Little Sister Death by William Gay

and the fingers of both hands hooked over the rough edges of a tier of slate. His head and his fingertips hurt. The world looked filtered through a red miasma of fear and anger at his own stupidity. He could feel blood soaking through the hair on his right temple, see it trickle down the index and second finger on his left hand.
    David? She was calling him from somewhere below him, out of sight beneath the eaves.
    He lay with his face against the roof, unmindful of the hot slate burning his cheek.
    David. David.
    He closed his eyes. What?
    Something happened to the picture, she said.
    No shit, Binder said to himself. He didn’t say anything aloud.
    The TV was showing a fairly plain picture then it all went away and there was nothing but snow. It’s not even talking.
    Did it show me going ass over kneecaps off a ladder before it all went away? he asked her.
    What?
    Nothing.
    Are you all right, David?
    Yes. I’m all right.
    He guessed he was. He got up slowly, still holding on with his hands. The world turned like a stone-drunk carousel. He looked at his fingertips. The nails were bleeding. He felt for a handkerchief but didn’t have one, remembered tossing the shirt off the roof. He wiped the blood off his temple with his forearm, a slick smear of bright scarlet.
    He ascended the roof once more, unwired the antenna pole, and knotted the lead wire around the leg of the antenna. He began to pay out wire, lowering the antenna toward the eave of the roof.
    Get out of the way, Corrie. I’m lowering it down.
    What?
    Just get out of the way.
    The antenna tipped over the side. He braced his knees against the ridge of the roof to absorb the onset of gravity, let the wire slide through his palms until he felt the antenna settle onto solid ground. He threw the wire and it slithered away, vaguely serpentine, and vanished. He wiped the blood out of his eyes again and sat for a moment breathing hard, trying to get his bearings. He felt vague and dislocated. He hungered for the normality of fifteen minutes ago with an urgency that bordered on panic.
    Naked to the waist with a white cloth tied around his longish hair, he looked vaguely like a refugee from the sixties, aging flower child disenfranchised and purposeless in 1980. He climbed the steep embankment the house seemed shored up against and through the sedge toward a flat knoll with the antenna balanced across a shoulder, reeling out line as he went.
    She watched from the back porch, fretfully solicitous. A touch of concern in her voice when she called. David, it doesn’t matter about the TV, really, can’t you just let it go?
    No, he said. If you want to see The Tonight Show then you’ll damn well see it. Just keep the wire unreeling.
    He followed a rockchoked red gully, looking over the rim of the hot metallic sky, past the worn, faded timber of the sedge. He clambered out of the gully, hoping the reel of wire he’d bought would be enough, skirting last year’s cornfield. Binder wondered vaguely who had tended it, guessed the land had been rented on shares. Yet it might have been years old. The stalks were tilted and bleached to a delicate silvergray, seemed composed of some material of awesome complexity. The thin, paperlike blades hung sere and still in the windless day.
    He leaned the antenna pole against a shelf of limestone protruding from the red clay and stepped up, then leapt involuntarily backward, suddenly aware of swift movement, coppercolored and nearliquid. A snake big as his forearm flowed across the smooth limestone, its skin rippling. The snake turned, halfcoiled, and for a moment Binder was staring into its deadlooking eyes, the head flattened and poised.
    He looked about for a weapon, a rock small enough to throw. Go on, goddamn you, he said. I didn’t set out to kill you. You never did anything to me. The snake watched him hypnotically, eyes like shards chipped off black glass, old and evil and implacable. He had a momentary vision of Corrie’s tanned leg