Selena gets out of a bad relationship by gathering up her dog, a black lab named Copper, spending almost the last of her money, and taking a train two and a half days from the unspecified city where she had lived out into the desert Southwest to a settlement called Quartz Creek, to find her Aunt Amelia. Snake-Eater is set in a nearish future America, though Kingfisher clues readers in on that slowly, gradually doling out the details that show the differences. “Selena knew that the area was a historic zone, which meant that you couldn’t put developments up all over the place and drones were banned, but she hadn’t expected a lack of taxis. Or maybe there just weren’t enough people around for taxis to make any money, which was a somewhat alarming thought.” (p. 8) Selena is a city woman, and Quartz Creek is about as far as you can get from being a city while still being a settlement and not just a homestead.

Selena has been traumatized by the relationship she is getting out of, and she was likely neurodiverse to begin with. One of the ways that Kingfisher shows both is how Selena practices what to say to people, and the bits of her interior monologue that Kingfisher writes out as she works out what to do next. When an older Latino man offers her a ride into Quartz Creek from the station — she has been dragging her suitcase down the dusty and taxi-less road for about a quarter of a mile, and he says “It’s a short drive but a long walk” — her first reaction is to refuse as she thinks of how many things could go wrong. She decides to accept, reasoning that “If they were planning on kidnapping her, it didn’t matter whether she climbed into the truck or not.” (p. 11) Then she reasons through the next step in the interaction:

“Thank you,” she said. Was that enough? Probably not. “I’d appreciate that a lot.” There, that should be good. Just enough, not too much. (p. 11)

She gets into the back of the pickup, where it is too loud for conversation. That gives her time to prepare the next step, too.

She practiced what to say to the driver in her head. Thank you for the ride. You were right, it would have been a long walk. That sounded pretty good. That was a normal thing somebody would say, right?
Thank you for the ride. You were right, it would have been a long walk.
She ran through it a couple of times, staring at the landscape bouncing over the side of the truck bed. (p. 12)

All goes well, and Selena’s scripts serve her well. They point her to the post office, where “If you’ve got people here, Miss Jenny will know where they’re at.” (p. 14) So she does, but the answer is something that Selena has no script for. Her aunt passed away about a year before Selena’s arrival in Quartz Creek. Selena is down to her last twenty-seven dollars, knows nobody, is two and a half days of train travel from the home she doesn’t want to go back to, and if she does break down and call for help the man she is trying to leave behind will never let her forget it. Then she catches a break.

The woman from the post office studied the postcard [from Aunt Amelia] again. “Tell you what. The house is still there, you know. Amelia’s house.”
Selena looked at her blankly, one hand hooked under the dog’s collar.
“Nobody’s claimed it,” said the woman. “She’s got no kin around here, and it’s not a big house. And you look about done in, if you don’t mind me saying so. No reason you can’t stay there for the night. Or however long you need.”
Selena had to think for a minute, to put the words together. She tried them out in her head a few times, then said, “Is that allowed?”
“Sure,” said the post office woman. “I said it was fine, didn’t I?” She grinned. “I’m the mayor, you know. Also the postmaster, fire marshal, and the chief of police. My name’s Jenny.” (p. 22)

And so Selena begins her way into the community of Quartz Creek, though she doesn’t realize it at the time. That journey will see her getting more practice in dealing with people without scripts, finding her own abilities to set boundaries and make choices, and learning how to both accept and give help, something that her upbringing and adult life have made it hard to see. She also learns that there are more things on earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy; heaven is another matter. Her aunt had gotten very close to one, and its ideas of boundaries and property are very different from most people’s, and nowhere near as easygoing as Postmaster Jenny’s disposal of Aunt Amelia’s real estate.

The cast of Quartz Creek is heartfelt and hilarious, from Grandma Billy, Selena’s nearest neighbor, through Father Aguirre, the syncretic local Catholic priest, who’s a bit of a thing undreamt-of himself. There’s Lupé who runs the only café in town and makes enough money during the limited tourist season to last her through the year, and always makes too much food for the weekly potluck. Connor, Elizabeth, Gordon; for someone who doesn’t like meeting new people in a place where there aren’t many people, Selena gets in a lot of practice. Then there’s DJ Raven, the voice of KQDZ, the only radio station that comes in reliably. His callers are as likely to mention weird energy brewing to the northeast as they are beagle puppies for sale. When Selena tells Grandma Billy some of the story of her late ultra-Christian and controlling mother, but breaks off just before the tears start to flow, she replies, “No reason [to continue]. You don’t owe anybody your story. Have another mojito.” (p. 127)

She’s already in the middle of another story, though she does not know it yet. Getting out, that’s a neat trick.