It was the summer of my thirteenth year when I saw the rattlesnake.

Every summer in August my family made the cramped, insufferable car ride down to Cullowhee, a small town huddled in the western Blue Ridge Mountains, closer to Tennessee than its actual location in North Carolina. We stayed with my great-grandfather in his cabin he built on the peak of a mountain. The cabin was a medium-sized ranch style, with a large wrap-around porch filled with uncomfortable white wicker rocking chairs. Rose bushes, ferocious with their thorns, guarded the perimeter. He owned the acres spanning the immediate area surrounding the house all the way to the creek rushing in front of the gravel road.  

I eagerly looked forward to the trip every year. My great-grandpa and I would take long hikes together up the mountain. He would point to trees and wildflowers we saw and tell their names to me as we walked. I still remember many of them, black-eyed Susans, with their petals a golden yellow, and Indian paintbrushes, their spiky flowers vividly vermilion. Butterflies, yellow with black stripes, flitted between the stems. My great-grandpa’s spoiled white toy poodle, Penny, would always snap at the butterflies if they flew too close to her nose. I tried to catch them with my fingers. Occasionally, I would snatch one of the butterflies as they lingered over a flower. Afterwards my fingers would be stained an iridescent, shimmering yellow and black powder from the butterfly’s wings. Oftentimes, we would stride down to the farm at the foot of the mountain with cardboard baskets and pick quarts of blueberries. The purple juice of the berries would stain my fingers sticky, and I would suck on the sugary syrup until my tongue turned blue.

This year is different. Sitting in the kitchen at the breakfast bar with my mom, she clutches at her coffee cup. My mom said there will be no more nature hikes, no more blueberry-picking.
“But why?” I whined. She smiled tightly, showing the tiny creases at the corners of her eyes. She sighed before speaking again.

“Great-grandpa’s not doing well this year. Remember last summer?” she asked. I nodded, looking back at the blemish last summer left in my memory. He had trouble remembering my name. I would say it to him, and he would apologize and look confused. Then a few minutes later he called me by the wrong name again. My parents told me what was happening to him, but I refused to believe it was true. I heard whispers of hospice, of inoperable masses lodged where they should never be. It was as if a malevolent black spore had infected his brain, seeping into his skull to suck the memory of us from his mind. Now the disease was blossoming like a terrible flower.  

“Well, it’s getting worse,” my mom continued, “He can’t even remember to lock the door anymore. The neighbors have told me he wanders and can’t find his way back to the house. The cancer is getting worse, we knew this would happen--”
She glanced away from me, her face suddenly splotchy and eyes glistening. I didn’t cry. I felt a numbness, like I had been tranquilized with razor sharp needles. Turning away from her, I left the house. Her head down, she didn’t notice me leave.
I stumbled through the screen door and out into the humid summer heat. Looking out at the creek rushing past me, I began walking.

Unintentionally, I gravitated to the trail my great-grandpa and I always went to go fishing together. I walked for a couple of minutes, listening to nothing but the thrashing of the creek beside me, trying to cancel out my pounding head. That was when I first saw the snake.    

Stretched out across the gravel path like a fat scaly worm, it was perfectly motionless. No rustling rattle to caution me of its presence, it was malicious in its stubborn silence, daring me to come closer. I crept toward it; my shoes crunched the gravel. Still no rattle echoed along the ground. Curious, I gingerly treaded nearer.

A low menacing rattle punctured the suffocating silence and rang in the air, reverberating through the lush leafy trees and sounding its way back to my waiting ears. I paused, captivated by the reptile despite the hidden poisoned needles nestled within its jaws. Now I was only about one foot from the snake. It was inert no longer; the act of rattling had caused the snake to coil up in a toxic spiral, symmetric and exacting. Its body was sinuous and taut, ready to strike and unfurl itself like a deadly elastic rubber band. The snake was well camouflaged for its environment, the brown mottled with black crossbands, tapering to its tail which was entirely coal black. I observed its head, triangular and sharp, the venom glands on either side of its face bursting with amber poison and the deep pits beneath each eye. The snake’s eyes glinted in little severe slits; its armor plated body tensed before releasing its coil in a blinding flash.

A small brown mouse had wandered too near the hungry serpent. I stared as the snake pricked its lethal fangs into the creature’s small furred body. The mouse let out a spasm that racked its tiny body, then another, until it gave a final terrible shudder. I watched with horrible fascination as the snake swallowed the corpse in its entirety, without pause, its jaws unlocking and working back and forth. I watched until I could no longer see the small lump slither malignantly through the snake’s vertebrae, like an awful tumor.