I

The factory had been empty for twenty years. I know because I worked there, before it emptied. I was a steelworker at the Republic plant in Youngstown, Ohio, for eleven years. Then the plant closed, like half the plants in half the towns across the rust belt, and I was twenty-eight years old and I had a back injury and a severance package that lasted four months and a girlfriend who left me because she said I was already dead inside and she was probably right.

I moved into the townhouse on Elm Street. It was cheap, which meant it was falling apart. The roof leaked, the heating didn't work, the neighbors didn't speak to me, and the local bar served beer that tasted like regret. I was fine with all of it. I had been fine with everything for a long time.

Then I found the snake.

It was in a cavern beneath the old textile mill on the edge of town, a place that had been abandoned since the fifties and was slowly being consumed by the weeds and the rain and the slow erosion of everything human. I was scavenging for copper wire to sell at the scrapyard, and I found a hole in the wall that led down into the cavern, and the cavern was damp and dark and smelled of wet earth and something else, something ancient, and then I saw it.

The snake was enormous. Maybe eighteen feet long, thick as a barrel, with scales the color of wet earth and eyes that were gold and unblinking. It was injured—one of its coils caught in a rusted trap that must have been set by a farmer or a trapper decades ago—and it was struggling, weakly, against the iron teeth that had sunk into its flesh.

I should have left it. I should have walked away and gone back to the townhouse and the leaking roof and the broken heating and the beer that tasted like regret. But I didn't walk away. I knelt beside the snake and I touched its scales and it stopped struggling and it looked at me with those ancient gold eyes, and I understood, with a certainty that transcended language, that we were both broken, and that broken things recognize each other.

I brought it food. Rats from the scrapyard, rabbits from the fields, once a chicken that I stole from someone's coop and felt bad about stealing because the woman who owned it reminded me of my grandmother, who was dead now, who had raised me after my parents died in a car accident when I was sixteen, who had been blind in one eye and tough as nails and the only person who had ever made me feel like I mattered.

I called her Grandma Ruth. I called the snake Old Snake. It felt right, like a key turning in a lock.

II

Old Snake and I developed a routine. I would arrive at dusk, when the light was golden and the mosquitoes were beginning to rise from the water. I would call to it—haltingly, brokenly, in the same way that I spoke to the world, in sounds that were almost words—and it would raise its head and regard me with those ancient gold eyes. I would sit beside it and talk, and it would listen, and sometimes it would make a sound like wind through a hollow tree, and I would understand that it was answering me.

Grandma Ruth died on a Tuesday in March. She was sitting in her rocking chair on the porch, watching the sunset, when her heart stopped. I found her like that, still warm, still smiling, and I sat with her until the moon rose and the fireflies appeared and the field began to sing its nightly chorus of crickets and tree frogs and something else, something low and resonant that I couldn't identify.

I buried her in the family plot beside the church, next to my parents and my grandfather and all the Mercers who had come before me. I stood over the fresh earth and I felt the weight of two centuries of Mercer history pressing down on my chest, and I understood, with a certainty that transcended language, that I was the last.

The snake knew I was grieving. I could feel it in the way it regarded me, in the way it lowered its head until it was before me and pressed its scales against my hands. I pressed my forehead against its scales and I felt nothing, which was the problem. I had felt nothing since the plant closed, since my girlfriend left, since the world had ended in slow motion and I had been too tired to stop it.

Then Sheriff Briggs arrived.

He was a small-town sheriff, fifty years old, balding, with a face that looked like it had been carved from cornmeal and left out in the rain. He was walking his property near the textile mill when he saw me, sitting beside an eighteen-foot snake in a cavern beneath an abandoned factory, and he didn't scream or run or call the state police. He just stood there, watching me, and then he pulled out his radio and he called it in.

III

The state came on a Friday morning. They were animal control officers, or something like that, and they came with a truck and a crate and a veterinarian and a sense of bureaucratic purpose that made my stomach turn. They didn't ask me questions. They didn't need to. They had a snake to capture and a zoo to deliver it to and a budget to justify, and I was just a guy sitting in the way.

I tried to stop them. I stood in front of the cavern and I told them the snake was injured and needed care and couldn't be moved, and the veterinarian looked at me with those tired eyes that belong to everyone who has spent too long dealing with people who care too much about things that don't care about them, and he said, "Ma'am, this snake is a state hazard. It needs to be relocated."

"It's not a hazard," I said. "It's a person."

The veterinarian didn't respond. He just signaled to his assistants, and they came forward with nets and clubs and a crate, and they tried to coax Old Snake out of the cavern, and Old Snake resisted, and they forced it, and I stood there and watched and I felt nothing, which was the problem.

They loaded Old Snake into the crate and closed the door and loaded the crate into the truck and drove away, and I followed the truck to the state veterinary hospital outside town, and I watched through the window as they examined Old Snake, and then I saw the vet shake his head and write something on a chart. I waited outside for four hours, and when the vet finally came out, he looked tired.

"He died during transport," he said. "Stress-induced heart failure. I'm sorry."

I went into the morgue and looked at Old Snake on the steel table. It looked smaller dead, somehow, less like a creature and more like an object. The vet剖开了 its belly to check for internal injuries, and that's when I saw it—a glowing stone, red and pulsing with light, nestled in the space where its heart should have been.

It wasn't a heart. It was a stone, a crystal, something that had grown inside it over years, fed by the minerals in the groundwater and the rats I had fed it. It was beautiful and impossible and it was glowing with a light that had nothing to do with biology.

I took it. I put it in my pocket and I walked out of the hospital and I didn't look back.

IV

The stone glows at night. I keep it in my pocket, and sometimes I wake up at three in the morning and reach into my pocket and feel it glowing through the fabric, and I think about Old Snake and Grandma Ruth and the way they both died for reasons that didn't make sense.

I live in my truck now. The townhouse was too much, and the shelters don't take animals and I'm not an animal, exactly, and the streets are cold and the nights are long and the stone in my pocket glows and glows and glows and I don't know what to do with it.

Sheriff Briggs looked for me. He came to the truck stop where I was sleeping, and he came to the library where I was sitting during the day, and he came to the diner where I was eating pancakes that tasted like grease and syrup, and he asked me about the stone, and I told him it was a trick of the light, a coincidence, something that doesn't exist, and he didn't look convinced, but he didn't press me. Maybe he believed me. Maybe he didn't care.

I still visit the textile mill sometimes. I sit in the cavern and I watch the water drip from the ceiling and I think about the night I found Old Snake, injured and struggling, and I thought about how stupid I was, bringing it food, trying to fix something that couldn't be fixed. But then I think about Grandma Ruth, who helped me anyway, and about Old Snake, who trusted me enough to let me touch its scales, and I think about the stone, glowing in the dark, and I think about the truck and the streets and the long nights and the empty days.

I think about how stupid we are, all of us, trying to fix things that can't be fixed. And I think about how beautiful that stupidity is, maybe, or how meaningless, which is the same thing in Youngstown.

The stone still glows. I keep it in my pocket. Sometimes, when I'm driving through the rust belt at night, past the abandoned factories and the closed-down malls and the towns that the maps forgot, I reach into my pocket and feel the stone glowing through the fabric, and I feel Old Snake's scales beneath my hand, warm and living, and I feel Grandma Ruth's hand on my shoulder, and I feel twenty-eight and broken and alive, and I think about the cavern beneath the textile mill, and the water, and the dark, and the things that live beneath the surface, waiting for someone to notice them.

I keep driving. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know why I'm going. I just keep driving, and the stone glows in my pocket, and the road stretches out in front of me, and the night is long and the world is empty and I am nothing left to keep.

--- OTMES ENCODING: OTMES-06-T2-060-000-040-050-050-070-030-270-25-085 STYLE: Dirty Realism | TI: 68.4 (T2 Disillusionment) | M1=6.0 M10=4.0 | N1=0.50 N2=0.50 | K1=0.70 K2=0.30 | θ=270° | R=0.25 I=0.85