The album looks familiar, really familiar, but I have no idea what’s in it. Frustrated with what I’m working on anyway, I take the album over to the couch, sit down, and open it up. The first page of photos is Lisa and I going to a pet store. The memory of the actual event it fuzzy - but believable enough. There’s a shot of me tripping, my head heading straight for a handrail – it’s hilarious and as I chuckle I feel the bump on my head from where I must have it. The memory of the event in the photos becomes more vivid – less of a dream and more of a reality. Shots of Lisa and I in the pet store, making faces at the fish in the tanks, looking at birds and cats. Pictures of us going into a meet-and-greet room where we’re obviously waiting for a new pet. Shots of a pet-store employee in a blue apron bringing us a big red snake with black stripes and yellow eyes. Now I’m freaking out. “Did I get a snake?” Worse still, “DID I FORGET THAT I OWN A SNAKE?” The dust on the photo album is sign enough to me that it’s been on the shelf for quite a while. A long while. What the… I’ve neglected a pet. I’ve neglected a snake, but a pet nonetheless. I start panicking, wondering where my pet snake is. I keep flipping the pages; pictures of us buying the snake and its habitat, pictures of us getting in the car, pictures of us bringing it in the house, pictures of us setting up the habitat in the garage, etc… Pictures, pictures, pictures. Memories of a snake once loved. But then the pictures start to look ‘different’. The pictures start to look as if they were taken by someone else, someone not Lisa or myself, someone rather short or low to the ground. A chill or two ripples down my neck as I turn the page again, only to see pictures for a very, very low vantage point of Lisa and I sleeping, Lisa and I in the shower, getting ready. Shots from around corners, under couches and beds, and bottoms of doorways at the end of the hall. Then I see a picture of Lisa and I on our first day home with our new puppy Boston. Pictures take from behind window blinds of the three of us, Lisa, Boston and myself, playing in the backyard. I turn the page – there’s a post-it note with letters written as if by a right handed person using his left hand. It read, “You forgot me, but I remember you.” On the page opposite the post-it is a photo of my face, take from very, very, very close – as if by someone sitting on my chest while I slept. I drop the album. I stand up and start looking around frantically. Out of the corner of my eye I see something sticking up from just behind the couch, just behind where I usually sit, just behind where I usually rest my head when I’m at my most comfortable spot on the couch. I inspect it closely, and it’s a crudely carved, chewed rather, wood box with a chewed wood knife on a chewed wood lever sitting on a spring held in a kind of strike position by a chewed wood pin. A stabbing machine, if you will, aimed right for my head. I freak out and jump back, landing on a rather long bump in the carpeted floor. I yell and step off, only to watch the long bump underneath the carpet begin to slither, slowly, toward the closet. It’s the snake. It had to be the snake. It’s the snake that’s watching us and trying to kill me. I look to my desk and see a pair of scissors. I run over, grab it, drop to the floor alongside the slithering bump, and start stabbing. I unleash at the carpet until the bump stops moving. Stab, stab, stab, and all I keep feeling is the tips of the blades hit the wood floor beneath the carpet until one stab meets a softer, meatier end. The bump is still. I pick the scissors up and stab it down one more time, right where I did just before, and I hear something small snap. The tips of the scissors beneath the carpet, and obviously ‘in’ whatever was underneath, I open them and close them – cutting the bump in half. Using the scissors gently like tongs, I pull one end of the bump out through the hole I’ve made in the carpet. It’s the back half of the snake. I reach in again with the scissors once more, and I pull out the front half of the snake. The body of the snake is long and wide but very flat – as if it’s adapted to a life of living under things. The head is sharp, very sharp, but broad – as if it used its head to cut its way into things/places. And that’s where I wake up. I got a snake, I ignored the snake, the snake stalked me, and I killed it. Creepy as hell. |
