Free Bearded Women by Teresa Milbrodt Page A

already staring at me. Shit. I slide down in my seat and leave right after class, before my prof can ask my opinion on anything else. I paid hard-earned money to take this course, and I’d drop it if I could afford to take the loss, but I’m financially committed to a creep for the rest of the semester.
    I complain about him to Violet when we tend the City Park gardens on Monday.
    “He sounds like my ex-husband,” she says. “He was a bastard and a flirt besides. Do you know if this professor of yours is married?”
    “Don’t think so,” I say because I haven’t seen him wearing a wedding band, but sometimes people take those off if they want to give the appearance of singlehood. I work in a bar so I know all the tricks.
    “Just keep away from him,” she says. “No private meetings in his office.”
    I nod. I’m careful not to let him catch me alone, though it won’t do anything to relieve my in-class embarrassment.
    After our gardening session Violet drives me to the store so I can buy bread and milk, then she drops me off at my apartment. I grab my sacks from the back seat and Violet closes the car door for me, but she doesn’t notice that one of my snakes is in the way.
    The pain in my head is excruciating. I’m glad I can’t see the blood.
    “My sweet Lord,” Violet says, grabbing a hankie from her purse and wrapping it around the end of the decapitated snake. “Doctor or vet?” she yells, shaking my shoulder.
    “Vet,” I say, almost woozy from the pain.
    The next half hour blurs. I wish someone would cut off my head along with the snake’s. The vet only has to use a local anaesthetic, but it knocks me out.
    I wake up sitting in a padded chair in the vet’s office, listening to dogs barking in the next room. Violet sits beside me, twisting a clean hankie in her fingers.
    “Oh goodness,” she says. “How do you feel? I’m so sorry.”
    My head doesn’t hurt, feels like it’s full of lead marbles. The vet called my doctor and explained the situation. My doctor called a prescription for Valium in to the pharmacy.
    The vet had to remove the snake at its base and put in a few stitches. She says I’ll have to be off work for a few days to give the wound time to heal. I want to protest, say I can’t afford to be away from my jobs that long, but the anaesthetic makes my tongue thick.
    A nurse gives me a small cardboard box containing what’s left of my snake. It’s wrapped in a little baggie, the kind they use for pets that have been put to sleep. I stare down at the box and get weepy again. Violet pats my shoulder until I’ve exhausted my tears, then she drives me to her apartment and has me lie down on her bed. She says she’ll pay for my medical bills.
    “But it was just an accident,” I say. I think of that little cardboard box, my lost snake, and start weeping again. Violet hugs me. I don’t have names for all my snakes, but there were seventy-eight of them and now there are only seventy-seven. The remaining ones will be traumatized.
    Lying on Violet’s bed with a glass of ginger ale on the table beside me, I ask woozy questions. If a snake got cut off at the base, near my skull, would it die or just grow a new tail? Could the snakes exist independently of me? My snakes have been injured, my snakes have received small cuts, but none of them have died before. Maybe I’m a burden to them. Maybe they don’t want to be attached to my head, forced to breathe smoke every evening at the bar. Maybe they’d be happier writhing around in the City Park gardens, eating bugs on their own accord, not subject to my whims and part-time jobs.
    I take more pills when the pain rises in my head. Violet brings me toast and eggs and sandwiches and meatloaf. The snakes and I don’t feel like eating. I can feel their sorrow, their confusion. They nip at each other, upset because they don’t know what to make of the floaty feeling we all have from the Valium.
    Violet tells the Garden Society ladies about