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Envy and malice form a double-edged sword, a bladed boomerang that would ultimately bring me to my knees and topple the life I had set out in blocks. A ribbon of scarlet would needle it's way into my chest, a creature of deception, fluttering in a beautiful show of foolery.
That wormy little ribbon seemed lost to existence as I romped about in tiny bare feet, only meager years atop my forehead, an evanescent, youngster star of wisdom flickering in the midst of the space that filled my skull. As I grew like weeds, a stench of spring sought my nostrils, a new-found scent of which I was very curious. The space in my gray matter began to accumulate with brighter stars, planets, and supernovas, flashing about as my eyes glinted from one phenomena to the next. I was still a cub, distractable and impulsive, jumping at rattling snakes without even a forethought. Most times, I was lucky, escaped without so much as a few bruises to the heart and a lingering splinter of a thought, festering to become so much more than I had signed up for.
But what I had enlisted was nothing like I had imagined, for everything I knew was a farce of glacier eyes and the smoke of chivalry. Their faces, studded with tiny, red-capped mountains, peered between the blades of which I dodged, their tails lashing, tongues dripping in anticipation. A greedy monster hell-bent on the swaying of my mind, for they were not the peers I had grown up with, but snakes with arms and legs and fingers and toes, and a mat of shaggy, sideswept hair that framed their stubbled cheeks.
But even if they possessed no true rattling tails or shiny scales and no stalactite fangs pinching against their lips, their venom was as real as you and I. A stinging, rampant flood of steam to clabber your blood and macerate that beating animal within your chest.
When I grew ignorant enough to seek out the source of this stench, it was one particular snake that caught my attention. He was a goon of childish play, dribbling about his women on a court of red velvet. My sight had grasped those very glacier eyes, and though I could not see it before, his gaze was upon me as well, sardonic tongue whipping at my ears. A fancy of words like silk, so inconceivably sly as they passed my common sense on the way to my thoughts, planting ideas like ivy roots. His sorcery was smooth, and it was not until I touched his greedy lips with mine that I had found myself chained to his artful will, for what he crafted was too cunning to be lashed with the mere name of trickery.
Before long, I felt my body crashing amongst a crest of restraints, the slick oil that was humility impossible to remove and so difficult to forget. Waving this way and that, I was a slave to the snake, a pitiless mouse locked between the jaws of delinquency. Of then I was oblivious, addicted to the very image of what the starry space held within its depths: a shallow dream of rapture, a hankering for that ribbon of scarlet. It was a sheer enslavement that I followed.
But I could not leave, and it was not the chains he kept on my ankles that thwarted my escape. In my gut, I knew then that it was not liberation that I wanted, but compassion, and somehow I came to believe that the very serpent he was could offer me something that was not within his grasp.
By the time I realized the key to my cuffs was in my own child-like hands, the stars were dying, the supernovas famished, planets obliterated. My hands wavered above the keyhole, unable to severe the link between what was and what wasn't.
His tongue writhed at my cheek, a ridged finger that moved along the line of my neck, veins capped, my will clasped amidst my shoulder blades. He beckoned, glacier eyes transformed to that of a snake's, his body no longer limbed, tail battering at my wrist. The boy I knew was no longer a boy in my eyes, but a venomous viper, and it had never been his tail wrapped around my finger, but these chains ripping at my ankles that had been coiled in his. In that moment, his gaze brought fear gurgling to my throat as my tiny paw unlatched the clasps.
When Eve took the forbidden fruit, I don't believe that it was Satan who beguiled her. Within the serpent head came the cunning mind of Adam, disguised as a snake.
The ivy planted by my glacier-eyed reptile has perished, withered away with time. But the scars on my ankles would never fade. Of all the seeds he'd planted, only one remained, that of which he was unknowing. It nested deep within my spacey mind, a bitter stench wafting from its roots. Its green-eyed face posed gnashing teeth, heart barred off with brick-lined walls, impervious, implacable. Little did I know that the vengeance it held would keep me from the dream of rapture, and that I would shy from tenderness as thorns. This inception was the double-edged sword in which my captor had wrought.
A child caught napping in the sea of pheromones, ignorant of the beasts within the brush, when a rattlesnake came along, searing her veins with acrimony. Thereupon, she had walled off her own heart, a vengeance like fire burning her hands as she threw it at the nearest serpent.
