Jonathan Odell

Baba the Magnificent

The old plow shed behind the Brackett’s tarpaper shack was filled with shadow and the soft hissing of his pets. At this late hour, the snakes spoke only to David Lee, and the boy found this reassuring. From their boxes, they whispered to him secrets of death and survival. Of evil and grace.

On nights when his father was drunk and dangerous, the boy brought the boxes into the house and slid his snakes under his bed. Their electric hums and vibrations barred his father, frightening him from coming close. But behind the barricade, the sounds comforted the boy and lulled him to sleep as certainly as when his recently dead mother read to him from her book of Bible stories.

Tonight, he needed his snakes even closer. His father was not the only demon David Lee had to fend off. Perhaps by surrendering his life to a power beyond his control, yet something he trusted to do right by him, the way his mother had trusted God, it might assuage the advancing threat of this thing he was becoming.  

David Lee stripped off his shirt, baring his stick-like arms and sunken chest. He opened the box that contained the female cottonmouth, at least three feet long now. She would be full of venom. Queen Sheba coiled and lifted her broad head. Her hinged jaw opened impossibly wide, exposing a flicking tongue, short, sharp fangs, and a mouth as white as a fish's belly. She was poised to strike. 

Suicide ran unbridled in David Lee’s family. The graveyard was full of Brackett men with abbreviated lifespans. At fourteen, David Lee saw the attraction, the finality of it, the numbing dread replaced by a dreamless sleep.  

David Lee took ten deep breaths to slow his heart. He gazed into Queen Sheba's lidless eyes, pupils shaped like slits, and waited for permission to come near. She soon closed her jaws and relaxed her coil. Her thick head swayed rhythmically, and her tongue tasted the air. More curious now than frightened.  

Moving slowly, fluidly, like a leaf in a stream, David Lee placed his hand into the box. Queen Sheba kinked her neck and lowered her head, her tongue darting. He opened his hand. She tentatively moved up David Lee's fingers and across his palm, then coiled around his wrist and ascended his arm. 

Thicker than the boy’s forearm, Queen Sheba wound herself upward, pulling herself ever forward by contracting and releasing the powerful muscles that ran the length of her spine. She was bequeathing the muscle that the boy lacked.  

She gripped and massaged David Lee's arm, inching her way toward the boy's head. Her movements felt intimate, even affectionate. Her implausibly smooth skin like muscle encased in velvet. 

When she reached David Lee’s shoulder, with his arm as her anchor, she raised above his jawline and rested her head against his cheek. She was still, yet liquid. David Lee knew this was where she wanted to be. In the chill of the night, the snake craved the heat of the boy's body. David Lee was grateful to have something to offer. 

In that moment, David Lee was complete, lacking nothing. This close to death, he was totally alive, but at peace. Queen Sheba trusted him, and he, her. The two were one. They became the same wondrous creature, one nobody had a name for, not boy, not man, not snake, not queer.

David Lee gently gripped Queen Sheba and looped her length around his neck. Her head, now level with his chest, kinked back, biting the air.

If he had to die, he wanted to taken by what he loved rather than what he feared. But tonight, she refused to harm him. He offered his life to Queen Sheba, and in exchange, she gave him absolute peace; the kind found only in the calm eye of danger.

David Lee often relived that day at the carnival when the spell was cast. Baba the Magnificent stepped barefoot onto the stage, wearing a sequined red cape and a silk turban. He turned to the audience, expressionless, as if under a spell himself. A woman scantily dressed in billowing silks and a ruby in her navel stepped on stage to loosen the tie string around Baba’s neck. The cape dropped from his shoulders onto the stage. Beneath, Baba wore a loincloth, revealing a finely muscled body, oiled and gleaming, stirring David Lee in a way both strange and familiar. 

Several woven baskets surrounded Baba. His assistant removed the top from one and Baba reached in. He retrieved a writhing cobra which he allowed to coil up his arm.  

After emptying several more baskets, Baba has sheathed himself in serpents, some looped around his shoulders, others coiled up his arms and around his waist. He reached both hands into the final basket to retrieve two fistfuls of smaller snakes and brought them up to his chest. Baba himself had nearly disappeared. Remaining was a writhing mass of flicking tongues and twisting tails.  

For those few minutes, the snakes made the man mightier than any demon in God's creation. Shedding his own skin, Baba had encased himself in pure muscle, fangs, and venom. No one would dare harm him. With his cloak of scales, the snakes had transformed him into a wondrous beast, one simultaneously worshiped and feared. He had truly found the calm eye of danger. 

Tonight, it was David Lee who wore the armor of scales, safe, released from the mounting confusion over what he was becoming, free of the violence by those who claimed to know. For a few moments, the boy disappeared into a shielded world of absolute darkness, a world where nothing could reach him.

Jonathan Odell (he, him) is the author of three novels, The View from Delphi (Macadam Cage 2004) The Healing (Random House 2012) Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks Club (Maiden Lane Press 2015). His essays, short stories, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, Commonweal, Publishers Weekly, and others. He lives in Minneapolis with his husband. JonathanOdell.com