Cast

When the brake wheel atop the freight car came off in his hands and against his chest, Don's body was hurled to the ground, breaking his back across the railroad tracks, an injury compounded by the heavy iron wheel against his chest, fracturing sternum and ribs, too.


In full body cast, he'd often shuffle to the front door just inches at a time and peer at the Pinkerton men (one always with binoculars, trained) spying to negate his insurance claim with the railroad, and in return, Don would sometimes push the tattered screen door open to wave and scratch his testicles just to inflame the ire of the day-in, day-out car-bound detectives.


Standing or flat on his back were the only postures Don could experience, transitions perfomed by 6-handed maneuvers to right this husband and father encased in plaster for just 11 just more months.


As he lay on the floor watching TV around sunset, a rattlesnake wound through the open screen unnoticed and slid up into Don's cast to mortal terror's throat-clenched shreiks and frantic side-to-side rocking as he sensed something alive slithering in the plaster's confines, repeatedly feeling fangs tearing into encasement-tenderized flesh before the snake curled up comfortably under the small of Don's dead and arched broken back.


Gone less than two hours, Don's wife and teenagers returned home about 7:45pm from a to visit Granma Connie's nursing home, horrified to find Don's lifeless body, knowing...convinced that his death had occurred at the hands of the Pinkerton men now conspicuously absent from across Spruce Avenue, and all to escape Don's justifiable injury payoff.


Time of death was placed about 3:16AM when ambulance drivers discovered the body of the assistant coroner bearing fang marks in his neck, crumpled on the floor next to the gurney holding Don's half-casted remains.

A snake coiled peacefully venomless, content, in the corner of the county morgue's reception room.