Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

I leaned over to see what he had, which was the smallest, smallest green grasshopper you can imagine with your brain. Like it came from the planet of smaller things. He said, “The storm thing, I get that. Birds would need to know, right? So they won’t get rained on.” I agreed with him on that, caught in the rain would suck for a bird, hard for flying. Tommy and I could go into mental-type things like that, where with other guys, you just don’t go there. Mainly we were stalling because we’d finished winding the fence, and ended up with giant wire rolls that were way too big for us to drag to the barn. Then what? At Creaky’s we basically lived in terror of doing the wrong thing, and in terror of asking him what was the right thing, so we spent a lot of time debating on which would be worse. Finally, I said I would go ask if he meant to haul the wire out with his tractor, or what.