ACT I

The rain was coming down hard when Danny found the snake. He was driving home from the last place that would hire him— a warehouse in Youngstown that paid minimum wage and didn't ask questions, which was the kind of place Danny had been going to lately, places that didn't ask anything at all.

The snake was on the side of the road, half on the asphalt, half in the ditch. Danny had to look twice to see it. It was grey-green with dark spots, not pretty, not threatening, just there. And it was half broken— something had run over it, and the back half of its body was twisted at an angle that made Danny's stomach turn.

He pulled over. Got out. Picked it up. It was lighter than he expected, and warm, and it was still moving, just barely, like something that had forgotten whether it was alive or dead.

Danny went home to his trailer in the park and got a cardboard box and an old towel from the closet and made a bed for the snake in the box and filled a shallow dish with water from the tap. He put the snake in the box and sat down on the floor beside it and watched it for a while.

It climbed onto the towel and stopped moving.

"Okay," Danny said. He wasn't sure why he said it. Maybe because it was the first thing he'd said to another living thing in two weeks that wasn't a question about work.

He went to the hardware store the next day and bought a glass fish tank, a heater, a bag of gravel. He set it up on the kitchen table, poured in the gravel, filled it with water, turned on the heater. The snake— he didn't have a name for it yet— swam in the tank and seemed fine.

Danny named it Slick. Not because it was slick— it wasn't particularly. But because it was a snake, and snakes were slick, and it was the first thing that came to mind.

He talked to Slick sometimes. Not a lot. Just little things. "Morning, Slick." "Rain again, Slick." "Beer tonight, Slick." It wasn't conversation. It was just sound. But it was sound that wasn't the television or the radio or the silence.

ACT II

Rick moved in three months ago.

He lives in the trailer next to Danny's. Danny knows his name is Rick because the park manager called him by name once when she was yelling at him for leaving a couch on his deck. Rick is twenty-nine, short, with close-cropped hair and a face that looks like it's always ready for a fight it didn't start. He works occasionally— fixing cars for people who pay him in beer or cash or both.

Danny doesn't dislike Rick. He just doesn't like him. There's a difference. He dislikes people who are loud when they don't need to be, and Rick is often loud when he doesn't need to be. He plays music too late at night. He parks his truck in Danny's sightline. He laughs too loud in the communal laundry room.

Danny has said nothing. He said something once— a quiet "hey, man, maybe turn it down"— and Rick said "sorry, man" and turned it down for one night and turned it back up the next. Danny didn't say anything after that.

The fish tank sits on the kitchen table. Danny looks at it when he gets home from nowhere. He doesn't feed Slick every day. Sometimes he forgets. Slick is a snake. Snakes don't need to be fed every day. Danny knows this. He also knows that he forgets sometimes because he doesn't care enough to remember, and that knowledge sits in his stomach like a stone.

The water gets cloudy. Danny sees it but doesn't change it. He tells himself it's fine. Snakes are fine in cloudy water. He's read this. Or someone told him this. He can't remember.

Slick swims in the cloudy water and seems fine.

ACT III

The snake died on a Tuesday.

Danny came home from watching television in the communal room— there was a football game on, and he sat with other men who didn't talk to him and drank beer they'd brought from their trailers and watched men run up and down a field and it was something to do— and found his trailer door open.

Not broken. Open. Like someone had walked in and forgotten to close it.

Danny walked inside. The kitchen table was wet. The fish tank was on the floor, shattered, water and gravel and broken glass spread across the linoleum. And in the middle of it all, the snake. Flat. Still. Something had stepped on it with enough force to make its body spread outward like a pancake.

Danny stood there for a long time.

He looked at the tank on the floor. He looked at the snake. He looked at the back door. And then he looked outside, at Rick's trailer, at the space between them, and he saw something under Rick's truck.

A brick. And under the brick, pieces of glass. Tank glass.

Danny walked across the space between the trailers. He didn't plan to. His legs just moved. He stood in front of Rick's door and looked at it. It was closed. He could hear television inside. The same football game. Volume low.

He opened the door.

Rick was on the couch. Television on. Beer can on the table next to him. He was wearing a t-shirt and boxers and socks and he looked up when Danny walked in, and his face did something— not fear exactly, but recognition. Like he had been expecting this and had been wondering when it would happen.

"Hey," Rick said.

Danny looked at him. He looked at the beer can. He looked at Rick's hands, resting on his knees, not clenched, not relaxed, just there.

Danny's hand was on the wrench he'd brought— a pipe wrench, the kind used for plumbing, heavy steel, about eighteen inches long. He hadn't planned to bring it. He'd picked it up from the kitchen counter without thinking.

He held the wrench in his right hand. He looked at Rick.

Rick didn't move. He just looked at Danny, and his eyes were clear. Not drunk. Not high. Just clear.

Danny held the wrench for a long time. Rick didn't blink.

Danny put the wrench down on the coffee table. It made a sound like a door closing.

He turned around and walked out.

ACT IV

The snake was still on the floor when Danny got back.

He didn't look at it. He walked past it, went into the living room, sat down on the couch, turned on the television. The football game was over. Some talk show was on. He didn't listen to it.

He sat there until the light went away and the trailer was dark and the only sound was the talk show and the hum of the refrigerator.

In the morning, he went to Rick's trailer. He knocked. No answer. He knocked again, harder. No answer.

He went to the park manager and said, "Rick's not answering his door."

The manager went over, knocked, tried the door. It was locked. She called the non-emergency police line and asked them to check.

The police came an hour later. They broke the door down. Rick was on the couch. Dead. Overdose. Had been for a couple of days, minimum. The smell hit Danny before he got close— sweet and thick and wrong.

The police moved Rick's body. Danny stood in the doorway and watched them work. He didn't go inside. He didn't need to. He knew what it looked like.

He went home. He picked up the pieces of the fish tank and the body of the snake and the gravel and the water in a trash bag. He drove to the dump on the edge of town and threw it all in the biggest bin he could find.

The tank pieces clattered against the metal. The snake didn't make a sound.

Danny drove home. He opened a beer from the case in his trailer. He sat at the kitchen table where the tank had been and he drank the beer and it tasted like nothing.

He drank another. That one tasted like nothing too.

He sat at the empty space where the tank had been and he drank beers until the television went to commercials and the commercials went to nothing and the nothing went away and morning came and he was still sitting there and the space where the tank had been was still empty and nothing had changed and nothing would change and he was fine with that.

He wasn't fine. He was something else. Something that didn't have a name.

OTMES-v2-BSR-003 (Empty Tank - Dirty Realism Variant) TI: 55.0 | θ: 180° | M: [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 4.0, 1.0, 1.0, 2.0, 2.0, 5.0, 2.0] | N: [0.50, 0.60] | K: [0.70, 0.30]