A Serpent Named Mourning

(Trigger Warning: themes of death and implied self-harm)

I sat in the front pew. It was hard against my back, but I didn’t shift to get more comfortable. There was no getting comfortable. My cheap dress shoes pinched my heel, my slacks felt constricting, and my suit jacket felt stiff and awkward. My little brother was in the front of the room. His face was pale. She had his color all wrong. He had always looked tan. The makeup she’d used on him was three shades too light. His curly blond hair was slicked back. Matthew never wore it like that. She didn’t know him, not like we knew him.

He was too young for this; he was only twenty. He was gone, and in his place was something else. A pastor who stood next to him was speaking, but the words washed over me without meaning. I just kept watching my brother. I hardly blinked; the white of his face was etched on the back of my eyes.

When I rose and blinked, his silhouette flashed against my retinas. I rubbed my eyes and walked up to him. I put my hand on his shoulder. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, but I couldn’t; not here and not now. I was his big brother, and he was in that box, and I was standing there looking down at him. This couldn’t be real.

I tried to imagine him as he should have been: with bouncy blonde curls and a smiling face. I touched his cheek. It was cold and hard. His face was expressionless and somber: present and absent. A smart black silk necktie was wrapped around his neck. My eyes were swimming in suppressed tears; it made the tie look like it was moving. I wiped my eyes, but it still looked like it was writhing like a snake. I rubbed my eyes harder. This wasn’t real. I was tired. No one else seemed to see the inky black thing wriggling free of his neck. Someone touched my shoulder.

“Are you okay?” she asked. It was Cass, one of Matthew’s friends from college. She was pretty. Her strawberry blond hair was pulled away from her young face and into a low bun.

“I mean, not really,” I replied. “How could I be okay?”

“That was stupid. I’m sorry. Of course you’re not okay.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“It’s just that you look like you need some fresh air.” She smiled earnestly.

“I get what you mean.” I looked back down at my brother. His necktie was gone. Or he’d never had one. I shook my head. The room felt suffocating. The stillness of everything was pressing in around me. No one was talking about why he was in this box in the first place, but I could feel the weight of what they left unsaid.

“Are you one of the pallbearers?” the mortuary assistant asked quietly.

“Yeah. I am.” I didn’t look at her. I got the impression that she was short with a brown bob, but she had become a personification of the whole process; a part of the greater machine of grief, and I didn’t want to look at her.

“It will be time to take him soon,” she said.

I nodded. Right before she shut the casket lid, I saw something wriggle from under my brother’s jacket and disappear into the shadowed recess over his legs. I was definitely seeing things. The assistant would have done something if she’d seen a snake sliding around in a casket. I was very sure of that.

I grabbed the side handle near the front. Along with five others, I carried the casket toward the hearse. As we walked through the funeral home, our dress shoes left prints in the thick peach carpet. The sun was hot, but the air was dry. It was supposed to get cold tonight. I imagined my balcony plant wilted and frostbitten. I could worry about that later. I’d bring it inside when I got home. It was trivial… a trivial thing I could prevent, unlike this. This couldn’t be helped. The finality of it all didn’t seem right.

We loaded him in the back, and the driver shut the door. I followed the hearse to the cemetery. We lifted him once again and brought him to a small green tent. My cheap dress shoes bit into my feet with each step. I noticed my shoes leaving prints again, but now in the thick grass.

His casket was black and as glossy as my other dress shoes, the good ones I brought for Matt to wear since we wore the same size. I wondered if he was wearing the shoes right now. Surely they put the shoes on before they put him in the casket. Why was I worried about this? It was too late to check.

The preacher said a few more words as they lowered the casket into the ground. As the lid disappeared, I saw a dark, snake-like shape wriggle out of the grave. It was slithering toward me through the grass. Somehow, whatever that thing was had squeezed out through the impossibly tight joint between the casket and its lid. Out of all the people, only one old woman seemed to look down at it as it crawled past, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe she didn’t see it at all. I wanted to back away, but I couldn’t move. It was at my feet now. Once it disappeared up my right pant leg, I could move once more. I snatched the pant leg up. Cass looked over at me.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing… just a bug. It went up my pant leg.” I chuckled uncomfortably. I studied my leg; there was nothing on it.

I wanted to stay longer, but I couldn’t stand it. I walked to my car and pulled onto the cemetery exit road. The road wound through a dense, dark-green wood before connecting to a road leading back to town. The old trees pressed in from either side, and I could feel the unseen entity finding its way up my right leg. It was slithering around my thigh. It was so cold it felt like ice and so smooth its edges seemed to disappear into my skin.

“My leg must be falling asleep,” I told myself. If I just ignored whatever it was, it would go away.

I pulled into my parking space, then keyed into the red brick apartment building. I raced up the steps and into my space on the fourth floor. I took my slacks off and threw them across the room. Nothing fell onto the hardwood boards. I felt like I was losing my mind.

I just needed to unwind after everything that had happened. I would drink a beer and go to sleep. I was determined to go to work in the morning. I wanted to. I needed to. I couldn’t stay here all day alone.

One beer turned into a few too many. I felt my eyes getting heavy. The sitcom on the TV blended into the darkness as I fell asleep on the couch. I woke suddenly in my dark living room. The TV was off. I must have turned on the sleep timer by mistake. I had a distinct feeling that I had something in my throat. No, something was squeezing. I coughed and put my hand to my throat. I ran to the bathroom and flicked on the light. My neck was red, but nothing was there.

It was 4 a.m., and there was no sense in going back to sleep, and I didn’t think I could have. I got ready for my day. I showered, scrubbing my neck like I could dislodge the thing that had taken hold of me. I got out and dried the steam off the mirror. I inspected my neck. I could see a ligature mark there. Something was happening to me, and I didn’t understand it, but real or not, it was becoming increasingly dangerous. I dried myself off and put on my work slacks and polo shirt.

On the drive to work, memory came bleeding through like a dark stain while my body drove me to the junior high school where I worked. It knew the way. It had done this drive hundreds of times. Matt moved in with me after Mom and Dad passed. He wanted to live with me instead of our grandparents. He was never right after they died.

Two weeks ago, I found him cold and still in his bed. I immediately covered him up and called the police. I couldn’t look at him like that, but I wish I had. He still looked like himself in the moment before I pulled the comforter over his head. They listed his cause of death as undetermined, but people whispered that depression took him and that he had done something to cause this.

Sadness was burning in my chest. I pushed it down, and as I did, I felt the cold grip of the shadow snake around my neck tightening. I couldn’t breathe. I pulled over on the side of the road. I got out. I was doubled over. I pulled at the snake. I coughed, and I gasped. I got angry. I pulled even harder. I was angry at the thing around my neck. I was even more angry as I came to the realization that this was the very thing that might have killed my brother. He could have been fighting this monster all alone, and I hadn’t noticed. The monster finally loosened its grip.

My first day back after my bereavement was a blur. Like an automaton, I went through my lesson plans. I was present, but my mind was absent. After the students left, I stayed a while to grade the assignments that had piled up in my absence. The hours slipped away. The sun glowed crimson through my classroom window. It was time to go home. I collected my things and left for the day.

After I arrived at my apartment building, one of my neighbors pulled up next to me. She opened her car and got out onto the pavement beside me. She was in her fifties, a widow and empty-nester. She worked at a palliative care facility and was wearing green scrubs. We’d exchanged pleasantries and kind conversation, but she’d never looked at me so intently like that before.

“Honey, you can’t pretend like that’s not there.”

“Huh?”

“I can see it on your neck,” she said.

I looked down, and the snake was coiled there.

“You can see this thing?”

“Yes, I can. I’ve got one too,” she said as she held out her hand. A small black creature wriggled onto her palm. It looked like a fuzzy black caterpillar.

“Yours is so small,” I said.

“Yes, because I didn’t pretend it wasn’t there. It will swallow you up if you’re not paying attention. It’ll choke you if you… You can’t let it choke you.”

“Why didn’t anyone else see it?” I asked.

“Not many people can. I don’t know why or who gets chosen, but it seems to be attracted to unusually strong grief. Mine showed up when my husband died and has been with me ever since. It just keeps getting smaller, and I only feel a little tickle sometimes. The thing has lost its power to hurt me like it did before.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a serpent I call Mourning, but I’m not really sure what it is: a spirit or a feeling or a creature. It might be all three.”

“What do I do?”

“Let yourself get mad, let yourself get sad, argue with it, challenge it, and finally accept that it’s going to be with you for a long time. That’s how you break its power.”

I thanked her, then we went our separate ways to different ends of the apartment building. The snake tried to throttle me again that night. I strangled the snake back as it wrapped around my neck. I got angry. I told it I knew it was here to stay, but that I wasn’t going to let it choke me or swallow me up. It didn’t leave my neck, but its grip loosened.

The next day went mostly like any other, but I could still feel the weight pulling me down. At the end of the day, a student stopped at my desk before she left.

“Mr. Emerson?”

“Yes, Casey?”

“I’m really sorry about what happened with your brother. My mom told me that’s why you were gone last week.”

“Thank you, Casey.”

“I wouldn’t come to school for a year if my brother… well, if something happened to him.” She seemed to care but stumbled over the concept of loss.

“It is hard, but I’d rather be here teaching all of you than wasting my time at home. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

She was a good kid, both smart and kind. She waved and disappeared into the hallway. I spent a while tidying my classroom. I locked the door behind me as I left. My eyes were burning, and when I got in my car, I finally let myself cry. The serpent called Mourning was still around my neck, but it felt just a tad lighter. It took a long time for the snake to become completely manageable. Every time I faced it, it got a little smaller, weaker, and softer. It was going to be with me for a long time, but I wasn’t going to let it swallow me up.