucket attracting flies, the children playing hide and seek, screaming with laughter, Dad’s face concealed under the tent of the newspaper). The child who, secreted behind the bush and all attentive to IT as IT stalks by, becoming focused on two bare and twisted feet sticking up on the ground just a couple feet from his crouch and gingerly lifting the leafage to behold what the feet belonged to. The disposal problem, it seemed, was continually in the news. The tv news. The tv shows, less graphic then, still showed killers hiding their victims, which implied that somebody was going to find those victims. This bugged me. I thought that I would, inevitably, as a child of the crime waves of the twentieth century, stumble across a corpse somewhere, someday. And horror films in the seventies became rather monomaniacally insistent on kids, teens at least, discovering cadavers.

I look back at this fear and am a bit surprised that it was never actualized. From my first steps to my now, more than 500,000 Americans have been murdered. Yet I have managed to scrape by without ever being in proximity to a bloody hair or twisted face. It is a big country, is all I can say. I long ago shed that fear, and its cousins (the fear of ghosts, the fear of some terrifying face staring at me from a window at night, the fear of confronting this or that bully, etc.). The old fears go where all my shed skins go – into my dreams.

And this must end with: a sigh.