Free Shape of the Final Dog and Other Stories (9781101600665) by Hampton Fancher

Vrksasana. Meaning erect like a mountain. He isn’t sure. At least he’s trying. He thinks about making juice, maybe going down to the beach. Right then, on the road below, he sees her car flash by, returning from another night with Peter Ryles.
    Jack has had it. No place to turn except to her, and she is gone. He lifts his arms to the sky and sputters, Please let me die! Then collapses on the hot concrete and says it again. He hears the hum of the bees and doesn’t care. The rasp of the oak leaves in the breeze and doesn’t care. He wants death, so badly wants it he thinks maybe it has already happened.
    He can’t hear the bees anymore. The world has closed. But he hears something. Light as a finger running its tip along a length of silk, and it’s coming closer. Jack turns his head, opens his eyes. It’s a foot away, coming at his face. In a flash Jack is on his feet. His sudden rising causing the snake to coil. It’s Blacky! He begged for death, death came, about to crawl under the hollow of his neck. If he hadn’t heard it, he would have been struck. He stands staring down at the dark embodiment of his wish. Without so much as a rattle, Blacky unspools and slides past the man to the place he was headed, the little hole in the shade under the rotting lumber. This is where Blacky lives, thinks Jack. I was lying at the serpent’s door.
    Jack the fatalist believes life to be random. Turn right, you get hit by a bus. Turn left, you get laid. He called for death, death came. But he was saved. The ocean is twelve miles distant. Jack is almost two thousand feet above sea level, but suddenly he can smell its tang. Blacky has been a benediction. Jack can have what he wants, or not have it; either way, he is himself again. Stewart can hear the difference in his voice, adores the story about him and the snake. A week later they are making love again. She will marry him.
    Jack has just taken her to the airport. A job in Trieste. She will be gone a week. He is relieved. He will have to address this marriage thing when she returns. He doesn’t want to believe it couldn’t be anybody, but knows it can’t be her. For one thing she wants children. The idea of harvesting an infant in Rat Hall makes him laugh. He walks into the cool dim of the front room and abruptly stops. Blacky is stretched out on the floor in front of his bedroom door.
    Thrilled, the welcoming host goes into the kitchen, pours a splash of milk into a saucer, brings it back, places it on the floor three inches from Blacky’s incredible head. The thin black tongue slips in and out, reading the offering. But Blacky doesn’t move; neither does Jack. It occurs to him that Blacky has come to stay.
    Have you heard? Jack has a new pet. Stewart will tell all her pretty friends that her fiancé has a pet snake. Not a fashionable python, but a mean, highly venomous, five-foot rattler is what he’s got, and he feeds it by hand.
    Now Jack wants to lie on his bed, contemplate the wonder of what has happened. He knows true faith will not suffer doubt. If he is to step over Blacky, it must be done in absolute compliance with the conviction that Blacky will not strike. Slowly, Jack slips off his clothes, inhales and exhales a lungful of
prana
to integrate his
kundalini
. He pictures the painting by Edward Hicks, of man and woman, lion and lamb, and all the green world in passive accord,
The Peaceable Kingdom
. Then, with his eyes closed, he steps over the snake and into his bedroom.
    Jack rolls up onto his bunk, lies back to reflect. Spring and summer, Rat Hall’s climate is favorable to reptiles. Rats from the attic scampering the premises at night—Blacky could get a plump one anytime he wants. And in the winter, the dark beneath the bed is perfect for hibernation. Rat Hall has everything a big snake needs.
    In a reverie of connection to the nature of things, Jack recognizes that Blacky is no mere pet, but an