snakes galore

snakes galore

fiction
edward w pritchard

It started with an old green wood boat sunk in the canal. We found it,hauled it ashore and drug it two miles along the back of every bodies backyards' some people nice some people mean and cranky about having kids going through their yards. We finally got it home. Home was my friend's house who lived on the canal. Since it was dark we made plans to meet early and repair our new boat. It was ours by salvage.

We were hard workers. We often built things of wood, huts,or tree houses and sheds but repairing a waterlogged boat with plywood was beyond us. We coated the lopsided plywood repairs with glob after glob of various boat repair goops, let it dry a few hours, and took off on our maiden voyage. Over a mile east up the canal and then on to the lake.

The boat drank water as we went and we spent most of our time bailing and tipping the heavy, very heavy old tub. Just before the lake, after about three hours to make a thirty minute trip [ by canoe or in a decent row boat] we pulled into the haunted house. It was the original farm house in our neighborhood, with the crazy owner, built before the five hundred castle homes we inhabited were built. We hauled our selves up on the back yard of the high old farmhouse, too tired to be properly scared of the farmer, and laid in the warm sun near the cement root cellar, built for storage of fruit and things in a small hill over a hundred years ago.

We were both in very good shape. We played little league baseball, pee wee football and ran or rode our bikes every where we went. The old boat had done us in, however. It seemed alive and to complain and resist our every effort to row it, repair it or treat it like a boat.

The sun was very warm and I went into a deep reverie sleeping on the sloping bank. My tired muscles relaxed and I was in a peaceful place, joyfully out of the wet old boat.

I woke up suddenly to a surge of adrenaline and a heightened awareness. Something was very wrong. I was surrounded by snakes. Hundreds, of snakes really. The bank was covered with them, many coiled together. They were gardeners, non poisonous but jumping up and fleeing we didn't know that then.

We got half way home with the boat and abandoned it in the last piece of undeveloped woods along the canal. The next day another friend, came by with his hood cousin, five years older than us; and claimed ownership of the old boat. We didn't resist or enlighten him when he said they were going to repair it.

They had some of a special compound to repair the leaks he said.
end