The serpent’s tongue flicked from scarred lips. Its fat brown body coiled in the palmetto, black eyes glinting in the dim light. The forked tongue touched the glass and retreated, touched and retreated, steady as a metronome. Without that flicker of motion, the snake would have been invisible, one more piece of driftwood lost in the shadows thrown by the branches and wire mesh atop the display.

“You ever seen a serpent handler’s snake?” the zookeeper said. His cut-up arms bulged from a work shirt emblazoned with the logo of Zoo Atlanta. He passed me twice before he spoke, the two of us alone in the gloom of the reptile house, with nothing but the rustle in the cases for company.

“Never have,” I said. “That’s a cottonmouth, right?”

“Sure is,” the keeper said. He nodded at a lonely rope divider, meant to hold the public a few feet away from the glass. It was the only such barrier in the building. “That’s a Pentecostal snake. You come close, she’ll strike at you through the glass and smash her mouth up. She’s done that a couple times already, you see? That’s why we’ve got the rope. She’s an angry snake, Jack.”

I looked down at the rope divider. The cottonmouth’s head tracked my movement. “Where’d she come from?”

“Donated,” he said. “Came off some Alabama snake handlers. Apparently she bit a few too many. Some people died.” He looked down at the heavy brown coils with a beatific smile. “We call her Preacher Killer.”

I laughed. “She’s that mean, huh?”

“Not mean, Jack,” the zookeeper said. He nodded to me as he left. “Just angry.”

The cottonmouth’s jaws opened in slow, threatening gape. Its gums glowed a ghostly white. Above the open mouth its eyes glittered, unblinking. I met its gaze for a long time before I walked away.

I thought of Preacher Killer now and then, in the following months. I knew nothing about serpent handlers at the time, having grown up Jewish in Orthodox neighborhoods in Dallas and Atlanta. But I loved reptiles, and 20 years of experience of turning over logs and scrambling down ravines had taught me a lot about snakes. I’d seen them agitated, made aggressive by fear or territorial instinct. Never anything deeper than that.

But if any snake was angry, it was that one. Angry enough to bash her own face in by striking against solid glass, striking at anything that came close, striking from the sheer existential rage of a snake born into a world filled with people. Had she hatched that way, I wondered, or was that anger born in a wooden box, buffeted to life by holy hands? Who were the people who had kept her?

What was life like for the Pentecostal serpent?