The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan

decided I would go back the next evening and find out more about the man who had sketched Lincoln, and the girl he secretly loved, and the lady in the green sweater, and the amazed one, and the fat teacher who gasped. It would be something to do for a while, a place to go in the evening.

Snake

    Walking through the park in May, he saw a small brown snake slipping away from him through grass and leaves, and he went after it with a long twig, feeling as he did so the instinctive fear of man for reptiles.
    Ah, he thought, our symbol of evil, and he touched the snake with the twig, making it squirm. The snake lifted its head and struck at the twig, then shot away through the grass, hurrying fearfully, and he went after it.
    It was very beautiful, and it was amazingly clever, but he intended to stay with it for a while and find out something about it.
    The little brown snake led him deep into the park, so that he was hidden from view and alone with it. He had a guilty feeling that in pursuing the snake he was violating some rule of the park, and he prepared a remark for anyone who might discover him. I am a student of contemporary morality, he thought he would say, or, I am a sculptor and I am studying the structure of reptiles. At any rate, he would make some sort of reasonable explanation.
    He would not say that he intended to kill the snake.
    He moved beside the frightened reptile, leaping now and then to keep up with it, until the snake became exhausted and could not go on. Then he squatted on his heels to have a closer view of it, holding the snake before him by touching it with the twig. He admitted to himself that he was afraid to touch it with his hands. To touch a snake was to touch something secret in the mind of man, something one ought never to bring out into the light. That sleek gliding, and that awful silence,
was
once man, and now that man had come to this last form, here were snakes still moving over the earth as if no change had ever taken place.
    The first male and female, biblical; and evolution. Adam and Eve, and the human embryo.
    It was a lovely snake, clean and graceful and precise. The snake’s fear frightened him and he became panic stricken thinking that perhaps all the snakes in the park would come quietly to the rescue of the little brown snake, and surround him with their malicious silence and the unbearable horror of their evil forms. It was a large park and there must bethousands of snakes in it. If all the snakes were to find out that he was with this little snake, they would easily be able to paralyze him.
    He stood up and looked around. All was quiet. The silence was almost the biblical silence of
in the beginning
. He could hear a bird hopping from twig to twig in a low earthbush near by, but he was alone with the snake. He forgot that he was in a public park, in a large city. An airplane passed overhead, but he did not see or hear it. The silence was too emphatic and his vision was too emphatically focused on the snake before him.
    In the garden with the snake, unnaked, in the beginning, in the year 1931.
    He squatted on his heels again and began to commune with the snake. It made him laugh, inwardly and outwardly, to have the form of the snake so substantially before him, apart from his own being, flat on the surface of the earth instead of subtly a part of his own identity. It was really a tremendous thing. At first he was afraid to speak aloud, but as time went on he became less timid, and he began to speak in English to it. It was very pleasant to speak to the snake.
    All right, he said, here I am, after all these years, a young man living on the same earth, under the same sun, having the same passions. And here you are before me, the same. The situation is the same. What do you intend to do? Escape? I will not let you escape. What have you in mind? How will you defend yourself? I intend to destroy you. As an obligation to man.
    The snake twitched before him helplessly, unable to avoid the