Horns and Rattlesnakes
I turned to look over my shoulder to see exactly what I expected to; there was Ginger, furiously working on her kong, tucked into her dog bed on the patio. Wil, my nineteen-year-old cat, was on the counter working on his food. I already know how most of it will never make into his mouth. He has perfected the art of spreading it around the counter - something he will share with me when I get home from work long after the sun has gone down.
Yep, the house is locked down, I have watered the outside plants and I have my two bags with me; my backpack and my lunch. Normal. This is entirely normal.
Until you find a live baby rattlesnake in your garage.
If you want to know exactly where you stand in the messy transition of midlife identity, look at what you do when you find a live rattlesnake firmly adhered to the sticky trap where you would normally find a cricket or maybe even a spider. When it happened to me, my brain immediately defaulted to the old script: find a man to fix it. Decades of social training told me this wasn't my job.
But life had changed; the husband was gone, and the snake was very much alive.
Stepping into my new identity didn't feel like a grand, liberating breakthrough. Strangely, it wasn’t even panic, although that would seem reasonable. Instead, it felt awkward, almost wrong, and looked a lot like a woman facing down a venomous reptile with nothing but a pair of barbecue tongs.
The hardest part of this shift isn’t stepping into a new role; it’s the agonizing process of unlearning the old one. I can say, without a doubt, I spent the first year after my divorce asking the never-answered question: How in the hell did I get here?
We are told that aging or independence should feel liberating, but no one talks about the friction. It’s messy. You trip over your own conditioning. The muscle memory scrapes across my shoulders like nails. Painful? Absolutely. Alien? You bet. You feel guilty for putting yourself first, or you feel invisible because the world no longer looks at you the way it used to. It’s a slow, awkward negotiation with yourself.
We talk about the "mushy middle ground" of aging as a quiet negotiation, but sometimes it feels like a possession. My divorce threw away my muscle memory overnight, forcing a transformation I didn't ask for but desperately needed.
So, instead of punching through music options on Spotify as I make my way to work, I’m searching for the barbeque tongs - you know, the super long kind that have been hidden deep within the garage for a year. I don’t barbeque. That was my husband’s job. But I can think of no other reasonable option for extracting the stuck, very alive baby rattlesnake that has become wedged under the metal rack.
This is the heartbeat of ARC-Mutar: Heart of the Queen. At forty-eight, my protagonist Ray undergoes a dramatic, supernatural reckoning when she manifests a female demon and grows literal horns. It is a fierce, dark awakening. That demon is the voice that decades of conditioning tried to silence - the one that looks at the old, suffocating expectations and fiercely commands her to step into her own untamed power. She’s messy, unhinged, violent, and absolutely beautiful, even when her husband, who has loved her for decades, looks at her and whispers, “That’s not my queen.”
Was I brave? Heavens, yes. Did I hold my breath as I gripped the cardboard trap so tight that the tongs instantly squished the snake? You know I did.
Did I hang the tongs next to the rake, right where I can see them? Absolutely. They are my sigil. I will die on that hilltop.
Rayale? I think of those horns often and wish I had my own. But I’m beginning to understand that I do. I just had to learn what mine looked like.
What about you? What did you “barbecue tongs” look like when life forced you to throw out the old script? Drop me a comment below and tell me about the moment you realized you had your own set of horns?
Want to read Rayale’s story? I am currently preparing ARC-Mutar: The Heart of the Queen for the world.