Page 2 of Half Blind

The following morning, clutching the pillow which made sleeping in the bath semi-tolerable and grateful the storm was over, she climbed out of the tub, treading down the stairs to the living room fearful of the amount of damage the farm had sustained. The girls who were her wards would be home soon from Cincinnati. The call had come through fifteen minutes ago. The girls were coming down the main road. Last night she'd been alone, not afraid but simply concerned.

Wearing rubber boots that came to her knees, she exited the front door, mentally prepared to see the damage left by the tornado. Instead, what she found was a strange, racially ambiguous man in her yard standing over the carcasses of her lab specimens. He also held in his hands her pickle jar which normally contained the morning pickled vinegar she enjoyed consuming before a cup of tea. Her eyes were then drawn to the contents of the jar.

“Are those my babies? Did you kill my babies?” she screamed at the man. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here? And why did you kill my babies?”

The man, solid in form, loaded with muscles, and only wearing the remnants of a tattered wife beater tee, loose fitted jeans, and worn-out boots, frowned at the African American woman. He was surprised she was the owner of the home. After seeing the serpents, he had automatically assumed the property was owned by a man with missing teeth and a rebel flag on the front stoop, wearing a red ball cap. He also expected said owner to possess a mutt with a backwoods name like Butchie Ray. Instead, what he had in front of him was something entirely different. His curiosity was piqued.

Adding a bucket load of fuel to the fired-up situation, a car arrived with two teenage girls. Based on their expressions, there was a relationship between the woman in the boots who kept deadly snakes she called her babies and the teen girls. Jared found no familial resemblance, yet they were protective of the woman. Immediately, they flanked both sides of the snake whisperer. He respected that since he was, in fact, the interloper. He set down the pickle jar with the snake heads. He held up his hands to show he was unarmed and lowered the intonation of his voice.

“The tornado picked up my truck and dumped it with me inside behind the wheel in a field five miles down the road,” he explained. “I'm Jared Bane. I walked as far as I could with my injured leg and found your barn.”

“And you feel that gave you the right to walk into my barn and kill my babies?” Myrtle asked.

“No,” he said, “I walked into the barn and was greeted by the big one, standing upright with the full hood expanded. Then the Gaboon came around the corner at me, so I decapitated them both.”

“You had no right!”

“Right? You want to talk about right? You have two of the deadliest snakes known to man in glass cages in a barn in the middle of Ohio,” he said. “I'm certain no lab knows you have them, and in the middle of a storm, the glass was broken and they were free. What if, instead of me in the barn, one of these young ladies had walked in there? Would they have known what to do against a giant King Cobra? I think not. It could have been you as well.”

“So, I'm supposed to thank you? I think the hell not!” she said, snatching up the pickle jar with the two heads in it.

As she opened her mouth to give him an earful, another vehicle arrived. The crunch of the tires on the gravel was enough to lower the temperature on the conversation. The car came to a stop as a black woman stepped out, observing everything around her. Her eyes went first to the man standing over the dead snake bodies. Next, she took in the woman with the pickle jar with two snake heads from the bodies on the ground. Then she looked at the teen girls. None of the items went together.

Her response was, “Hmph.”

The woman holding the jar gritted her teeth. “On top of everything else, I forgot about you coming today.”

The girls asked, “Who is she? And who is he?”

Helen McDaniel simply smiled and said, “I am The Cranberry. You can call me Helen.”

Chapter 2- Interest

Myrtle Kainker hadsoured on the lemons life had given her years ago. She was always an exceptionally bright child, she never stood for the nonsense of being an awkward teenager who was not quite cute enough to be attractive. Her darker skin made her a target for fair-skinned kids in class with a better grade of hair, as well as made her what the boys believed was an easy ride in the back seat of their dad’s Buick. However, at a young age, Myrtle understood what knowledge meant and that her self-esteem wasn’t truly based on how she looked, but what was in her head.

Being born the same year on the same day that MTV launched the channel into the metaverse, she had developed an early love of music and how things worked. Her mother, who loved to dance as much as she loved to wear skintight leopard print pants, often held parties at the end of the month, charging a nominal fee for entry. As Myrtle grew and began to understand how to count past the number ten, her mother, Laney, put her in charge of the collected funds which were used to pay the rent. However, it never failed that once Laney got into her cups, the men at the party wanted a private audience with the door cashier.

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