Maria is in a hospital and is being asked a list of routine questions about who she is and why she is there. Maria sits in her hospital room, thinking back on the earlier years of her life, musing about how dangerous snakes can be and how Darwinian it is that a coral snake needs neurotoxic poison to survive but that a very similarly marked king snake needs none. This unfairness, she fears, will prevail throughout her life. (read more)