The photo hangs crooked. Like this.

I can barely hear Sal call “Action!” over the wind, brown leaves turning up
and scattering downhill. It is the final shot of the day and standing in
this mountain field—my back hit with the last rays of sun, red flannel
shirt itching my arms—I think: Why was I cast as Andy? What about my online CastCall profile says, Maybe a little out of his mind.
Prefers being alone. Willing to risk his life for a snake.

It is dusk, a line of gold light tipped over the Vermont mountains. We have
to stop filming for LETHAL INSTINCT every few minutes because Sal needs to
check what he’s been referring to as “the big game.” The snake, which rests
on a bed of dead oak leaves, from a certain angle—in silhouette, I’m told— looks real. Everything from the crew, who fight over a fast food
lunch, to the cameraman’s broken chair suggests what I told myself I’d
never do again: low-budget. But this afternoon, and tonight, I’m Andy
Campbell, a man bitten by one of the exotic snakes he kept as a pet before
meeting his untimely death in the Catskills, having inappropriately
projected human emotion onto a wild-caught king cobra. Tonight I am Andy
Campbell, and my eyes are glazing evocatively over with tears. My legs are
the first to go paralyzed, then my hands, and I fall to my knees to avoid
facing the lens. I am Andy Campbell, and I am alone in my field. I was cast
out by society for my love of reptiles and made my home in a cabin flanked
by old pines. I own several forgotten vials of antivenom and I don’t have
time to call my brother before the pain seizes my arms, fills them with
dead weight. I’m not clear on what motivates me to handle the snake
improperly, and Sal says he can’t tell me. No one really knows, he
says. Tonight I am Andy Campbell. I am a dead mystery, and I did not have a
history of bad decisions. I twitch just once before dying.

“We’re gonna run three takes, just in a row,” Sal yells.

“Sure,” I say. It sounds just how I want it to—so over-it, done-before. I’ve been trying to project confidence. Four
years ago when I started doing these films I thought it was a way out of
something, and now I realize it’s only a way in—to doing more of these
films, which could more aptly be called stints, a term my mother
has taken to using in place of my preferred jobs.

“Action!” Sal yells.

I walk a few steps down the hill, kneel to the snake, upstaging it so the
camera can’t see. I try to move with the kind of nonchalant gait I’d expect
from someone like Andy, a sort of whatever in every movement. I
pause for a few beats, preparing for the imagined bite. When it strikes, I
bring my thumb to my teeth and snip the skin hard—snap back my arm, shake
my hand, and bring the bite wound to my lips, a small pool of dark red
pooling near the base of my thumb. AndyCampbell would have learned to suck
out the venom.

After that pause, I walk back up, trying to forget the actual sting of the
bite. I regret having broken the skin. In the wind, my blood feels cool.
It’s almost evening, the time Andy actually died, but Sal calls out to say
I’ve done a good take, and that they don’t need any more. The crew briefly
cheers, announcing that the filming for the series is over. This was it.

But as I shake the stinging numbness from my thumb, I consider that none of
this is technically the problem. The problem, technically, I can’t
forget. Even as I let my neck grow slack, that thin orange glow on the
horizon in my peripheral vision, I think about it. As I stand here in the
sudden cold, the small lens shooting my small reflection back at me, my
boyfriend Cole is laying on an operating table struck with sterile white
light, and a man with a green mask over his nose and mouth is holding out
his hand and saying “Scalpel.”

***

I did know what moving in with Cole would look like. Sort of.

And Cole had always been defensive about his work, something I felt I
couldn’t, as another aspiring artist, ever invalidate. So I didn’t press
the point. But I did not know, not at all when I opened the screen door
with that faded duffel at my side, backpack like a lead weight on my
shoulders, not at all before climbing those wood steps to the porch, what
his life looked like—really. After three years spending nights in each
other’s dorm rooms, it was all perfect—or as close to perfect as I could
see the word: him with his paint-splattered overalls, his wide-lens camera
and rolls of tan film, and me with my scripts, the rehearsals and
auditions, replaying single scenes for hours, the whole house alive with
color and possibility. That was the expectation.

So when he saw me trying to get the door that day, fumbling with the strap
on my bag, he turned the handle. I bumped awkwardly in. He kissed me—that
unchanged tongue-first kiss. I hit my head against the low doorframe as he
pushed me and fell down. The tile floor was hot. We smiled into each other.
And then there he was on top of me when I saw the first warning sign.

It was not hard to discern, at the time, what it was hanging on the wall,
or why I didn’t ask about it. The photograph. But I didn’t get a good look
at it. In fact, at first, I wondered if I saw it at all.

But that didn’t matter to me then. Because in an instant I was back
again—to those years before I knew what it felt like to be adrift in the
world, to intimately know the phrase cattle call, before those few
months when I didn’t have Cole, trying to make it alone, so I could run
back to him with proof of my worth. See! I wanted to say, months
later. Before the backup plan was to move to New York, take up with some
small theatre, and hope for someone to stop me, to beg me into a job. And
that place was so warm, so what I wanted, even the room disappeared around
us. He pushed off my backpack, and I closed my eyes. I felt ridiculous to
be that romantic. The tile lifted beneath me like a cloud.

***

The hill seems steeper, at least the way I’m going down, stopping every few
moments to pause at the reflective eyes of chipmunks. The dark settles in
like a grey mist around me. I’m surprised I’m not being walked down by the
crew, who decided to stay put to get some cold open footage of the sunset.
LETHAL INSTINCT. I can almost see it already flash, tacky, across a screen.

My phone rings—I didn’t think I had service. I lose my footing on a slick
boulder trying to fish it out of a loose pocket. For some reason I thought
Andy Campbell would wear baggy clothes, clothes he could drown in—my own
misprojection. As it turns out, Sal showed me a photo of Andy, young Andy,
back when he was social and full of promise, and he was handsome, something
the description of him hadn’t mentioned and something I hadn’t actually
considered a possibility—wearing a jean jacket, his brown hair parted and
slicked back. Sal let me wear what I had brought, and it felt like a
betrayal of character, but I didn’t want to argue the point and risk
seeming high maintenance.

“Hey, buddy.” I have to pause to hear Sal. “We were talking, me and the
crew, we were talking,” he says. I detect he needs something more from me.
A drop of rain hits my nose, and I look up, move nearer to the trunk of a
tree. “We were wondering if you wanna shoot that scene again. Right now,
soon as you can. Joey looked over it and it just looks, well, you know.”

I can hear rain falling over trees. I consider what I did wrong. People
tell you it’s the light or some bullshit about angles. No. If you have to
redo a take, you did something wrong.

“It’s something about the light,” Sal says.

“It is pretty dark out,” I say, sure he’s seeing the same night I am. My
mind runs back to the question: How I had messed up. I went through Andy’s
thinking as best I could beforehand, scribbled in black ink in my notebook
back at Cole’s: If I were Andy, I wrote,

I’d have gone searching for that snake. I’d have overturned every leaf,
looked behind every rock, and just when I thought it futile, called off
my search, there it would be: coiling like a garden hose in dense
weeds.

I’d see it and then the snake would get me. Like that. No explanation. The
notes weren’t helpful, but suggested I was serious about my roles, so I had
cultivated the habit early in my career.

But then I realize: Was Andy being impatient? Maybe that’s it, I
think. That’s the reason he couldn’t save that snake from the Vermont
forest, the winter, when it would surely die. Maybe he was so happy he
finally found it he couldn’t think clearly. It was, after all, the moment
of rescue. And what else did Andy have?

I tell Sal I’m walking back up, to expect me. With every step, I consider
that acting would be a gift, if I could do it either much better or much
worse. If someone had told me in middle school, as I acted out Macbeth to
an audience of ten that I wasn’t cut out for this, gotten me on another
path, an office job that would have let me take care of myself. Or if I
could have signed with an agent during school, fast-tracked past the shit
gigs. Just before I see the outline of the dark clearing ahead, a calm wind
slanting its tall grass, I notice a voicemail, delivered to my phone
sometime these past few minutes when I wasn’t paying attention. The voice
is low, and I have to pause again to make it out. I catch—“this does not
look good. Please give us a call back when you can. I’m sorry to concern
you, but this is truly urgent.”

The word truly feels hard and wrong, too formal.

“Hey!” Sal spots me from the field. He’s waving both his arms, like that’s
the only way I’ll notice him, like I don’t get subtlety. I raise a hand as
if to say Wait a minute, as if I’m on the phone with someone, but
then there is the sharp beep against my ear and I am frozen in place. I
move my foot forward but I feel sick. I am sick. I am on the ground, and my
eyes are watering, my palms against the fallen wet leaves, a sick metal
taste behind my molars. “You ready?” he yells down to me. My lungs seize.
The air is so clean it hurts to breathe. The inky night pitches in and out
of focus, and I feel a drop of rain strike the back of my neck, faster.
“Just one more,” he adds. And then, louder, “We promise.”

***

Cole lived in an enormous cabin in the middle of New Hampshire. It was
beautiful, a sort of vacation home, wrapped in porch, with more window than
wall. It seemed to have been designed around how much sunlight would enter,
and from which angles, and at what times. When I woke up the next morning,
and Cole was still asleep, it felt as if I had been startled awake. It was
the hard light shooting in through his blinds—more expensive blinds, I
noticed, than I had expected. And the red sheets were so soft. I made a
note to ask about thread count over breakfast, whenever he woke.

But a half hour later—like in college, when I came back from the dining
hall to find him still asleep in my bed—he wasn’t awake. I stayed near him,
watched him turn over, but even at noon he was asleep. So I got up and took
a shower. I only used his soap; the shampoo was foreign and looked
expensive. Cole always had this sort of taste, ever since I met him in
Introduction to Acting: no dining hall food, packages of imported things
from his parents, a cultivated fondness for something that looked like
caviar but was in fact both rarer and more expensive. After the shower, I
dressed and, noticing Cole still asleep, walked to the kitchen.

And there it was.

It was not a photo of just any man, but a beautiful man—blond with those
darker highlights, those chiseled abs I could never get no matter how I
starved myself, the sort of brooding face that suggested real thought. The
worst part: Cole’s florid signature beneath it, like he had some claim to
the man. The photo hung above Cole’s kitchen sink, and I immediately
imagined him seeing it, enjoying it, every day, every time he saw it. I
looked closer, and the whole thing came into sharp, revolting relief.

None of this would have been a problem, I reminded myself, my stomach
burning with anxiety—not if it hadn’t been for the day senior year I walked
in on Cole while I skipped a lecture on Lessac theory, my copy of his key
turning in that lock, and those loud and hurried whispers, and the black
sheets over his pale chest. I had heard Cole once discussing a photo he had
taken of this same man as his best to date. Not because he’s attractive, Cole had said, but because the man
had been on the verge of tears after his own breakup, which made for excellent photography, “real emotion.” The wind struck me as I
walked back to my room, shaking. None of this would have been a problem.
The photo would not have been a problem.

I heard footsteps and turned around. “Morning,” Cole said, rubbing his eye
with a palm. I pointed at the photograph without looking at it again, that
stupid body backlit with white light. I mustered in a quick rage some of
the best acting advice I had ever received, years before during an
audition: If you want to sound serious, speak a question as if it’s a fact.

“Oh,” he said, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

Outside, a cicada held its shriek.

“What is this,” I said.

***

“You look awful.”

This, of course, is Sal, who has everything set up for another shot. But
he’s taken the light away. The problem, he says, was it looked artificial.
It looked made. I wanted to steal away, only for a minute, to call the
doctor and learn what was happening with Cole, what they’d found—or worse,
I consider, what they had not found. Cole had been sick for years,
though we hadn’t known it, and I had always imagined since the months he
learned this that not only had I not helped, but that I had some
weird communication with the tumor, a psychic sense that made him
eventually, horribly ill.

But Sal had asked Can it wait? And I had said Yes
—something that, unlike projecting confidence, I’m trying not to
do. To say yes to everything. I hold my thumb and make a point not to bite
it again. I can feel it still, the glow and pulse of pain.

So everything gets reset. Sal stops telling the crew to “Find the wind” and
to move the snake just so. I have no lines. I just redo the part where I
die.

But after Sal calls “Action!” something clicks on like a lamp, and I start
walking with a different step. It feels almost as if I’m possessed, like my
body knows all the right things to do. My eyes are mad with fear. I make a
false pass at a log, looking for the snake, which I’ve suddenly given a
name—Emily—that name is just spinning in my mind, and I’ve lost her, why
had I left the lid of her tank open last night, and where could she be,
really, and then I see her. And I move my hand down, something I’ve never
had to do before—her tank is on the top shelf, above the scorpions—and I
don’t have time to kneel. I feel how Andy does: as if the world has dealt
me an unfair hand, I think, but not in the way people reference it—like
even the cards themselves are meant for another game. I’m on the ground, my
forehead slick with sweat, but before I can keep on with the scene, Sal has
jumped off his chair. “Holy shit, Shawn!” he says.

Behind him, one of the crew members tosses up his hands and says “Sal, come
on. You just fucked up the shot.”

My shirt is weighed down in the humidity, the flannel choice seeming
smarter every minute, my personal spin on a role so unlike me. I’m overcome
by a sense of pride, the feeling I’ve reached some new height, adrenaline
tripping up my heartbeat.

“Turn on the lights!” Sal says. He hops back on his chair, pleased with
himself. “For fuck’s sake. Give him some light. That was”—he pauses,
unaccustomed to thinking before speaking—“excellent.”

There is a cut-open quality to the moment, a vulnerability that feels
violent. I sit up and brush the burrs from my knees. Above, the moon glows
yellow, but it instantly disappears when a flash of stark, hot light floods
my vision. I can see the rain fall, barely, against it the metal. I cover
my eyes with my hand, the scabbed red dot on my thumb uglier than I
expected. From this angle it actually looks like a snakebite. The crew
flicks on another light behind me.

“Now that?” Sal adds. “That was acting.”

***

It didn’t take long to rehash the basics: Cole had been doing this since
senior year, when he’d photograph models in an unused room in the
Engineering building, which was never locked and near his studio, since he
realized how well it paid; he was still trying to sell his nature
photographs to major magazines; he preferred other art; this was temporary,
probably; he loved me—he really did—so, what was the problem?

“The problem,” I said, “is, like, five problems.”

“Start with one.” Cole had the awful habit of getting me to talk by making
the discussion seem doable, the problems solvable, even easy.

“Where do you even do this now?”

“Here,” he said, and tried to take my hand. “I’ll show you. But don’t freak
out.”

He brought me to the top of the cellar staircase, his hand shaking. I
wondered how he thought I’d react once I did find out he was still doing
this, because I was going to find out—he had the photo above his
sink, for God’s sake, and then it occurred to me maybe this was a sign of
how desperate he perceived me to be, that he knew I would love him despite
it.

“Shit,” he said. He held the silver door handle and looked at me, his eyes
shot with red. The sunlight grew across the living room, reached us and
faded. “You’re going to freak out.”

Another one of Cole’s habits: He tended to be right.

The view of basement registered in the same way as a scene I once played in
college for an original horror-drama entitled “Please Hold.” All of my
lines (and the play itself) were bad. I had taken the part, given out of
some ridiculous pity from a professor who considered me a department
underdog, which was embarrassing. In the film, I was a secretary entering
middle-age, and every other scene had me answering the phone at my work,
several times, and saying those words: “Please hold.” In the final scene,
though, I realized my daughter had left her bedroom after curfew, taken off
with a handsome, volatile football player with a drug problem and a
collection of samurai swords on his bedroom wall. You have to seriously imagine the trouble, the director
said. His words held weight and I imagine he could feel them reflected in
his own life.

And so I did. I imagined, seriously, the scene’s “emotional turning,” a
phrase used to describe the advancing of emotion through a split-second
moment. It was one of our college’s things, a proud central lesson
of the curriculum. The idea was there are moments inside of moments that we
can never know but have to try and replicate. My emotional turning for the
scene, my hand on my head, jaw gone slack, eyes scanning that room,
registered like this: 1. Fear for my daughter2. Anger at her having broken
her promise to me. 3Concern over how I would be perceived by those close
to me4. Disbelief that it had ever happened, that I had ever lost her, at
all5. The lockdown of definite loss.

So when I saw the photos, gold-framed and winking on the wall, I was
furious. I turned to Cole, expecting my body to will forward a punch. But
when I saw the bed in the center of the room, made cleanly with those same
red sheets I had slept in the night before, I collapsed into disbelief. I
sighed and sat down on the cold cement stairs.

“Cole,” I said.

“I can explain,” he said.

“Haven’t you already.” I felt myself press the period into that sentence.

At the end of that play, I returned to that bedroom, and my daughter was
still gone, and that was when the lights for the act went down. Cole was in
the audience, watching me, though I couldn’t see him. He later told me I
had looked directly at him, but I don’t remember that. And before the hot
light shut down, it grew intensely, furiously bright, so that when I was
left standing near her bookcase, my hand on the small of my back, I
appeared as a ghost in the sudden dark.

***

It is night now. I run through the scene again, one last time, and my heart
is wild, like I released something I didn’t know was in me to begin with,
something that kept the other parts of me lodged in their correct places.
I’m on the ground, again, my hair coated with dew, the rain shower now a
pervasive mist, like I’m filming in a dream. We just finished three more
takes of the same scene, with variations on where I first thought I’d seen
the snake: under a log, near my foot, and once—So exciting! Sal
had said—behind the lens, from the snake’s point-of-view.

A flock of small birds trembles up from tall trees, like thrown ash across
the deep blue sky. I wait for Sal to finish talking to his assistant, a sad
man wearing an awful old earpiece whose main job is to strike the time code
clapper.

“So we were thinking,” Sal says again. He walks toward me, a silhouette.
“We were just talking and wow—something changed in you.” He stops just
short of stepping into where he’d be in the shot, halfway illuminated. I
can see his squinted eyes, sense good news.

“How’d you like to do one more scene?” he says. “Just, you know, to try
it?”

I had nearly forgotten what had caused my change, so wrapped up in how I’d changed, how I was being recognized for my ability and not
my crooked nose or whatever I’d written on my CastCall profile ( Leading man or supporting man: I do both!)—the headshot Cole had
taken and generously edited: How many jobs had that got me?—that had
attracted Sal in the first place. I need to call the doctor back. I’m
vaguely disgusted I haven’t yet. In fact, I feel disgusting,
covered in dirt, my shirt sleeve awkwardly rolled up, the rain giving me an
undone, feral look.

“Can I have a minute?” I ask him.

“It’ll only take a minute,” he says.

“What’s the scene,” I say.

He turns around and gives his assistant the thumbs up; the man runs to turn
off several lights, around which moths have begun to buzz. He shuts off all
but one, as if I already agreed to doing the take. A current of wild air
rattles the metal and knocks over a folding chair. It’s freezing, I
realize, and the hair on my arm shivers up, my blood cold as a cobra’s, and
I’m reminded of Cole, and how pale he was three weeks ago.

“Oh, it’s the same part,” Sal says. “Where you die. Sort of.” He pauses as
he settles back into his chair and whispers something to his assistant. “We
just want it zoomed in. We want it slowed down. Think you can do that for
us?”

***

The way Cole and I decided to get over it—after I briefly cried out on the
porch, a thunderstorm coming, and went back inside, after we ordered dinner
and he told me between bites of pasta curled around his fork that he loved me, he was doing this for us—was to not talk
about it, and to create a code for when a client was coming in. When he
said “Looks like bad weather,” I’d know. He was sensitive to my idiot
grief, and I both admired and hated him for it, because that meant nothing
would change. I finally unpacked my things in his dresser that night,
convinced I could do this, that I could stay.

That night, after Cole fell asleep, I stayed awake thinking about emotional
turning. The window open; the air smelled like moss. It wasn’t just Cole. I
had been so blindly trusting in my acting coaches. Once, years ago as a
rehearsal warm-up exercise, the cast was asked to become ice cream cones on
“a hot July boardwalk” (weirdly specific I recalled thinking), and
I melted stupidly to the floor. Why had I done this? Why hadn’t I asked
more questions? Had I grown from this moment? Softened further? And then
the question I dreaded: Why did I act at all? I was soft serve vanilla
melting from that moment, melting still.

Closing my eyes, I found instead of rest the image of Cole’s photo, hanging
in the kitchen. Looking at me. The model reached one hand out of the glossy
film and onto the wall; his other hand steadied itself on the photo base,
and he lifted himself out—right there onto the tile floor, nude. His
muscular shadow stood in the bedroom doorframe, watching Cole and me under
the covers. I wondered if this would stir anything in Cole, and what that
would be.

Before I fell asleep, I was thrown back into that scene in “Please Hold”:
The director pleaded to me, red-faced, looking at the notes from our last
dress rehearsal. “What have you won?” He seemed drunk at the time,
and spat a bit with passion. It occurred to me I didn’t understand the
question but that my admission of this would only rouse in him a storm. I
said, “Nothing.”

“That’s right,” I remember him saying, pleased with himself and me. “ Nothing.”

***

Sal gave me only a minute to figure out my emotional turning. I decided
Andy Campbell’s final moment would go something like this: 1. Shock at
having mishandled the snake2. Shock that the snake I loved, that I had
cared for, bit me3. A strong surge of purple venom through my neck,
seizing all other thought4. The knowledge I will die.5. Both the
lightness of fainting and that final sting of regret for ever having moved
out to the mountains, for losing all the people of my life, for becoming so
completely resigned to begin with.

We run the take, though I don’t move in it. I close my eyes and pace
through the emotions as if they are a flipbook, touching each and just as
swiftly moving to the next, wincing, letting every minute difference appear
barely, even risking its loss on the viewer. Only for a second I consider
whether I am trying out any of what Cole is feeling right now, those yellow
plastic bands around his arm, a clear IV stuck in his elbow, his head
shaved and reflective, almost greasy. Here, filming as Andy Campbell, the
Vermont mountains like dark teeth jutting up around me, I wonder if I have already lost him.

“I don’t know what you’re doing these little jobs for,” Sal says. “Tell you
what, I’ll be in touch.” He moves forward to shake my hand but sees my
thumb.

“How’d that happen?” he asks.

“I fell coming up.” I try to make it sound convincing, and it does. “Wet
leaves.”

“So that’s why you looked awful.” He laughs. It offends me and then it
doesn’t. There is a distant clap of thunder. Wind races through the trees,
trembling the leaves.

“Huh,” Sal’s assistant says. It’s the first I’ve heard his voice, which is
mousy and thin, not at all what I had expected. He removes his earpiece and
holds a palm up in the air. The lights click off behind him, and my
eyesight doesn’t adjust right away. The man says, “Better head out. Looks
like some pretty bad weather.”

***

“It’s called Lethal Instinct,” I yelled. It was a warm night, almost a
month after I had arrived at Cole’s place. He was downstairs, uploading
photos onto the computer. He’d stopped doing the prints at my urging; the
profit was better online anyway, and most of his models didn’t mind—better
exposure. Not that I ever saw them. I always made a point to hide away or
drive to town whenever he had the men over. I avoided my occasional desire
to go downstairs, to uncover anything, because I had nowhere else to go.

“This guy,” I said, scrolling down, reading the description of Andy
Campbell. “This guy had over fifty snakes. Cole! In a trailer.”

“He did what?” Cole asked. His voice was deadened from the other room.

I briefly considered this, what Andy had done, but I was trying to get down
to my point: a freak. This guy must have been a freak to do something like
this—however he’d even managed it. Hauling tanks and snakes up a mountain,
something I couldn’t even picture. And what kind of guy, the thought
distracted, got cast in that role anyway? How does that mind work?

Through the kitchen window I saw a flock of crows settle on the branches of
a tree. I sat down at the table again and squinted at Andy’s physical
specs, the actor’s desired height and weight and features. It was me right
there on the screen, down to the note about a particular kind of nose.

The sun dimmed quickly, like a lamp clicked off, and I felt myself stiffen
in my chair as I read on, looking up occasionally to see the birds, to
wonder about where they’d come from and why they hadn’t moved. When I went
downstairs to check on Cole, he got the story wrong: He thought I’d said
Andy bit the snake. He looked as he had when I’d first seen him, a blue
button-up, attentive eyes, that messy brown hair styled in a perfect swoop,
all that energy of love coming at me like a breeze from across the quad,
too easy to be anything real. And I could see his computer screen in the
reflection of a glass cabinet behind him: some man like me, maybe, or not—I
could only make out the frame, the way he’d posed them, and it occurred to
me for the first time that if it were me, with my eye behind the lens, I
would not know how I would pose him, which angles might flatter, what it
would mean to say stand like this, I want to see you like this.

*

LETHAL INSTINCT comes out two weeks after Cole closes his eyes for the last
time. He leaves me with the whole house and his business, and each night I
look up how to close it, but I haven’t brought myself to do anything yet. I
don’t touch the photos. With Cole’s gorgeous signature in each, they’ve
taken on a haunted quality, and I am superstitious of everything. The
messages just add up in his inbox: Still on for next week? There
is evidence of nothing I had felt, all those suspicions I had hissing away
in my mind. A model showed up a few days ago at the door, his blonde hair
cut for the occasion, and I just stared at him, feeling a fury grow in me,
before saying Cole wasn’t around. A euphemism that felt sinful.

The show is somehow even less of a feature than I’d imagined, re-made to a
short docu-series on exotic animals that kill their fawning owners. I turn
up the volume and sit on the couch, a pillow Cole had bought on my chest.
The house had been so much his creation that the pain of his absence feels
often, in the past days, like something I invent myself.

Watching this is a form of masochism, I know, but this particular way of
hurting feels also like a way of honoring Cole, a logic that I know doesn’t
add up. My body tenses during the opening credits. Someone on the crew must
have learned more about Andy, because the narrator starts confidently with
facts about his childhood, stock footage of babies an embarrassing
precursor to my scene with the snake. Andy’s mom had died of cancer when he
was young. He loved snakes especially, though he also kept a pair of
pigeons and tried to train them to carry messages—something a neighbor
awkwardly divulged in anonymous silhouette during a cut scene. I find it
unbelievable that there is a neighbor in Andy’s story at all, the man who
found him slumped there against his trailer a few days later, a poisonous
cobalt hue marbling Andy’s hand and wrist. That Andy had given up on people
seemed to be the general point of his adolescence, and though I was waiting
with some excitement for information that would surprise me, the
obviousness of this felt right.

I don’t see at first that the crew had decided not to use me at all. They
had gone with a different actor, someone who didn’t even type the part: a
thick head of wild brown hair, muscular arms. Played up the handsome. They
gave him another story, took liberties. I only see that it was another Andy
at that shot from the snake’s point of view—so stupid, but I feel it in me,
a betrayal that can be any size I want, another little pulse of venom in my
veins that I know I’ll survive. When the credits roll, I don’t bother
looking for my name. I stand and walk to the kitchen. The light from a
candle catches on every mounted photo, that glass hiding those wild secrets
I had put there myself, those little monsters, my reflection in every
frame.