Dragon Juice
October 17th, 2008
We drank the dragon juice. The dried ingredients had plumped up in the alcohol and looked fresh again — after three glasses, the tail of the snake was visible over the level of alcohol, which had turned from clear to red.
When I was a teenager, we moved to a place on the Kissimmee River in Florida, which is a habitat for cottonmouths, coral snakes, and other poisonous creatures. I broke the lock off the shed in the backyard and found it was full of racks of pickled snakes. I burned them all in a big formaldehyde-fueled pit fire, in which the snakes charred and writhed like the damned souls in Dante’s Inferno. Dragon Juice tastes exactly like what that looked like — both gave me nightmares.