Excerpt from Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Python's Kiss

He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents. With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked. Nero, a mixture of fierce breeds in a line known locally as guard dogs, was valued for his great strength, his formidable jaws, and his resonant bark. At night, he was turned loose to guard the cash register in the front of the shop, where he paced the waxed linoleum, a ghostly white. Other unbanked valuables were kept in a safe, but that was in my grandfather's bedroom. He slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side and a loaded gun on the other. This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.

I was taken to stay with my grandparents because my mother was about to have a baby. The plan was for me to stay there until the baby was established at home—a period of only two or three weeks. While there, I must have lived at a more intense pitch. Or perhaps the novelty of everything that happened caused each day to imprint itself deeply on my mind. I believe I can still draw the stippled print on my grandmother's homemade dresses, or even reproduce the maps of blood that appeared and disappeared on my grandfather's bleached, starched, ankle-length aprons. I was eight years old, wore boys' clothes, and was often mistaken for a boy, a skinny one. Don't you feed him? the customers would say, laughing. My grandfather stopped giving me jobs out front. Every day, I climbed the trestle fence to watch Uncle Jurgen, lean in steel-toed boots, bring pigs, sheep, even steers and heifers, into a stilled submission. My grandfather, a real wrestler, had taken prizes in Germany. But Jurgen had his own ways. He grappled with each animal without exerting, it seemed, much effort. When the animal had tired itself out and stopped kicking, he'd use a razor-sharp knife to cut its throat with a technique so precise that the blood could be collected for black sausage.

Now the scalding tub for pigs is rusted, thistles have grown through the wire chicken cages, and somewhere in the field behind the closed shop, the bones of Nero whitely petrify.

Throw down the guts when he rushes at you, my grandmother said, handing me a bent pie tin heaped with offal. Nobody argued with her, ever. Sometimes Nero buried his dishes in the fenced backyard after emptying them or, if acutely bored, tossed them high in the air with his great muzzle. He caught these objects and chewed them to lethal shreds of metal, which littered the ground, along with his dung, and had to be picked up by one of the old men who worked odd jobs in exchange for schnapps. As instructed, I threw down the guts and backed away. Nero snapped down his food and stared at me. His eyes were nobly set in his broad brow. I stepped behind the screen door, but Nero held my gaze.

As I looked into his eyes, which were the same brownish gold as mine, I had my first sensation of self-awareness. I realized that my human body, my human life, was arbitrary. I could have been a dog. An exhilarating sadness gripped me, and then I felt the first intimations of sympathy for another form of creation, for Nero, who had to eat guts from an old pie tin. In the kitchen, there was a ceramic cookie jar in the shape of a fat baker. It was always filled with gingersnaps that had gone stale in the shop. The jar was on top of the rounded, plump-looking refrigerator, but was easily reached if I stood on the table. I took two cookies to the back door, opened it a crack, and tossed one of them toward Nero. He caught it with a jump. He caught the second one too. After that, it became my custom to take a few gingersnaps to the door and toss them to Nero, in the spirit of secretly aiding a fellow prisoner. For I had a confused sensation that we were both captive—in different bodies, true, but with only one dark way out.

Excerpted from Python's Kiss by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2026 by Louise Erdrich. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.