You know it’s warm when the asphalt softens, smells like an oil can and the dugites slide out from under the long wallaby grass, hugging the edge until they find a baking spot on the tarmac. The air sizzles dragonflies and the east desert wind blows in the other kind of flies, the sticky ones, the kind that strut on your upper lip like it’s their own special day spa. If you set your belly along the road like that black snake, you can see heat waves rise. That’s physics in your eyeballs.
People drive their cars up and down the road in the heat same as they do every other day, collecting kids or milk cartons or driving around because they like driving. Who knows what they do. You can’t feel the heat if you stay inside your car.
Those cars don’t stop for a snake on the road. They leave tire marks and they keep going. They say aw, that snake’s okay, she’s moving off, see. The snake heads down the gravelly ditch past the spindly Geraldton weeds and into the wallaby grass. The meadow opens ever so gently for the snake to get inside and then the grass blades cover her, give her shade and hide her.
Just because she got off the road doesn’t mean her back isn’t broken in a few places. The snake lays there, could be days, weeks even, those green swards dripping dew on her and stroking her with the help of the wind. The grass knows she might make it.
You don’t know that’s what goes on in the meadow after you hit a snake on the road, but it is.
Laila Miller writes about bougainvilleas and sea urchins and turnips, and sometimes about people who don’t get along. Her work can be found in FlashFlood Journal, Flash Frontier, Cricket Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Canada, she lives in Perth, Western Australia with her husband and son.
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