I WENT FROM BEING A STREET VENDOR TO SLEEPING WITH A SNAKE ALL FOR WEALTH

I WENT FROM BEING A STREET VENDOR TO SLEEPING WITH A SNAKE ALL FOR WEALTH 

I never planned to take over my mother’s market stall. Honestly, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t loud like her, or brave like her, and I was definitely not the type of person who could run after cars, smiling at tourists and convincing them to buy fruit. My mother made it look effortless for more than twenty years, but when she passed away, everything suddenly fell on me.

Venda has a long line of wooden stalls where tourists stop to buy fruit—mangos, avos, litchies, bananas—and sometimes they give tips that are bigger than the fruit itself. That’s how my mother raised us. But when it was my turn, things didn’t go the same. People ignored me, other vendors outran me, and my quiet, shy nature made it impossible to sell the way she did. Some nights we slept at the market just so wouldn’t miss a single customer, and I often sat in my mother’s chair, crying quietly without anyone hearing.

Then, one random night, everything changed. I was asleep in the chair when I heard a deep engine, the kind you only hear from expensive cars. A G-Wagon stopped right in front of my stall. I jumped up immediately, grabbed a bag of mixed fruits, and ran towards it. Not a single vendor woke up, which was strange because usually the moment a nice car arrives, everyone runs. When the window came down, I saw a dark, beautiful girl with glowing eyes—eyes that almost looked supernatural.

She asked how much the fruit was, and I told her R100 for everything. She didn’t argue or even look at the fruit properly. She opened a thick bundle of R100 notes, handed it to me, and took the bag. As her driver pulled off, the other vendors suddenly woke up and rushed towards the car, but it was already gone. When I counted the money, I couldn’t breathe. It was R10,000. I fell to my knees and whispered, “Thank you, Mom. I know you sent this.”

What I didn’t know was that this was only the beginning. Every second week, the same G-Wagon arrived. The girl bought something small and gave me huge amounts of money, and every time, the other vendors somehow fell asleep just before she came.

Our lives became better than they had ever been. Then everything changed again. One night the girl took the fruits but handed me a folded paper with a phone number on it. No money. Just a number. Weeks passed and she didn’t return. My stock rotted. People ignored me like I wasn’t even standing there. Hunger and desperation finally pushed me to call the number.

The voice that answered felt like it wasn’t even coming through the phone. It felt like it was whispering right next to my ear. She said, “It took you long enough. Do you miss the money?” I froze. She told me that my mother didn’t want me suffering, that she wanted me to return to school and stop wasting my life at the market, and that she would make sure I was financially taken care of.

Then she gave me instructions that still haunt me. She told me to go to my mother’s grave, take a shovel of soil, mix it with water and wash with it, drink one gulp, hide a glass of that water somewhere secret, pour the rest back on the grave, take some soil home to keep under my bed, and write “wealth” on a piece of paper to place under my bed too. She said I must choose one date, and that every month on that date, money would appear.

I didn’t follow the instructions immediately. I was scared. But soon I had no choice. Fruit was rotting, customers didn’t even look at me, and we had nothing at home. When I finally did the ritual, everything changed. A week later I checked under my bed and found three big stashes of money—R30,000. Every first of the month, the same amount appeared. For six months, life was peaceful and comfortable.

Then everything fell apart. One night before collection day, I woke up to someone hitting me with a shambok. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her voice—the same voice from the phone—telling me to wake up and satisfy her husband. When I looked down, a huge snake was lying across my legs.

The soil under the bed had multiplied. The paper with my handwriting no longer said “wealth.” It now said “sacrifice.” The snake didn’t lie with me gently. It attacked me aggressively, forcing itself inside me with so much violence that I could feel my insides tearing. The pain was unbearable, and I screamed uncontrollably. Then the snake disappeared. The next morning there was no money. The girl called and said, “You screamed. You upset my husband. You will starve until you learn.”

From that point on, this became my life. Every month, I wake up to dirty sheets. Sometimes they smell like the snake. Sometimes they’re wet. Sometimes they have my blood on them. I wash them quietly because I’m terrified of what will happen if I make a sound.

My body feels like it’s breaking down. I’m sick all the time, my bones ache, my back feels like it's carrying a mountain, and some mornings I can barely walk because it feels like something enormous was inside me during the night.

What hurts me more is how much I've changed physically. I used to be light-skinned, because my father, they say, was a white man from ZZ2. But now my skin is getting darker every week—not healthy dark, but sickly, bruised dark. My cheeks are hollow, I’ve lost so much weight, and when I look in the mirror, I don’t even recognise myself. I feel like I’m dying slowly, month by month.

And the thing that haunts me most is not my own suffering—it’s the fear that if I die, the snake will turn to my younger siblings. I don’t know how these things work. I don’t know if rituals follow blood. I don’t know if the pact was only with me or with the whole family.

All I know is that I opened a door I should never have opened, and now I have no idea how to protect the people I love from something I cannot see, cannot fight, and cannot escape. I just pray that when my time comes, it leaves them alone… because they are innocent. I’m the one who brought this thing into our home.