And These Signs Shall Follow Them That Believe by Laura Grant

Daddy was a widowed Pentecostal preacher, snake pusher, tongue shaker, and in the summer of my eighth year he was getting married again.

His wife-to-be was a tall woman with short black hair: Darla. She had strange tattoos in hidden places, what my aunt called prison ink. Dark, muddy-green dragons with fuzzy outlines. She had a name, a curlique “Larry,” a dead son, writhing on her upper thigh. I saw it when we all went out to the lake and she wore a ratty brown bathing suit.

Sunday was the day I wished my momma back to life the most. Sundays, Daddy hauled hissing cages from the shed out back, loaded them onto his truck, and headed down to the church. Sundays, folks held their breath, held the living whips. Some of them cried out for a kingdom come.

I never could.

Darla does it, handles snakes. She holds them, they hold her, curling over her body, caressing the places where ink lives in her skin. Scales click as snakes slide over dragons, a susurrus of brotherhood. Sometimes she speaks in tongues, and when she opens her mouth I see a snake there, too. A copperhead clenched between her teeth.

There were no snakes at Daddy’s wedding. Just plastic bouquets, red and white flowers. Nobody from Darla’s family came, except her daughter, four-year-old Destiny.

During the pictures, Destiny kept bossing me, telling me how to look. Scowling at me for being me. But she always smiled right on time, like she could hear my daddy’s finger whizzing down to click the shutter.

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LAURA GRANT — Laura is a lawyer and writer. Like most elder millennials, she has held many job titles, including mother, photographer, burlesque emcee, private investigator, poker player, server, and pizza delivery driver. Her work is published or forthcoming in Five Fleas, Weird Christmas, Collage, and The Downtown (a funky and now defunct ‘zine in Johnson City, TN). She lives in Maryland with a couple of gremlins.

Art by OCH GONZALEZ — Och’s work has appeared in Brevity Journal, Panorama Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Lunch Ticket, Complete Sentence Lit, and Santelmo Journal, among others. Her essays have also been included in the literary anthologies in The Practice of Creative Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. You can find her art at och_gonzalez.