Dream of Heat
Dawn Corrigan

In the city there is a building like a miniature of the city itself, with thoroughfares and neighborhoods and tides that turn first one way then another. A young woman has moved to the city and found a job in this building. The woman knows nothing, has experienced nothing, but she knows that she knows nothing and counts on this knowledge for survival.

In another part of the building, a boyish man with wispy blond hair works. He sees the new woman; he does not find her especially beautiful but her straight brown hair shines with innocence. He asks her out.

The woman, who is tired of not knowing anything except that she knows nothing, accepts.

In another, smaller building elsewhere in the city, the boyish man has an apartment. He takes the woman there. The apartment is spacious, with wooden floors but almost no furniture. They sit on the floor and talk. After awhile, the man begins to rub the woman’s arms with long strokes. He rubs and rubs her arms, each time pushing her back slightly until the woman is stretched out in front of him along the floor, and then he rubs her torso as well as her arms. The woman does not know if this is the usual practice, but she has already decided to let whatever happen.

A snake appears from out of a closet or corner and slides along the wooden floor. The snake is poisonous and its thick skin shines like the oiled muscles of a bodybuilder. It moves with grace but no purpose beyond idle exploration across the floor, and it is a while before the woman, who is still being rubbed by the boyish man, notices that the snake is in the room. Stretched out on the floor as she is, she must raise her eyes toward the top of her head to see the snake.

The man has allowed, or encouraged, or perhaps forced the snake to bite several women, and then has made love to them while they were dying. Making love are his words for what he has done. He has been waiting for the woman to notice the snake’s presence in the room. He is surprised that when the woman spots the animal she does not start or scream or do anything, not knowing, as she does, that she has already decided to let things happen.

When the woman sees the snake she thinks, at first, that this is just something else that happens. Then she looks back up at the man and knows. She knows exactly what he plans to do, knows he is startled by her innocence, startled enough to think This one I can keep around for awhile, and knows that if he sees any fear on her face, she will never leave the apartment. She is terrified that he has seen knowledge on her face. But no, he hasn’t seen.

But wait, I have been mistaken. All of this doesn’t occur in the boyish man’s apartment, it occurs in the building that is like a miniature city. The man and woman are in an office high above the street. Elsewhere in the building, closer to the ground, another woman sits at her desk; the only other person who has not left the building. The sky is dark, except for a sliver of moon and an orange tinge that reflects off the clouds back down to the city, and everyone is supposed to have gone home.

This woman is older than the others, with graying red hair and a blue suit. She has remained behind in the building because she is after the boyish man. She has been hunting him. She’s drawn closer and closer, moving by intuition around the object of her search the way a snake might move randomly around an object that has newly entered the room.

Now this purposeful older woman, with whom we feel safe, knows that the danger is in the building. Does she call the police? Does she hunt out the danger herself, moving from office to office, throwing open the doors?

Upstairs, the woman with shining brown hair is trying to get to the door of the boyish man’s office, and out that door. Her movements are as slow and purposeful as the shedding of a snake’s skin. Does a snake have control over its own shedding? It would not be the worst possible way to die. This woman knows that downstairs there is another woman, a woman who wants to save her, and if she can get out this door, ease her way out without startling the boyish man, so that he barely notices she is gone and still believes there will be a time when she will return, then she can rush down to the other woman and they will put together what they know until they know everything.

But maybe it will not be enough for them to find each other, as long as they are still in the same building as the boyish man, though he is small and wiry and only a little stronger than the woman who was innocent, but is innocent no longer. He only needs to be a little stronger.

Maybe they should rush out of the building together, into the city, summon the authorities, who will come with handcuffs and a box, into which they will put the snake. They will keep the snake locked up safely as evidence. All day it will sleep in beautiful coils and dream of heat, of the sun on its back.

Dawn Corrigan lives in Sandy, Utah, where she works for the Highland City planning department. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hat, The Paris Review and elsewhere, and she recently had a story appear in the web edition of Monkeybicycle. Her nonfiction appears regularly at The Nervous Breakdown.