Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: Exploration, in fiction, of the complex relationship between mother and daughter is as ancient as fairy tales—but never gets old. In “The Maternal Instinct of Snakes,” Michelle Ross metes out just enough information, just in time, from an expertly chosen point-of-view, to complicate the reader’s allegiances.
Listen to Michelle Ross read “The Maternal Instinct of Snakes”:
The Maternal Instinct of Snakes
Spring was snake mating season, which meant babies, which meant aggressively protective mothers. My mother issued this warning when I volunteered to mow our overgrown lawn. Snakes that might otherwise wish to avoid trouble will attack without provocation. My mother said this as though maternal protectiveness were an instinct she knew firsthand.
This warning—like my mother’s refusal to let me get a learner’s permit, despite me being fifteen and a half now—was not evidence of protectiveness but of her desire to control and manipulate me, and I said so. If I’m not allowed to drive a car, then driving the riding lawnmower is the next best thing. But you don’t even want me to have this, I said.
My mother looked so tired then, which is how I knew I was close to breaking her.
Sick of the weeds and reluctant to ride around in the unair-conditioned heat for three hours herself—we lived in the sticks and had a large, unruly yard; also, Dad had moved out two months ago—eventually she gave in.
I mounted that lawnmower in a pink bikini. No sunscreen, no hat, despite my mother’s chiding: You’ll blister, you’ll burn.
I was inspired by an image in one of the magazines Dad left behind: a skinny model in a red bikini and glittery silver stilettos pushing an old-school push mower across what I was pretty sure was Astroturf.
Anyway, I’d been riding around for an hour when I felt a choke in the blades’ steady whir, like the mower was coughing up a hair ball. I turned the engine off, dismounted, and discovered I’d hacked up a large black snake. What I also discovered: the snake’s nest of smooth oblong eggs—unbroken, unhatched. They were shaped like my mother’s so-called mood pills.
It was a terrible, thrilling scene.
I wondered what would happen to those eggs—no mother, no shelter. I imagined baby snakes slithering their way into our house via hidden crevices the way crickets and cockroaches managed to do.
I got back on the mower and rode over those eggs until I’d smashed every one.
I spent the rest of that weekend in bed, fevered and nauseated. My mother, smug with I-told-you-so, blamed sun poisoning. Swapping out the warm washcloth on my forehead with a cool, fresh cloth, she looked happier than she had in years.
Michelle Ross is author of There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (Moon City Press, 2017), Shapeshifting (Stillhouse Press, 2021), and They Kept Running (UNT Press, 2022). Her work is anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Flash Fiction America. She’s an editor at 100 Word Story.
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