Worse Than a Baby’s Cry

by Colleen Albano A wail tears through the house and we’re all out of bed and on our feet, shaking the floors of the sagging, shingled bungalow. Fevers, falls, nightmares, broken glass. She’s always first to the rescue. “Worse than a baby’s cry,” my mother declares, already standing at my brother’s door, my father already back in bed.

It comes again, this time right in our ears. He caught the snake the other day but made me pinky promise not to tell. He never showed me the frog though. Its back leg now halfway down the snake’s throat. And he never showed our mother much of anything; he knew the answer was always no. There was something about my brother she never could get the hang of.

That’s just how it is. She doesn’t waste any time thinking about it, she just picks up the glass tank and walks straight to the front door. The tank goes on its side, spilling out the frog so the dark dewed grass can safely take it. I stand with my brother, heavy in the doorway. The same doorway that will hold only my brother a few years later, when my mother leaves, taking just me, assuring all of us that a boy needs his father.

It’s almost quiet now. Crickets softly chant, as if they know better. My mother kneels in the darkness beside the tank. The snake doesn’t hurry. It slowly creeps out and coils itself beside her. Like it was hers to keep all along.

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Colleen Albano is based in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, where she works in educational assessment. She holds an MA in TESOL and has taught writing to English-language learners at a local community college. She spends too much time sewing and serenading her cat, Otto.

Photo by Lidia Stawinska on Unsplash