SWEET NOTHINGS

I am here.

I let my breath settle inside me, the way a small lake settles after a stone has been thrown.

My eyes sharpen.
I step forward.

The cobra on the left uncoils slightly, just enough to let me know it sees me, that it has already measured the shape of my shadow. Its scales whisper against the sand. The other snake holds steady, a single, waiting line carved from the earth.

This is how it must be:
my body a hinge between them,
each step a slender thread I cannot afford to snap.

If I move too fast, they will know haste.
If I move too slow, they will sense doubt.
But if I move with the kind of stillness that takes effort to maintain…
if I let the air pass around me rather than through me…
then perhaps I will make it.

I think only of the hat.
Lying there in the dust, small and stubborn and unwilling to vanish.

She dropped it when she turned away.
Not on purpose.
But things rarely fall on purpose; they fall because something shifts, something sharpens, something in the air grows tired of being held.

Earlier, we had been fine.
Talking about the weekend.
Talking like two people who remembered how to be gentle.
Then the words changed shape between us…
grew brittle, sparked…
and neither of us knew how to soften them.

She turned too quickly, and the hat slipped from her hand.
It struck the sand with a sound I felt more than heard.

Now she stands behind me at the rim of the pit.
I can’t see her, but her silence tilts toward me like a waiting question.

I step closer.

The snakes tense again.
They don’t strike; they simply gather their power, coil it, hold it.
In this way, they are honest.
More honest than we were a few minutes ago.

The hat is nearly within reach.

I think of leaving it.
I think of climbing back up the slope and letting this small thing stay lost.
I think of walking away; how easy it would be to let distance do the hard work.

But that isn’t who I want to be.

I kneel.

My fingers brush the brim.
Dust rises, light as breath.
And there it is…her scent, soft and familiar, reaching me even here, in this place of tension and sand and dangerous stillness.

It steadies me more than caution does.

I lift the hat.
Slowly.
Carefully.
As though balancing a moment still trembling from its own fall.

Now the hardest part:
the return.

I do not turn around.
Turning would break the air in the wrong direction.
Instead, I step backward, retracing each place my feet once knew.
The pit feels different now…
as if the snakes are watching not my hands but my heart.

One step.
Then another.
Then another.

The serpents do not strike.
They do not even flinch.

They simply hold their ground.
And somehow, so do we.

When I reach the upper edge, the light widens.
She’s still there…
breathing, waiting, not speaking.

I offer the hat.
Not as an apology, not as proof of anything,
but simply as something I was willing to reach for
when everything in me said to retreat.

She takes it gently.

The snakes do not move below us.
For once, neither do we.