Bony boy grabs girl’s hand and pulls her after him and though her heart pulses in her chest, disturbing the thin layer of her skinshirt, she follows him. Up, up and up they go, winding through staircases that braid in on each other like a twisted stomach in the belly of a horse. Narrower grow the stairs, lower grow the ceilings as they ascend ever higher.
Her hearts falls out the bottom of her skinshirt but she’s too dizzy to bend down and pick it up.
Bony boy drops girl’s hand and points, “There” he whispers and the voice carries a sound like the wind through mountain passes and ragged holes in houses, whistling and steep and cold.
Girl’s heart pulses wildly on the stair landing where she left it. Girl’s gaze follows bony finger to the smallest stairway yet and to the tiny door perched at the summit. She wants to leave, but can’t remember how to go backwards. Heart on stair landing is thump-thumping, wet sloppy dying fish sounds, and she feels the reverberations in her hollow places.
They climb. Tiny door opens and in they step, to a teenager’s bedroom, but it’s a disguise. Bony boy stands in the center of the room, face framed by Zeppelin posters on the off-white walls. Girl relaxes, maybe it’s all okay.
Snakes.
Hissing, whistling, wind forced through small mouths and small mountains and small holes, seething whispers through forked tongues that send crawling shudders through girl’s spine.
In the outskirts of her sight lithe bodies coil, braid, tails like live leather whip and wriggle. She hears her heart leaping, far away, the bile is a tide rising, she moves her head as in a dream (is this a dream?) but they have disappeared.
Where is bony boy?
Snakes.
Around her ankles, and she is frozen.