GETTING IN THE SPIRIT | Fiction by Emily Ver Steeg

She had to drive three hours to meet the man. Cross the border into Tennessee, then Alabama. It was less like driving to another state and more like driving back in time. She’d taken a sick day for the trip, didn’t want to waste her limited vacation days. She got depressed when she thought about being chained to a desk in her own home. Sometimes she wondered if her coworkers even existed, or if she just chatted with bots all day.

Subdivisions with names like “Hillbrooke” and “Sheffield Stables,” with their manicured evergreens and closed-loop water fountains, appeared further and further apart, eventually giving way to brick homes surrounded by actual hills, brooks, and stables. Crisp Bermuda was replaced by wild, but not unkempt, lovegrass and switchgrass. Shopping centers became rarer—instead of clusters of fast-food and big-box retailers all sharing parking lot deserts, she drove past one McDonald’s or Wal-Mart at a time. The roads narrowed, snaked around foothills, switched back, emerged at surprising vistas.

“It ain’t stric’ly legal,” he’d said over the phone via the anonymous, end-to-end encrypted messaging app he’d told her to download.

“How come?”

“Lord knows. Discrimination, you ask me.” He blew air into the speaker. The sound made her ear twitch. “People don’t get it, right? Makes em scared. Easier just to write some law down in Montgomery and move on.”

“I see.”

“You best be careful. Georgia was one a the first to outlaw. They don’t mess around with it.”

“It’s just for me, though,” she said. “I’m not giving it to anyone.”

“Don’t matter. Just having one in your house… endangerment, they call it.”

They could only communicate through this app. And even then, she had to remain vague in all her messages. He insisted on giving her directions verbally. She’d scratched them out on a piece of paper she promised to burn later.

Partway up the mountain she pulled off into a gravel parking lot with an overlook and a fruit stand. She walked to the guardrail and looked out. Waves of trees just starting to yellow—too late in the year—rose and fell before her. She wasn’t used to seeing so many all at once. Just beyond the guardrail the terrain dropped off, hardly anything to stop someone from stepping over and sliding down over the rocks and coiled vines.

The air still smelled like gasoline, the route over the mountain was well-traveled. But the wind felt nice through the wisps of hair that would never lay flat in her ponytail. There was a freshness to it. Maybe it was colder up here. She tried to listen for crunching leaves, an animal slithering through underbrush, but the hum of the highway drowned out most noises. A bird cried somewhere, but when she looked up, she didn’t see it circling.

She’d gone hiking around Dahlonega several times, but now she figured that wasn’t really hiking. Just walking at an incline. She’d thought it was rural too, but the trails were only nature preserves, oases. This was closer to the real thing, though not exactly what she’d hoped for. The runaway truck ramps she passed during her drive reminded her that this, too, was connected to the suburban sprawl she’d temporarily escaped. It might not be possible to escape it fully. Even if she could, would she want to, realistically?

She took her foot off the guardrail—didn’t remember perching it up there—and turned to the fruit stand. She wanted to recreate this feeling, like she was connected to something big, without living on a mountain. She needed groceries, access to healthcare. What happened in the event of a crash or medical emergency on a mountain? An ambulance couldn’t travel fast enough up roads like this. It’d sail right off the edge, and another ambulance would have to be sent for the first one. A never-ending line of ambulances, each careening off the mountain one after the other.

At the stand, she considered the apples, pears, gourds, squash. Pie and cider were for sale too, and little decorative pumpkins. She fingered the cash in her jacket pocket. She needed it to pay the man. One-hundred-and-fifty dollars. He didn’t accept cards or PayPal. Nothing that could be traced.

“Y’all take card or…” she said.

The teenager minding the fruit held up an iPhone, a white square card reader attached to it. She filled a paper sack with apples, hoping she’d make her own pie but knowing she ultimately wouldn’t.

Apples on the passenger-side floor, she continued driving up the mountain. He lived just on the other side of it. Less than an hour to go.

Her brother had helped her download a VPN so she could access the dark web, and that’s how she’d found Brother Hank.

“This for drugs?” her brother had said.

“Just curious.”

“Not something you should be curious about.” He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t: “Whatever. Not my business.”

Brother Hank was an alias. The one she’d chosen was Eve. It was a little obvious, a little on the nose. She’d wanted to call herself by the name of the woman in Judges who throws a stone from a tower and crushes Abimelech’s head, but that woman isn’t named. So she went with Eve, the mother of all living, the woman whose fault it all was, the one who listened to the serpent.

The tight winds and curves of the road loosened. She’d made it to the other side, to Alabama. She didn’t have to wonder when the suburbs would start again, though. No developers had figured out yet how to raze the Appalachian foothills, but they could build right up to the foot of the mountains. Before the road even had a chance to fully flatten, she passed a sign that read “Future Site Of…” Look out, Brother Hank. It was coming for you, too.

When she saw the squat church, Name of Jesus Independent Baptist, the one Brother Hank had told her to look for, she turned right. Behind the church parking lot, she could see gravestones peeking up over the too-long grass. It must have been an old church. Nobody built graveyards at churches these days. Or, really, nobody left land undeveloped long enough to even consider using it for the dead instead of the living.

She drove on for a mile or so, and at the stop sign turned left onto a dirt road. She counted four mailboxes, the homes they belonged to set back into the woods, out of sight. At the fifth mailbox, she turned.

Brother Hank’s house was modest, but well-kept. It was a white clapboard ranch with a wide porch. The kind of house that would go for a lot of money in a historic downtown neighborhood. She parked in the close-cropped grass next to a blue pickup. The front door stood open, and a man’s face appeared behind the screen door, the rest of him obscured by the darkness of the home’s interior. He looked about sixty, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair.

“Eve?” He said when she got out of the car.

“Brother Hank.”

He stepped onto the porch. He wore a navy-blue polo tucked into jeans. He was full around the middle, like he’d never said no to a quality steak.

“Weren’t expecting a young lady driving a BMW.”

She hadn’t been expecting someone so… normal.

She hated artifice. It was what made her good at her job—she could almost sense the accounting errors, a vibration in her skull, before she actually saw them on her computer screen. But this loathing hindered most other parts of her life. She asked men whether they loved her too early into the relationship. She’d moved three times in the last five years. She became Roman Catholic, then Eastern Orthodox, then she’d ended up at a church with smoke machines and rock music. Now she was here, with Brother Hank, hoping for the real deal and unsure if she was getting it.

“I do okay,” she said.

He held the stair rail and limped down the porch steps. Up close, she saw he had one green eye and one brown. The hand he stuck out in greeting was dirty under the fingernails, his palm rough against her own. He’d seemed white-collar, but these were working hands.

“Well, come on,” he said.

She followed him around back to a shed built of two-by-fours and tucked into the trees. It had been white once to match the house, but time and weather had eroded most of the paint. She could smell damp wood and hoped the shed wasn’t rotting, liable to fall around her—or on her.

“I trust you’ll keep my location secret?” he said.

“Don’t have reason to tell anyone.”

He pursed his lips and nodded, then pushed the door of the shed open. She hesitated before following him. Either she was about to get what she came here for, or Brother Hank was about to murder her. She hadn’t considered worrying about her safety until it was too late.

“Careful,” he said. “Light makes em nervous.”

She glanced at the house. Past the screened-in back porch, she couldn’t tell if anyone else, a wife maybe, was inside. Ignoring the feeling in her gut, she stepped into the shed.

The sun came weakly through cracks in the walls and roof. The floor was covered in hay. When her eyes adjusted, she saw the crates lined against all four walls, stacked three high. The crates were wire, so she could see into them, but they featured a crisscross pattern so that what was inside couldn’t squeeze out. She peered into the one closest to her, but it was empty. She tried another one. The rattlesnake was coiled in a back corner, a sliver of light revealing its dark camouflage. Its scales looked like resin beads.

Brother Hank opened the crate and stuck his hand in. The snake uncoiled itself and wrapped around his arms. It click-clicked its rattler.

A shiver passed through her, but it wasn’t fear. It felt more like an electric charge lighting up the receptors in her brain. She felt an excited nervousness, her skin tingled when it passed through the mote-filled shafts of light. Her hearing sharpened. Was this the fight or flight response?

“‘At’s just a warning,” he said. “When she’s real mad, you’ll know.”

In most of the videos she’d watched online, professional handlers used snake hooks and wore protective clothing. They didn’t stick their bare, vulnerable arms in and grab hold of whatever they touched first. But Brother Hank was a different kind of handler.

He held the serpent up with both hands and bowed his head, bouncing a little on his feet. The snake became stiff and lifted its head up toward the light, flicking its tongue.

“Check your heart,” he said. “Make sure you’re in the Spirit.” Then he held the snake out to her.

She took a step back. “I don’t think I am, right now.”

“Lemme give ya a baby one.” He put the rattlesnake back in its crate and walked to the far end of the shed. He was barely visible in the darkness. To her left, she heard the unmistakable Ssshhhhh of a rattle. Not the small warning clicks, the high alert that says, “I am threatened and therefore threatening.” She recognized the flutter behind her naval as the correct response, but she didn’t run.

Brother Hank returned, a small, tan serpent held up by one hand. “Pygmy Rattler. Won’t charge ya as much for one a these.”

“I’d like the real deal,” she said.

“You ain’t never handled before?”

She shook her head.

“Make sure you’re in the Spirit,” he said again, and put the baby snake away.

She walked around the shed, looking in each crate. There was a muskiness to the air, a scent she’d never encountered before. She wasn’t sure if it was Brother Hank or the snakes. She didn’t know how to pick out the right rattler for her. Maybe it had something to do with being in the Spirit, but she wasn’t sure how to get into it, or if she was even out.

At one crate, a sand-colored snake with a dark chevron pattern was so twisted up she couldn’t tell where its head or tail was. It was an infinite knot of scaley muscle. She watched it slither over itself, either further tangling or untangling. She didn’t know which.

“Abimelech,” Brother Hank said. “Named after Gideon’s son. Killed his seventy brothers.”

“That how many this one’s killed?

“Naw. But he’s liable to.” Brother Hank looked around his shed. “Canebrakes got a nasty bite.”

“He’ll do.”

He lifted the crate off its shelf and threw a dirty sheet over it before bringing it outside. She followed him and squinted against the bright daylight.

Ima give you some mice too,” he said. “He’s only gotta eat once ever two weeks or so. Should last you a while.” He placed the crate on his front porch and disappeared into the house.

“The mice are…”

She wasn’t sure he’d heard her from inside, but when he emerged with a shoe box, he said, “Oh, they’re dead, hon. No worries there.” He gave her the box, which was cold to the touch. “Keep em in your freezer.”

She lifted the edge of the lid and saw a mass of stiff brown bodies. She wasn’t sure she’d have the courage to touch a dead mouse.

Brother Hank opened the back door of her car. “Sure hate to ruin these nice leather seats a yours.”

“Towels’re in the trunk.” She popped it open and gave him a couple ratty, stained ones.

He laid them over her seats and placed the crate on top, buckling it in.

“S’heavy.” He looked at her thin arms. “You got help?”

“I could find some.” She didn’t know who. Maybe her brother, but first she’d try by herself.

“Well…” Brother Hank stood there, hands in his pockets, not quite making eye contact.

“Right. Yes.” She grabbed the cash and counted it for him.

“‘Preciate it.”

She reached out to shake his hand. Her palm still itched from the first time, but it was the polite thing to do.

Instead, Brother Hank placed his palm on her forehead. Before her stomach had time to drop in fear, the fear only a woman meeting a strange man in the middle of nowhere can feel, he said: “Lord Jesus protect this young lady as she seeks to please you in her obedience amen.”

“Amen,” she said. When he pulled his hand away, her forehead burned slightly, like he’d rubbed peppermint oil on her.

“‘Member not to tell nobody.”

“I won’t.”

She started her car and drove away, Brother Hank watching her.

The snake was quiet on the drive back. Around the tight curves of the mountain road, she let her car drift to the edge, the tires buzzing over the raised pavement that warned motorists to stay in their lanes. Is that what the snake would sound like? The way her steering wheel shivered—is that what it would feel like to handle?

She still wasn’t sure about Brother Hank. He was too clean, too much like her neighbors or her father. But she also felt guilty, and embarrassed, about what she had expected: a redneck, white trash, hillbilly. But it shouldn’t matter what kind of person she got her snake from. As long as her heart was genuine, that’s what counted. That was always what God cared about: the heart, the intentions. Maybe that’s what getting in the Spirit meant.

Just as she had slowly exited her world on the drive to Brother Hank’s, so now she reentered it. The crammed shopping centers returned, along with their nearly full parking lots. She hadn’t grown up in this particular suburb, but she might as well have. It looked the same as the one her parents still lived in, about an hour away. One time when they were kids, her brother tried to scare her by making her watch a movie about tornadoes flattening a small town. Instead, she wanted to know about all the set dressing. What was that twirly thing on top of people’s houses? A weathervane. Why were they going underground? It’s a storm shelter. Why are there doors on the windows? Those’re shutters.

The next time it rained, she’d snuck outside and tried to close the shutters on the front of her own house, like she’d seen them do in the movie. But the little green doors were all pasted down onto the stucco and wouldn’t budge. There was nothing to stop a tree limb from riding the air right through the glass and into her parents’ living room. Not that that could have happened—it was only drizzling. When she came inside all wet, her mother had asked her what she thought she was doing.

“Closing the shutters,” she’d said.

“What shutters?”

“Next to the windows.”

Her brother looked up from his homework. “They’re decoration, stupid.”

He’d gotten hit on the back of his head for that.

Ever since then, she’d wanted a house with real shutters. But they’re hard to find. She’d forgotten to check whether Brother Hank’s home had shutters.

She turned into her neighborhood, distinguished from the other neighborhoods in town by name only. Inside her garage, she waited for the door to shut completely before getting out of the car. She unbuckled the seatbelt and took the sheet off the crate. The snake looked at her, its head resting on its coiled body. The small black eyes revealed nothing.

She grabbed the handle with both hands and slid the crate to the edge of the back seat. She braced her core and lifted high as she could, stumbling back against the wall. The snake was pressed up against the side of the crate—against her. When she realized this, she dropped it, and the box clattered to the ground, scratching her BMW on the way down. The serpent shook its rattle, the sound echoing shrilly in the small garage.

Her hands were sweaty, and they shook too much for a second attempt. Her knees felt like jelly. She found the box of mice and picked one up by its tail, slipping it into the crate.

The rattle twitched—tsssss—and the snake nosed the mouse. She waited, but it didn’t eat. She covered the crate with Brother Hank’s dirty sheet again, then she took the mouse box inside and set it in her freezer. She washed her hands and left the snake in the garage overnight.

The snake was hers, but she wasn’t sure what to do now. She hadn’t thought about the logistics. She’d wanted to test the genuineness of her faith, but now there was a snake stuck in her garage and no one to help her get it inside. Or to witness her handle it. Like a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it, if she handled a snake with no one around to see, did it even count?

For the next couple days, she left Abimelech in the garage, checking on him every few hours during the day to make sure he was warm. The nights were getting colder, and she didn’t have a heat lamp, but she put a space heater in the garage and left it running overnight, praying her house wouldn’t catch fire.

On Saturday the mouse was gone. She hoped it was a good sign. She stood before the crate still in her pajamas, the sheet pinched between two fingers and lifted up, the way she imagined the curtain of reality had lifted for John on the Isle of Patmos. Her snake was curled up, sleeping maybe. She couldn’t tell because its head was buried under the knot of itself.

Inside, she typed out a text message to her brother. She erased it. She typed it again with slightly different wording. She erased it. He would accuse her of getting obsessive again. But she needed to get that snake in the house somehow.

She put on long sleeves, jeans, and a pair of gardening gloves she’d never used. She doubted the getup would prevent the snake’s fangs from piercing her skin, but it was the best she could do. Her fingers in the gloves were just small enough to fit through the square holes of the crate. She clutched the thin metal and dragged the crate, shuffling backwards until she reached the threshold. The cheap plastic that covered the bottom of the snake’s habitation screeched against the cement floor, making her skin crawl.

The snake didn’t make a sound, but it eyed her. She wiped sweat from her face, caught her breath, and lifted the front of the crate up over the threshold and dragged it into her kitchen. When she saw the scratch marks it left on her hardwood floors, she gasped, her stomach dropping.

“Shit,” she said. Then, “Oops, sorry, Lord.”

She tried rubbing the marks out with a towel, but they didn’t go away. She’d need a professional. She then shoved the towel up under the crate best she could. Still no sound from her snake.

She lay down, spent, next to the crate. The snake looked at her, its tongue flashing out from between its mouth. Maybe he thought she looked tasty.

The snake was inside, but she still hadn’t solved her problem. What had Brother Hank meant about being in the Spirit? The snake’s expressionless face gave no answers.

Brother Hank had said not to contact him again after their business was finished, but she tried him on the messaging app just in case.

The text didn’t go through. She tried calling him, but a robotic voice replied: “This account is no longer in service.”

She sat at her kitchen table, head in her hands, and let out a grunt. She felt stupid and embarrassed for believing she could buy a snake and lift it up bare-handed to the heavens. And tomorrow was Sunday, the day out of all days when it would be appropriate to handle a snake.

She lifted her head. Tomorrow was Sunday. Maybe she could attend a snake handling church. The only problem was she didn’t know how to find one—she’d already tried. You had to be in the know, part of the community, to have access to a snake handling service. Plus, she’d never get Abimelech back in her car, and she didn’t know if one had to supply one’s own snake at a snake handling church service, or if there were enough to go around.

For the rest of the day, she tried various internet searches: “How to get into the Holy Spirit,” “How to handle snakes religiously,” “snake handling church Atlanta.” Nothing. Eventually, she settled for rewatching all the snake handling videos she’d already watched, hoping they’d teach her about getting into the Spirit. The old archival videos of Pentecostal preachers from decades before didn’t explain anything. And more recent videos made by journalists or content creators were just voyeuristic, like snake handling was a freak show.

All that effort to get the snake into the house—hell, she out to Alabama, bought it from a strange man, and brought it back—and she had nothing to show for it.

#

On Sunday morning, she woke up in a panic, remembering the apples. She hurried to the garage, picturing rotting apple flesh seeping into the carpet of her new BMW. But it had only been three days, and the apples were still nestled in their bag, shiny and firm. She lifted the paper sack and balanced it on her hip, but as she closed the car door, it nicked the edge of the sack, tearing a hole. Apples tumbled down, thumping and rolling all over the ground. She stood there stunned for a second. She wasn’t going to make pie now.

She grabbed a grocery bag from under her kitchen sink. When she turned back into the garage to clean up, the snake was watching her.

“What?” she said. “Stop looking at me!”

She slammed the door behind her so Abimelech wouldn’t see her gather up the dusty, bruised apples. A few had rolled under her car, and she crawled on her belly to get underneath, dirtying her satin pajama shirt. It was dark and cool under there, and she stayed for a minute, resting her cheek on her arms, not wanting to get up.

She wasn’t as smart as she’d thought. She was proud, really, thinking she could see straight through it all to the truth. She’d wanted to get at the center of it, the meat of everything. She wanted to dig it up with her hands, get it under her fingernails, like the dirt under Brother Hank’s nails. Instead, she was wallowing on the dusty ground.

Maybe he was real after all, the realest man she’d ever met. She couldn’t even recognize reality when it stood in front of her and held out a serpent. She didn’t hate artifice. She loved it, couldn’t live without it, fooled herself every damn day of the week.

She took her apples inside and tossed them in the trash. She looked at Abimelech, who stared at her, emotionless. Apples and snakes. She laughed at the irony, but it sounded more like a bark. She wasn’t even creative enough to do something original. Brother Hank had probably rolled his eyes at her alias. She hadn’t been able to see him as the real deal, but he sure saw through her. She was derivative, like everything else around her. Except you can’t throw a snake into the garbage bin, so now she had to live with her decision.

Her hands shook from the anger she felt toward herself, and before she realized what she was doing, she yanked the crate open and stuck her bare, vulnerable arm in. She gripped the snake behind the head, like she’d seen in the videos, and dragged it out of the crate. He wasn’t as heavy as she’d thought he’d be—it was the crate that’d been heavy.

She felt Abimelech’s muscles contracting as he wrapped himself around her arm. His tongue flicked in and out of his mouth, and she could almost hear the soft thrum the air made at the disturbance.

John on Patmos had been in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. And here she was, on the Lord’s Day, a snake sliding over her arms. He’d been in exile, and isn’t that how she felt, like a wanderer seeking a better country?

The snake gave its tail a soft click.

She turned, lifting him up. The cool, LED lights of her kitchen glinted off his scales. She recited the passage she’d memorized: “And these signs shall follow them that believe. In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues.” Her heart pounded with adrenaline, and she began to shout. “They shall take up serpents! And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them!”

Her neck throbbed, blood pumping through her veins, but she felt at peace. She did believe. She believed in the name of Jesus and his blood and the Truth that triumphs over a world of lies. Let her cast out Satan, the father of lies, let her speak in the tongues of men and angels, let her take up this serpent who has no power here. Whose head was crushed by the seed of the woman. The seed of the woman has triumphed over the serpent.

Her head fell back, and her bare arms tingled at the feeling of the snake slithering over her. Abimelech stretched out toward the light, stiff except for his rattle shaking furiously. The sound bounced off the flooring and granite countertops. His mouth opened, impossibly wide, revealing pink, gummy flesh and two long, shining fangs.

Eve heard the rushing of many waters. Her eyes filled with the light of her kitchen, and she could see. She could see better than she’d ever seen before.

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