Once a year, our family turns into snakes. It’s been happening for generations—my mom has memories of her great-grandmother writhing into a magnificent python, darting in agile strokes across the lawn with a mobility she’d lost to Parkinson’s over the years. Afterward, she lived to 109. We only become snakes for a few minutes before changing back, but the recuperative effects are long-lasting. And the benefits aren’t just physical. My uncle kicked the bottle; my mooching cousin landed a job at the National Wildlife Federation.

We shed dead weight and step into better versions of ourselves.

I haven’t seen my family in 364 days. Not since I “stole” my sister Julie’s boyfriend at the last reunion. It wasn’t premeditated: after the transformation, I was filled with a heat that could shatter glass. For the second time that night, I turned animal.

To convince my parents to let me come tonight, I vowed that things were over between me and Seamus. It was a one-time slip-up, and isn’t our whole family tradition predicated on the belief in redemption? For months, they stonewalled me. But this morning, I woke up to a Venmo notification with money for a train ticket. I slipped out while Seamus was in the shower, leaving a “Back soon!” note in the steam frosting the bathroom mirror.

We’re barbecuing on the back porch, waiting for the sun to go down so that the transformation can begin. Bones are stacked on my plate like kindling. I gnaw on a scrap of meat, trying to ignore how everyone is ignoring me. Julie’s here with a new boyfriend whose suspicious handsomeness I don’t trust. He’s like a hamburger bun in a commercial, each sesame seed pinned in place. Julie doesn’t look at me once, too absorbed in feeding her boyfriend morsels of rib. Only my obnoxious cousin wants to talk, and all she cares about lately is some endangered species. She shows me a picture on her phone: some snouty, pinecone-looking thing. A pangolin, apparently.

The light is dusty, blotted, like someone has held a sheer scarf up to the sun. People start checking their watches, speaking in murmurs. Despite being the black sheep, I start to feel ripples of excitement. Not just for the imminent transformation, but for who I might be afterward: a good sister, a good daughter, a good person.

We gather in a wide circle. The small children exchange nervous glances. They remind me of Julie, who never relished the metamorphosis the way I did. Always clawing at her skin in the days before, as if trying to preempt the shedding. I offer her a reassuring smile now. She blinks back, with neither anger nor affection. Her wimpy boyfriend has disappeared inside. Seamus was different: he watched us change and change back with pupils blown into black holes.

Mom and Dad are holding hands, and when I catch their eyes, they nod at me tightly. I stare at my feet. Manually erase every worry from my mind.

It starts in the neck. Vibrations and echoes, as though your throat were a concert hall full of musicians tuning their instruments. Then your skin grows unbearably itchy. Your teeth taper into fine points. Finally, you collapse.

I spasm onto the grass, surrounded by my convulsing relatives. Through my new eyes, I discern only vague shapes and movements—ropey, swishing forms. Julie is impossible to pick out. My mind hovers somewhere between human and snake. Thoughts sludge like water through a clogged pipe.

Freedom. I slither, I wind, I glide. I sink my fangs into a blur streaking past. I hiss, I thrash, I creep. I smile with blood-stained teeth.

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Nora Esme Wagner is a senior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.