“Boom” by Margot Douaihy

Boom

Margot Douaihy

Reading time: Approximately 3 minutes

A note from the editor: I think we probably all know someone like Kevin, the hero of Margot Douaihy’s charming piece for us. He falls into luck; falls out of dangerous situations; walks around with bravado we both admire and resent. Douaihy’s sense of place; her sly asides to us, her reader; Kevin’s eventual life story–this tight, evocative story had us hooked on the first reading. By the time you read it a second time, just because you want to, you’ll be charmed, too. 

Yi Shun Lai

Fiction Editor

On the sidewalk was a dollar bill. Boom, said Kevin. It was green and crumpled, and anyone else would have thought leaf, but Kevin was a man who noticed things. He picked up the dollar and spent it on a lottery ticket which won him $10,000 in cash. A week later Kevin boarded a plane from Tampa to Brazil where he joined a canoe trip through silver water. While paddling, Kevin saw a snake sunning itself on the shore. It was huge, this snake, easily the circumference of Kevin’s head. Kevin paddled closer. Against the advice of the smiling Tour Guide, Kevin left the canoe to meet the snake on the warm, gritty sand. For one minute, man and snake locked eyes. The Tour Guide sweat so hard his skin blistered; his face, no longer smiling, was striped with terror. But Kevin was not afraid of being bitten. For once Kevin had no fear at all. This snake is different, he thought, one of a kind! Kevin—often called a scrub by his ex-wife—also felt like he was one of a kind, when he wasn’t worrying about his IT job, work he loathed with a fiery passion, the cursing and complaining employees who threatened Kevin when their computers crashed. Sure enough, this snake was special. As Kevin approached, the serpent opened its large mouth and sang a glorious aria in a language Kevin understood. The Tour Guide fainted and the viper disappeared into thick brush, as elegantly as a penny sinks into a wishing well. Though Kevin left the shore and left the country, the snake’s song lived on, like dawn reverberating under eyelids after a bumpy night flight.

Kevin returned to Tampa with a sense of purpose he had never known. He quit his IT job and toured neighborhood after neighborhood, then every city along the coast, snatching snakes from pools, pipes, gutters, lawn furniture. Never once was Kevin bitten. He wore snakes like scarves, hoisted serpent tridents. Real Life Snake Charmer, headlines declared. Twenty years later, in the dizzying bazaar of a pink city, Kevin noticed a large tank surrounded by light, in the center, a snake. That slither. That skin—wet black as a startled eye. It inched close to the glass and Kevin knew: My snake! Kevin belted the aria he had heard performed years earlier by the enchanted viper. He lifted the tank’s lid, lowered his hands. Boom. Stunned creases in the onlookers’ faces spelled horror. The snake’s eyes changed in no perceptible way, how a hustler might bluff his next move. The snake launched onto Kevin and snapped his head clean off. As Kevin’s hands draped the corner of the glass, his knuckles twitched with the dance of life leaving. In the tank hovered a reptile who could not talk let alone sing, a snake ordinary in every single way, except for inside its belly, like a prayer inside a puff of incense-smoke, a charming man’s lips were pursed wildly and forever in Boom.

Reprinted with permission from the author

Margot Douaihy had this to say about “Boom”:

I think of flash fiction as a criosphinx—a sphinx with the head of a ram. It should charge forward with a narrative thrust but hold space in its heart for a riddle. “Boom,” my latest flash fiction piece, was inspired by the imaginative work of Italo Calvino. My goal was to craft an unexpected lyrical story like a Calvino fable with a fairy tale atmosphere woven into the universal desire for purpose.

Margot Douaihy is the author of Scranton Lace (Clemson University Press) and Girls Like You (Clemson University Press). Twitter: @MargotDouaihy.