She seems to require one hour to slide from one side of the terrarium to the other. I stare at the scales and the white-yellow motifs, the slow crawling.
Herlinde complains about the heat and rolls up her sleeves. I say the snake has beautiful colors and ask what it eats.
“Mostly frozen snake food. Nevertheless, I regularly try to give her a live prey, a quail or a mouse. He strangles them and gobbles them up in one piece. Did you see the video I posted recently?”
“No, I don't think so.”
"Come, I'll show you." She notices my hesitation. “It's nothing gory, though. It's even beautiful. An atrocity that occurs in complete silence.”

She pulls out her phone and we sit down on the sofa. As she starts the video, I lean on her.
The snake body fully mantles the quail. Only the little head sticks out, gasping for air.
I smell Herlinde's armpits and feel like putting my head next to hers. Her bare knees, the crust of a recent wound, she is always injured somewhere. She notices my looking at the scars on her arms and rolls her sleeves back down.
She cuts herself deeper and deeper. Even the healed wounds look like they are still open. Deep grooves that make me think of carved carcasses in slaughterhouses.
“Did you cut deep when you cut yourself?” she asks with a quivering voice.
“It only happened once. No, not deep. Just scratches. Why?”
“I sometimes worry about it. If the scars remain. One day, I must stop this. Every summer is hell, wearing long sleeves everywhere I go. How did you stop it?”
“I told you it was one-time...”
She nods in disappointment and draws my attention to the video. The leg of the quail is tapping against the wall of the terrarium.
“His bones are breaking,” she explains. “This is harsh, don't you think? Every time I see this, I think: ‘Life is so harsh.’”
An SMS notification appears on the screen. She jumps up and trots around hastily. “My mother. She's already coming back. I prefer you don't meet her. Do you mind leaving now? I'm so sorry.”

Outside, summer is hitting me in the face. A dense tropical heat. I thought it was only like that in the house. It's as if I didn't go outside, as if the house has multiplied and now covers the whole city.
At home, I throw myself on the bed and put my knees up. My armpits smell like Herlinde's. I think of her scars, the video, the trembling paw of the quail. Why did she insist upon the fact that I used to do it too, cut my arms? And why did she pretend that I did it for a long time, just like her?
Thunderclaps break the silence. I take my phone and browse through Herlinde's gallery. Beautiful, ugly, beautiful, ugly. Then a lot of ugliness in a row, then something beautiful again. And all those scars. Why must she post photos of this?
The dot next to her profile picture turns green. A few seconds later, a new message appears in my inbox: the video of the quail.
I mustn’t respond right away, let her wait a while.
When I browse through the feed, the first thing I notice is a new post by her. Another video. The thumbnail shows her thighs. There seems to be blood on it. The caption says: “I'm not an expert in scarography, but I think I did a pretty good job. The lemon juice wasn't really necessary, but I read it somewhere on a blog and it seemed like an excellent idea to increase the intensity of this unique experience.”
My stomach shrinks as I read the text again. With sweaty fingers, I start the video. The knife cuts into the flesh, the blood oozing out. I look away, then look again. A lemon is squeezed over it. Her fingers move playfully across the screen. Then she zooms in on the result. It is supposed to represent a shamanistic symbol, but it looks more like a tangle of cat's claws.
Someone posts a comment that he loves it.
“Aaaaawwww, thank you so much!” she replies.
More positive comments. I quickly look at the profiles of the people who posted them.
Then Herlinde sends me a message: “Don't you like it?”
I wait a while to answer, then write: “No, sorry. I don't like this at all.”
It remains silent. I'm considering to unsend the message, but it is already marked as read.
“Too bad,” she finally writes. “I thought you'd like it. Apparently not, so.”
Her silence sounds hurt, challenges me.
I bite the bullet and write: “It hurts me to see you do such things. I can't stand it anymore. Please stop it.”
Several times she starts typing, but always gets stuck. Her efforts are becoming more and more short-lived. Someone posts another astonished comment, but she doesn't respond to it.
I feel emotionally exhausted.
“I'm going to sleep,” I write. “Maybe we can talk tomorrow.”

With a smile on my face, I lie down on my bed. Outside, the thunderstorm breaks loose. The branches of the trees swing against the windows. Sometimes also chestnut bolsters, a sharp sound, like birds' beaks. The thunder roars like a prehistoric creature. I close my eyes and feel the vibrations in my body. Lightning flashes flicker in the dark haze and mix with images from the video. The blood on her thighs. Her arms cut open. My arms too. Herlinde and me, like Siamese twins, as if we were stapled together.
The notification beep and the vibration of my phone. With a sigh and a faint smile, I read her message: “Can we talk?”
For a moment, I pretend to hesitate, but then I type: “Yes, of course.”