Snake

The thunderstorm came like a pot boiling over and the color of water was made by that, all of a sudden, a pigment more tropical than dense with the reflection of light. Everywhere the scent of at least five different kinds of plants lifted up. The desert can’t talk back but I believe it breathes instead, breathes vivid when the water wants it the water can’t wait and it breathes back. I turned and went into the house. Under the dining room table, a snake. Green with a yellow stripe bisecting its back. Motion ate each centimeter of floor and air, scared, it makes sense to say, though there exists or existed no safer time ever in which that shape wouldn’t want to move, dead August being the exception to this when heat makes molasses of all of us. Why did I want to chase it out? I did, I got a rake and kept making it make that beautiful scared shape upon the floor, so clean. Like two ice cubes rubbing each other and too cold to melt. Nothing organized that fear. Seeing the edges it found its way out.