Body Heat
by Elliot Drake-Maurer
-Barbara Bretting Fiction Winner
The litter of Burmese pythons was hatched in an illegal exotic pet farm in Hong Kong. The first to
emerge came nosing through her leathery shell into a sweltering warehouse where sluggish fans churned the
thick air above aproned attendants scooping half-hatched snakes out of dripping eggs. After a week she and
her siblings were strong enough to survive the flight to the United States, smuggled inside tampon boxes in
the luggage of a gaggle of broke American exchange students desperate for quick cash.
Once in California, and past the bribed biosecurity agent in San Francisco, the petrified students handed the snakes over to the scowling man in the back of a restaurant in the Mission district, who delivered them
to the distributor in Oakland who made quick work of the inventory. Burmese pythons were in high demand,
and the requests kept pouring in over the less-than-reputable sections of the Web.
Most of the pythons were shipped across the continent to wealthy collectors or capricious snake enthusiasts with little regard for the restrictions on international exotic animal trade. The last remaining python,
first of her brood, stayed in the City by the Bay, purchased by a newly wealthy software developer. He housed
her in a two-story glass tank in the center of his beach-front house in Sausalito, where he fed her live mice,
then rats as she grew. As she matured, he liked to let her slither around the house, reticulated brown skin
sliding over the expensive hardwood floor with a leathery whisper. This period of bliss was not meant to last,
however, and the python’s residency at the developer’s house ended when his girlfriend brought her Chihuahua, Sparky, to his house and the python reacted as any python would when discovering a rat-sized morsel
scampering around the house.
Emerging from a session of afternoon coitus, the software developer and his girlfriend discovered the
python halfway through swallowing the still twitching dog. They managed to pull it out by its hind legs, but
the python’s sinewy coils had done their work. Sparky was already crushed in the snake’s ropey embrace.
Threats of a sexual embargo unless the snake was removed spurred the software developer to action,
and that same night the python’s glass tank was inhabited by a crested iguana, exotic enough for the owner’s
taste, but something that wouldn’t eat other people’s pets.
Unable to find someone willing to adopt a year-old, four-foot python, the software engineer left the
snake in a box at the edge of the verdant expanse of Golden Gate Park at two in the morning. It was a cold
night, the fog rolling off the bay in dense sheets and filtering through the streets like ghosts. Still warm from
the car ride, the python escaped her cardboard confines and nosed her way over the cool grass, across the
deserted street and toward the warmth of steam escaping a vent in a row of apartments a few blocks away.
There she coiled up like a garden hose, following ancestral urges and conserving her fading body heat, waiting
for the life-giving sun.
***
That same night, after counting his tips after bar-close, Blake Andrews stuffed the roll of bills deep into
his backpack and left the club through the rear door. His legs ached from dancing all night, and his jockstrap
had chafed his inner thigh whenever he would “drop it low,” but such moves brought in the big bills, so he had
endured and adopted his “sexy, but stoic” face so the patrons of the club wouldn’t catch on to his discomfort.
It was 16 blocks to Blake’s apartment, but he didn’t mind the walk. The night was cool and damp, and
he could see his breath clouding in front of him as he went, hands jammed into sweatshirt pockets. As he
neared his house the lingering endorphins from his dancing and the buzz of tequila faded from his brain and
were replaced by a dull ache in his chest at the thought of his dark apartment and the empty bed that waited
there.
He’d tried bringing guys home since Ian had left the month before, but their bodies and voices brought
only painful shadows of the man he’d loved. He longed for the smooth, flat sweep of a stomach broken by a
flush of coarse hair trailing down, down; the sensation of muscles encircling him, touching, sliding, squeezing;
another’s smell,
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