The Red Ruby Snake

Katie Dickson

My sister sat cross-legged on the tattered rag rug and laid out a game of solitaire, batting my hand away when I reached out to straighten a card. In the bunkhouse we shared with the other families working the fair that summer, we slept in a rickety bunk bed pushed up against the wall. Claudia had claimed the top bunk since she was the older one by seven years. Most nights, I crawled up to her bunk, and so long as I didn’t lay on her hair, she’d let me stay. 

We could hear our mother laughing with the other concessions ladies in the rec room next door—she knew most of them from one job or another. Soon, she would rap her knuckles on the wall and we’d have to get in bed. I fell back on my pillow and looked up at the milky polaroids we had tucked into the plywood underside of the bunk bed. 

“I miss Dad,” I said.

“I don’t see how, since you don’t even remember him,” she said. 

“I do so remember. I remember how he died, even—the pig-rig on I 35.”

“Big-rig.”

“What?”

“The truck that hit his was called a big-rig,” Claudia said. 

“That’s what I said.”

I had always pictured the truck that killed him pulling a livestock trailer—with a stench following it and a row of pig snouts sticking through the holes in the side. 

Claudia rolled her eyes. “Besides, you were too little. You remember the story; you don’t remember him.”

“Do so,” I said, though I hardly thought to distinguish between what I remembered and the stories Claudia told me about my own life. Our mother’s compass pulled us everywhere and nowhere—still, Claudia could recount all the places we’d moved from, ticking them off on her fingers. Each place, a vignette flashing by like the lit windows of the houses that backed up to the tracks that time we had ridden the train to Saint Paul—each one complete yet insignificant.

“Don’t worry.” She drew a card from the deck and tapped it against her temple. “I’ve got it all up here.”

From the top bunk we couldn’t see anything of the room other than the ceiling and the top half of the metal blinds covering the window. The headlights of cars rounding the bend in the road behind the bunkhouses cast stripes that slid across the ceiling. As we lay waiting for sleep, we made up stories about the lives of the people in the passing cars. The one with the loud engine was a man rushing to surprise his girlfriend at the train station—he had a bouquet of red roses on the seat next to him and when he saw her on the platform with another man, he would toss them in the street. The car with the music blaring held a famous traveling mariachi band, with each seatbelt stretched across two laps and the trunk packed with horns and guitarróns.

After Claudia fell asleep, I lay a while considering which bits of this place our future selves might light on. It could be the knotty faces grimacing in the pine planks of the bunkhouse, the miniature city of concessions stands that bordered the midway, or the posts of our bunk bed carved with the names of other families who had worked here. Most likely, it would be the long line of cars inching to the exit when the fairground parking lot emptied out each night—all those taillights like a red ruby snake slithering up the road to the highway.

That night, I dreamt of the upper bunk, heavy with Claudia and me, shuddering and then falling, crushing my bed below. We crashed right through the floor and into the bedroom of another house. We landed with a thud and crashed through that floor and the ceiling of yet another bedroom below. We propped our heads on our arms and surveyed the room before the floor gave out and our weight pulled us on. We crashed through bedrooms with checkered curtains and shelves filled with dolls, bedrooms with desk sets and lace curtains with soft patterns of flowers and leaves shifting on the walls. Mothers in rocking chairs and at kitchen counters in adjacent rooms looked up, startled, from their sewing and packing of school lunches. We crashed through so many lives and rooms, each one a memory even as it was happening. Claudia raised her eyebrows at a bedroom with two pink-curtained vanity tables with matching stools, a tabby cat curled up on one of them. 

We took one last look before crashing on. 

Katie Dickson has published short stories in 3Elements Literary Review and The Coachella Review. Her story, “A Matter of Weight,” was nominated for Best of the Net 2017 and New Stories from the Midwest Anthology 2018.