The Rattlesnake

Summary

A lone traveler, half-dead beneath a merciless sun, is revived by the cool pulse of a sidewinder coiled at his throat; rather than flee, he presses the reptile to his chest like a living relic and drags it home to a clapboard shack where dust motes swirl like guilty memories. In the hush that follows, gratitude calcifies into obsidian vengeance: the snake becomes a hired assassin, smuggled beneath the sheets of the rival who usurped his beloved. Yet innocence intervenes when the whisper-small daughter of the woman he once adored slips between those linen jaws of fate, and the man’s heart—suddenly porous, suddenly human—shatters the murderous contract at the eleventh breath.

Synopsis

The story of a man's gratitude to a snake for saving his life: He takes the snake home to live with him and then conceives the idea of having the snake kill the man who stole his sweetheart. He places it in the other man's bed. But when the little daughter of the girl he had once loved creeps into the bed, he has a change of heart.