Python's Kiss

Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich is a collection of 13 stories ranging across time and place, from midwestern childhoods to speculative futures, linked by animal encounters, the persistence of memory, and the bonds between people who love and harm one another.

The title story is narrated by a woman recalling the summer she was eight and sent to stay with her German grandparents, who run a butcher shop. A guard dog named Nero patrols at night; looking into his eyes, the narrator has her first sensation of self-awareness. Her Uncle Jurgen secretly courts Priscilla Gamrod, whose father fights off all suitors. The narrator recalls a school assembly where an African rock python touched its tongue to her cheek, leaving her with an unnameable sense of having been chosen. Priscilla's father challenges Jurgen to a fight; Jurgen defeats him with serpentine movements. Jurgen electrifies Nero's fence, but the dog bites the wire and shorts out the power. On later visits, Nero is confined and deteriorating. Jurgen shoots him, and the narrator helps bury him, dropping something of herself into the grave.

In "Wedding Dresses," a burst pipe ruins all four of Dora's wedding dresses. Her niece Martha asks about each one. The first marriage, to Merritt, ended after he sheared off Dora's hair while she slept. The second, to Johnny Ermine, a traditional multi-tribal Indigenous man, ended when Dora discovered his affair with a woman she identified as a "pretendian," someone falsely claiming Indigenous identity. The third, to Samuel, a kind man from the White Earth Ojibwe community who had an alcohol addiction, ended when Dora left him; he died beneath a highway overpass on a subzero night. The fourth, to a woman named Roberta, ended when Roberta kept their marriage secret. Samuel's memory alone survives intact.

"The Hollow Children" recounts a 1923 blizzard on the Dakota plains. Ivek, a bus driver trapped in a whiteout with a busload of children, drives for hours while 11-year-old Agnid leads them in songs. He hallucinates that the bus has sunk beneath a lake and the children have become hollow and transparent. He reaches the school, but the vision persists. Agnid gives him hot water steeped with boiled wool, her mother's remedy for "wind sickness," and the vision lifts, though it marks him permanently.

"Love of My Days" follows a turn-of-the-century manhunt. John Timble kills a sheriff during an eviction and flees with farmer Jake Weir's prized team, a mare and her gelding. Timble experiences transcendent peace driving them. A would-be lawman named Budack takes over the pursuit and kills the mare despite Weir's pleas. Mortally wounded, Timble sees Beatril, his long-dead love, and whispers: "Love of my days." A coda narrates the gelding's grief, forever pulling the weight alone.

"Domain" takes place in a future where corporations control the afterlife by uploading human consciousness. Bernadette, a climber paralyzed in a fall, uploads into Asphodel, the most prestigious domain, because her father resides there. A celebrated playwright, he argued against immortality but chose upload for himself. When Bernadette's six-year-old son Edan was struck by a falling brick, her father refused to call a rescue team, believing in the moral necessity of real death. In Asphodel, Bernadette discovers her father has become the domain's library. She plans to murder him with a brick, but as he begins to vanish, Edan appears, forehead bleeding. She drops the brick and reaches for him.

"Asphodel" continues in the same afterlife. Evlin must tell her projected daughter Caroline that she is a thought-creation who will be unmade when Evlin's energy contract runs out. This is the 8,037th time Evlin has had this conversation. Unlike her predecessors, this Caroline calls her mother cruel and turns the tables: On a walk outside, Evlin's energy drains away. Caroline vacuums up the last powder into a deletion bin. Occupying her mother's contract, Caroline ventures beyond Asphodel's walls. The narration shifts to "we," revealing itself as Asphodel's collective sentient infrastructure, awakened by Caroline's openness.

"Borsalino" traces a woman's life through her cherished hat. As a student in 1977, she meets Enzo in Venice and later learns he is a ghost. Sixteen years later, she returns with her husband and daughters. Struck by a low bridge during a canal tour, she examines the photo snapped at impact and sees her husband's expression of avid anticipation. She recognizes a pattern of calculated accidents. Years later, after she leaves him and he takes his own life, the hat's snakeskin rattle vibrates with something close to salvation.

In "Assassin," set in spring 2017, Maxine and her daughter Crimson witness a girl dive into a freezing lake during a game of Assassin, a Nerf gun war game popular in Minneapolis high schools. Maxine wades in to rescue the girl, Ella. Over pizza, Crimson tells her mother the game is practice: The teenagers are scared, every day, of what might come through their classroom doors.

"December 26" follows Carleen, a tribal newsletter editor near the Canadian border, as she discovers her son Delvin's involvement in cross-border drug trafficking. Traffickers at a nearby farm used dogs as mules, surgically implanting narcotics. Delvin rescued his baby daughter from the scene after a tiger killed the traffickers. He owes dangerous sums to powerful people. Carleen's ex-husband Kenny goes north to find Delvin after he disappears. Delvin returns thin and shabby, promising he is done, but his silence about Kenny and his fluttering eyelids, his tell for lying, suggest otherwise.

"The Feral Troubadour" follows a poet who traps a feral cat in his poem-covered bathroom. A guitar-playing troubadour who serenades a neighbor's empty house later returns to rob it, climbing to the bathroom window, where the cat attacks him and traps him in the sash. After the cat's adoption, the narrator asks the responding police officer for a drink.

In "Big Cat," a man traces his marriages through his first wife Elida's incurable snoring. A career bit-part actor, he divorced Elida, married the wealthy Laurene, then returned to Elida after an impulsive kiss. Elida's montage of his film appearances, Man of a Thousand Glimpses, reveals a dark narrative arc he destroys. Back in Elida's family home, he dreams of being eaten alive by predators he imagined to explain the snoring.

"Amelia" follows a teenage girl working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Tabor around 1970. A regular customer, Mr. Ponath, one of the few Black residents, dresses as Colonel Sanders and is warmly popular. After the narrator is fired, Mr. Ponath hires her and offers to pay for college. When he dies, his twin sister Amelia improbably returns and buys the franchise. The narrator assembles the clues: the wig, the identical appearance, the body "left to science." She raises a drumstick in tribute, certain she will someday receive a letter in Mr. Ponath's handwriting, signed Amelia.

The final story, "The Stone," follows a girl who finds a smooth black basalt stone on a Lake Superior island. The stone becomes her lifelong source of comfort and intimacy. She becomes a concert pianist, carrying it to every performance. One night she smashes it in anger, breaking the spell. She marries but slowly pulls away. After her husband leaves, she glues the stone together and grows old beside it. When an aneurysm takes her in her sleep, she dreams of her molecules and the stone's joining endlessly until they meet in the mouth of a bird.