Chapter One

The summer I wrote this, we discovered a nest of snakes living in our house. It was a hot spell, and often we retreated to the basement to escape the worst of it.

We weren't the only ones, it turned out.

A mother snake, at some point, had found her way into our house (we left most of our doors open that summer to create airflow). She had slithered into the back corner of the coolest, most interior room, and there hatched a brood of baby snakes: tiny black serpents, with slender, tapered bodies and teardrop-shaped heads and little, red flickering tongues.

I hate snakes. I once heard about a man who, digging in his garden, hacked his shin apart with his spade when a garter snake slithered up his pant leg. I understood this: the panic, the wildness, the madness, the willingness to maim yourself to protect yourself. If it had been me and not Adam and Eve in Eden, we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in, but not because I have greater virtue; simply because it was a serpent who seduced them. I'd have killed it first.

One evening I came home from a deacons meeting (was this itself a sign?) and Cheryl, wide-eyed and pale, met me at the door. "We have snakes," she said, hissing and writhing, snakelike, herself. She and my son had already managed to capture in a jar two of the babies. It was my job, I was told, to track down the mother. I began with stiff caution, jabbing sticks under furniture then leaping back, expecting Medusa's head to come shaking out at me. Everything I rousted out-a wisp of dust, a stray hairpin, a snip of thread-startled me. Every sensation of something touching me-the edge of a