Nature (a story)

You may want to read this: on winter nights, snakes come into your home and seek warm places to hide. They enter through open doors, glide through pipes, crawl through holes in your screen doors and windows and unseen corners where wasps nest. Small, black snakes; a particular species good at hiding and with an instinct to enter houses. They’re pencil-thin and have a strange awareness of their surroundings. You could be looking at a clothes hamper or a mess of cables behind your desk and you’d never realize that snakes were there, odorless and still. They seem to understand what places you’ll never look, and where they will blend in. Consider a regular garbage bag: a pack of four-inch snakes will be buried in the shapeless mass of paper, food, and plastic, and you will never know. Or they may hide in the pantry, behind spices and tins of flour you reach for only on occasion. The snakes hear you coming, too, and they shift along the walls, under bags, and behind boxes. It’s of no use to clean out the shelves—the snakes are gone already by the time you’ve taken out the first few cans. They’re always moving when you’re moving. But when they know they’ve found a safe hiding spot, they can be motionless for months. Most of the time they stay that way all through the winter, except when even your house get too cold, and they can no longer feed unnoticed on scraps and bits of unpackaged food. Then they rest, and hope that you will cook dinner in your kitchen one night. The snakes slide out of your bathroom, behind the book case, out of your clothes, and they wait for their chance to hide in the warm food you’re making. Of course, you don’t always watch your cooking without a break; and even if you did, the snakes would somehow find their way into simmering pots of thick soup and casseroles in the oven. They do this because they are desperate, and it kills them. The snakes can’t resist the bubbling blanket of food that warms them after a long, cold famine. The heat breaks down their brittle bodies into thin mush and flakes like dandruff. They eat and they cook themselves, and they become food. You may have eaten hundreds of snakes unknowingly—tasteless black strips of animals who drowned and burned themselves for comfort. And you can never chase them all out before they do this.