Ervin Krause - You Will Never See Any God - Stories

The boy came around behind me, dragging the stake. “It’s a big snake, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m going to tell everybody how big a snake I killed.”

“Don’t you see what you have done?” I said. “Don’t you see the difference now?”

“It’s an ugly, terrible snake,” he said. He came up and was going to push at it with his heavy shoes. I could see the happiness in the boy’s eyes, the gleeful brutality.

“Don’t,” I said. I could have slapped the boy. He looked up at me, puzzled, and he swayed his head from side to side. I thought, you little brute, you nasty, selfish, little beast, with brutality already developed within that brain and in those eyes. I wanted to slap his face, to wipe forever the insolence and brutal glee from his mouth, and I decided then, very suddenly, what I would do.

I drew the snake up and I saw the blue eyes of the boy open wide and change and fright, and I stepped towards him as he cringed back, and I shouted, “It’s alive, it’s alive!” and I looped the tube of the snake’s body around the boy’s neck.

The boy shrieked and turned in his terror and ran, and I followed a few steps, shouting after him, “It’s alive, it’s alive, alive!”

The boy gasped and cried out in his terror and he fled towards the distant house, stumbling and falling and rising to run again, and the dead snake hung on him, looped around his neck, and the boy tore at it, but it would not fall off.

The little brute, I thought, the little cruel brute, to hurt and seek to kill something so beautiful and clean, and I couldn’t help smiling and feeling satisfied because the boy, too, had suffered a little for his savageness, and I felt my mouth trying to smile about it. And I stopped suddenly and I said, oh God, with the fierce smile of brutality frightening my face, and I thought, oh God, oh God. I climbed quickly onto the tractor and I started it and pulled the throttle open to drown the echoes of the boy shrieking down there in the long valley. I was trembling and I could not steer the tractor well, and I saw that my hands were suffused and flushed, red with a hot blood color.

Nebraska-born Ervin D. Krause’s(1931–70) stories have appeared in literary magazines and two O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies.

About the Editor

Timothy Schaffert’sbooks include The Swan Gondola .