Snake in a Supermarket
Of course, it’s on video, today’s bauble from Buzzfeed. How it insists, popping up on our phones and devices and even the news, and it’s a big one too, a constrictor, its green head snaking its way out of a stack of spice cans on a top shelf, smiling at us, the top three or four feet of it swooping around in every direction like one of those inflatable flapping ten-foot stand-up SALE signs at car dealerships, like a giant live caduceus, like ET’S lost love child drunk-dialing home to find out if it’s missed. And at first it’s a good bet that it’s in a Publix or Wawa in Kissimmee, where everyone owns a python and then doesn’t know what to do with it, ends up tossing it from their jeeps over a bridge into the Everglades, or flushing it down the sewer where it begins popping up in everyone’s showers and toilets, but it’s actually in Sydney, Australia, its head sweeping back and forth till it comes within eight inches of a woman coming down the aisle, who, believe it or not, turns out to be a trained snake handler who starts right in taking care of business, luring it down, removing it, releasing it back to the wild, and returning, calmly, divine as Medusa, to finish her shopping, looking for the thing on her list that she missed. The mind recoils. The world grows even smaller, turns to precipice, our breath held tighter over some enormous abyss, as if it’s anaphylaxis, and we’re choking a little, mildly hysterical, as if we’ve suddenly been kissed, the many-lidded snake’s head lifting, hissing, weaving through the mist saying, “This is nothing. I’ve got this. I’ve been here since Genesis. Guess what’s coming next. See that? See this? This!”