A Short Story by Maureen O'Hara Pesta

The world is divided into two kinds of people.

There are those who will smash a snake with a shovel the instant it shows up in their front yard. Smack! Snake problem solved.

Then there are the others. They want the snake to go away, too, but their strategy is more subtle. It doesn’t go nuclear right out of the gate. It involves flowerpots, cardboard boxes, cinderblocks and self doubt.

Leann belonged to the second group.

* * *

She first spotted the snake the morning of the day she was hosting the bridal shower. It was coiled under the front porch, fat and happy. Six feet long, she guessed, and thank goodness just out of view, since her guests would be arriving soon.

Snakes are common enough in the countryside, and Leann lived by a pond. But most of her guests were coming from town, laden with gifts of dainty hand towels, tea cozies and apricot body butter. Snakes not welcome.

Worse yet, Staci was coming. Staci, who just last week flipped out when a mouse ran across her office at the Feed Exchange. You’d think nobody would bat an eye if they saw a mouse at the Feed Exchange, what with all that corn around. Someone needs to tell that to Staci. She screamed and jumped up on her desk chair, which rolled out from under her, causing her to suffer a broken wrist.

With that in mind, Leann took a few minutes out of her party preparations to drag a potted geranium over to block the view under the porch.

The party was a tremendous success. Staci stole the show at Pictionary even though her hand was in a cast. Everyone raved over thread counts.

Best of all, the snake stayed entirely out of view, deep in its front-porch lair.

Two days passed before the snake’s next public appearance. Leann spotted it soaking up some sun. It still looked plump. “Perhaps it’s eating mice,” Leann thought to herself approvingly.

Checking her “Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians,” she decided it must be a water snake, which is a good thing because they’re not poisonous. Reading further, she learned that water snakes give birth to as many as 99 babies. Suddenly, a water snake didn’t seem like such a good neighbor after all.

Days went by, and then a week, and the snake became a fact of daily life. The front porch was off-limits at night.

* * *

Leann’s husband, Brad, felt that something needed to be done. He offered to shoot the snake with the rifle in the basement.

Leann was dubious. That had been Brad’s grandfather’s rifle, and at this point it was pretty much rusted to the nails it was hanging from.

“No way you can hit Eugene with that thing,” she said. “More likely you’ll shoot your own toe off.”

“Who’s Eugene?” Brad asked.

“The snake,” Leann said.

“Huh. You named it,” Brad said. He reminded her about her friend Rose. “Remember last summer or whenever it was? Rose killed a snake with a shovel. Then they didn’t have to worry about it. I think she enjoyed it, too.”

It was true. Rose had killed the snake as soon as she spotted it slithering up the lane to her house. When Leann asked her about the killing, Rose’s response was matter-of-fact. Doesn’t everybody?

The difference between them, Leann knew in her heart, was that Rose had been raised on a farm. They both lived in the countryside, in fact they’d been neighbors for decades. But Leann sometimes felt reminders that she was still an outsider, and now this was one of those times. She grew up in Toledo, where killing snakes with shovels wasn’t a thing.

A few days later, Brad came up with an idea.

He would put a large, flat cardboard box on the ground by the porch, with the opening facing the snake. Leann would bang a broom handle on the porch to scare Eugene, who would go into the box.

The box containing the snake would then be slammed shut, and Eugene would be transported to the other side of the county and released there.

The plan was put into effect right away. And astonishingly, it went off without a hitch. Within seconds, Eugene was in the box.

“Ha!” Brad shouted. “What a stupid snake!”

It all happened so fast. They stood there, marveling at their ingenuity. But then the fatal flaw revealed itself: Leann and Brad hadn’t figured out who should reach down and close the box.

The delay gave Eugene just enough time to wise up. He exited the box and disappeared under the porch.

* * *

One night, not too long after, Leann awoke startled from a deep sleep, ears straining and heart pounding. Had she been dreaming? Had she heard, or simply imagined, shrieks of horror? Is Eugene along with 99 baby snakes somewhere in the house, strangling her beloved cat?

She searched everywhere until she found the cat, Chaz, curled on a bathmat unmolested. Chaz was happy to have its neck scratched at 3 a.m., but Leann had a new resolve. She crawled back into bed, heart still thumping. Enough was enough with the snake.

The next day she moved a wooden bench to the edge of the porch nearest the area where the snake liked to bask in the sun. With some effort, she hoisted three cinderblocks up onto the bench.

Then, she waited.

When Brad got home, he strolled into the kitchen and began opening cabinets looking for Cheezits. “Why are those cinderblocks out there on the deck?” he asked.

Leann described her plan. “I’m going to stand on the bench and drop the blocks on the snake,” she said, intentionally not saying the word Eugene. “Bombs away!”

“Riiight,” Brad said, his hand floating above the Cheezits box. “You’re really gonna bomb somebody you’ve named?”

That word, “somebody.” It hit hard. Was Eugene just a snake, or was Eugene … Eugene?

Brad walked to the living room and grabbed the TV remote. “Poor, poor Eugene,” he said. He listened to a few basketball scores. “Get Rose down here, why don’t you,” he said. “Ask her to bring the shovel.”

As fate or luck would have it, Eugene didn’t sun himself that afternoon. Or the next day either.

Then on Saturday, Brad reported that he saw a snake wiggling down the trail toward the pond. "I’m pretty sure it was Eugene," he said.