Snakes

The easiest path usually leads straight into a minefield...Eddie, a young, pretty single mom, is trying to do the right thing by her three-year-old daughter. She really is. With no education, no job, and a string of loser boyfriends behind her, she faces hard decisions every day. Gas for the car, or food for Joy? She's already been forced to move back into her mother's decrepit old trailer in Shady Acres Trailer Court in rural Arkansas. Should she get a normal job working long hours for minimum wage, or should she put on her stiletto heels, bikini bra and micro-skirt and go back to exotic dancing so she can bring home fistfuls of cash for a few hours' work? When she catches her daughter playing with handfuls of baby copperhead snakes behind the trailer, the choice gets a lot easier: get out of there by the quickest means possible. But at what cost? And is that strange man the devil or her knight in shining armor?Snakes provokes a gut-wrenching emotional response, perhaps because by using snakes as a motif, it speaks to one of our most primitive fears. ... For a 30-page story to have such a deep, powerful and abiding effect shows that Travis Heermann is a master, ranking up there with Aesop and the Greek myth writers.- Rose Cimarron, Reviewer