Free Snake by Kate Jennings Page A

man. Decent. But disappointed. Who wouldn’t be? That wife. Those children.
    Your wife. You love and cherish her. You like to watch her unobserved, through a window, across a road or a paddock, as if you were a stranger and knew nothing about her. You admire her springy hair, slow smile, muscled legs, confident bearing. If this woman were your wife, your chest would swell with pride.
    She is your wife, she despises you. The coldness, the forbearing looks, the sarcastic asides, they are constant. She emasculates you with the sure blade of her contempt. The whirring of the whetstone wheel, the strident whine of steel being held to it, that is the background noise to the nightmare of your days.
    She passes on the loathing she feels for you to the children, solemnly, as if it were an heirloom. They grow up ignoring you. They are not your children; they are hers, with her hopes, virtues, faults. When they were born, you stood over their cots and wished for them sturdy bodies, strong bones, and a sense of fairness. Now you look at them and think, foreigners .
    Every reason to be disappointed, although that word implies expectations, and you never had many of them.

2
    Rex Redux
    Y OU GREW UP on a farm, a thousand acres of chalky soil, a rainfall to break the strongest spirit. The days always began with your father, shoulders hunched against the half-light of dawn, trekking across the yard, past the clothesline, to the rainfall gauge. Any kind of precipitation, even a heavy dew, was marked with ceremony on the calendar that hung on the back of the kitchen door.
    You were a taciturn child, skinny, with freckles, and you looked at people with a shy, sideways squint. You had a younger brother who was your opposite: a plump bully. One day your brother – he was ten, you were twelve – whacked his pony with a piece of wire, and the beast bucked, for the moment made as vicious as her master. As your brother fell, his boot snagged in the stirrup, and he was jounced against hard ground from the sheep shed to the house.
    He didn’t scream; he squealed. You all heard him. Who knew a human could produce a noise like that? By the time the horse reached the house, your brother was unconscious. The pony stood quietly, flicking her tail, spittle looping from her mouth, ignoring the inert boy with the bloodied head and arms that dangled from the saddle on her back.
    Broke every bone in his body, your parents told neighbors when they came to commiserate. As with all disasters – hailstorms, foot-and-mouth disease, miscarriages – their tone was reverential, boastful even, as if his accident had been an achievement.
    They set up a bed in the living room and waited for gangrene to set in, as it must, things always went from bad to worse in their world. Your parents were familiar with gangrene; in a similar makeshift bed in the same room, your grandfather had died piece by piece, the smell of his rotting flesh perfuming the air, a magnolia blooming in hell.
    For once, events were in their favor; your brother’s wounds healed, his bones knit. His luck was your misfortune. The farm couldn’t support two sons, one of you would have to go into the world, and it had to be you, you were fit, capable.
    The decision broke your heart. You would have been happy to spend your life in that small wooden house on its stony hill, the sheltering stand of ironbarks, the paddocks spread below, the dams with their chocolate water. You are one of those people who take comfort from the sameness of their surroundings.
    It seemed all the more unfair as your brother’s brush with death had not humbled him; if anything, he took up his career as a sly tyrant with renewed vigor. They should have called him Rex, not you.

3
    Light Doth Seize My Brain
    T HE YEAR OF your brother’s accident, you stayed home from school to help with the wheat harvest and never went back, which was no loss, or so you thought, only a step toward becoming a