1.
Consider the muse as garter snake, curling gentle at the edge of the path. Or don’t.
Consider the 18-foot Burmese python that three trained men struggled to pin down and overcome in the Everglades. They found 132 eggs inside her, and a half-digested young white-tail.
Consider the python’s four-times-or-so grandmother, trapped in some Burmese jungle, shipped across the Pacific and the continent to be sold for a hundred bucks from somebody’s van, dumped in a ditch when she outgrew her cage.
Consider her spectacular how-many-times granddaughter—another hard-working refugee turned successful immigrant and apex predator, scouring the swamp for any breathing thing, squeezing, breaking, swallowing.
Consider this one more fucked-up late capitalist quasi-parable, one more slide into the swamp of hunger, sex, dread, half a man’s face peeled by a lashing tail.
Consider those 132 eggs, crushed, seeping into a soggy hummock.
Consider the white-tails, the raccoons and possums and foxes, if any are left, for the mother and her kin are so very hungry, so good at what they do.
2.
Consider that in the interests of fictional justice, the high-minded Atticus Finch wrenched and twisted something like the truth from his crucial witness, a poor girl who was not in fact raped by a black man. May Ewell is her name, but I had to look it up. She only has the one big scene, where she’s forced into shamed revelation. Her father made her do it.
Justice was not served anyway, in this particular fiction. Did Bob Ewell think his hapless daughter would hold tight against a well-dressed, clever white man, when all her life he’d demanded she obeyed or get smacked? Can we imagine anything for her but one hard man after another?
3.
Consider Grendel’s mother crashing the mead-hall, furious, grieving her slaughtered son, slaughtering the gathered warriors in her fury, so that the great hero must find her cave below the bloody, burning lake, must don his chain-mail and dive, must be seized and nearly crushed. Only with her own ancient, heavy sword may he slash her nearly in two.
4.
Consider these mothers, these daughters. Why are they so hungry, so angry? Why must they trouble us so? If they were not so hungry, not so angry, we could forgive them.
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Jeff Gundy’s thirteen books of poetry and nonfiction include, Wind Farm: Landscape with Stories and Towers (Dos Madres, creative nonfiction) and Without a Plea (Bottom Dog, poems). Recent work appears in Georgia Review, The Sun, River Teeth, Kenyon Review, Forklift, Ohio, Christian Century, Cincinnati Review, and Terrain.org. He serves as 2023-25 Writer in (Non)Residence at Bluffton University, and is at work on a project with the working title Phantom Power(s).
