“On average every newly-conceived human bears more than 300 mutations—most of them detrimental, although to varying degrees.” Outside Magazine, January 2007

Her throat loose-skinned and pale, rounded by a necklace of living snakes —diamondbacks, the patinas of their hourglasses fluorescing under the humming lights and vipers, mouths agog, venom dripping— the widow rushes into Galleries Lafayette.

Her quick eyes futilely search one glass case after another, scanning wildly until she corrals a copper-skinned salesgirl near the perfume counter.

“I am here to purchase grace,” the widow announces.

The tawny salesgirl, reveling in the rare opportunity of having the upper hand, says haughtily, “You can not buy grace here. You are rich and have led a life overfull of privilege. There is no grace I can sell you.”

“What do you know about it?” the widow replies. “It’s true, I was rich. But my husband beat me and my children were full of spite.”

“That is no concern of mine. Did you have no choice but to stay? Did your husband’s beatings make you give more money to the poor? Did his rain of open-handed blows across your white face open your heart to the lonely? Did your children’s bile push you to live with an eye to service? No, I can no more sell you grace than I could sell you my youth or you sell me your ruined, white skin.”

Bending at the waist, the widow leans over the glass counter arrayed with vials and tubes. She scowls, and as her unblinking eyes dart from one container to the next, one of the snakes strikes the salesgirl on the tip of her slightly-wide nose. She falls dead behind a pyramid-shaped display of sapphire blue bottles.

Unruffled, the widow steps over the salesgirl’s brown, cooling body. She rummages through the bottles, flinging one after another over her shoulder, infuriating the department store’s well-heeled clientele.

“I had no choice. I had no choice,” the widow shouts minutes later, her arms fixed behind her back as the uniformed security guards march her out into the street, careful to avoid the serpents’ marauding fangs, still seeking, still dripping.

***

Damian Dressick lives and writes in Pittsburgh, Pa. So far this year his fiction has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Vestal Review, Flashquake, 63 Channels, 55 Words, 3711 Atlantic and other literary journals. Damian has fiction upcoming this fall in Caketrain, The Worcester Review, The Kennesaw Review, Word Riot and Contrary Magazine. He holds an M.F.A from the University of Pittsburgh and has recently completed his first novel. He teaches creative writing at Robert Morris University and at the University of Pittsburgh through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. With the poet Terrance Hayes, he coordinates Pittsburgh's UPWords reading series. He can be reached at justdamian@gmail.com.