My Brother Stole My Title.

So it was midnight, and I was walking to the library (Just how many stories, you ask, might I begin with “It was midnight, and I was walking to the library? I have, I reply, as a noted American patriot/Led Zeppelin bassist once mentioned, only yet begun to fight) and there, on the sidewalk, was this thing which people do not typically see on your average sidewalk: it was a snake, slender and black, still in a manner that instinctively told me that it was dead. I’m a big believer in instinctive judgment, and from everything that I know about snakes would expect one to move with a 155 lb. animal bearing down on it, but also new to the region and devoid of any knowledge about the potential venomousness of local serpents. (I knew I meant to ask for Venomous Snakes of North Carolina for my birthday. Why didn’t you remind me?) So I decided to locate a stick to make sure that the little fellow was in fact deceased and hence unbothered by my continued intrusions into his private affairs. I scrounged around until I found a fallen branch near the gully from one of the many pines planted around the campus. I prodded the snake a few times, able to tell almost immediately from the weight and structure that this was a real animal and not a rubber toy left as a joke, and quite dead, and then dragged it until we were underneath the streetlight and I could get better look at it.

He (or she, as I believe one needs to be a certified herpetologist to tell the difference) was about 24-28 inches long, and all black except for a little patch of white underneath the jaw. There were only a few insects around the spot that I found it, and no smell of decomposition, so I gathered that it couldn’t have died more than a few hours earlier. Closer examination revealed that what I had initially assumed to be sidewalk dirt clinging to the middle of the animal’s body was in fact some kind of innards poking through the side. It could have been defecation, as I don’t know where a snake’s backside is located, but looked to me more like intestine that had come through the skin. Likely answer equals: my reptile friend was trying to cross the street (which people drive down at like 50, so that I, much quicker than the snake, have problems crossing it myself) and fell afoul of an unwary motorist, who almost certainly had no clue what he’d done, and the sidewalk was as far as it got afterward before giving up the ghost. Poor little thing, I thought.

I kept on looking, as far as the dim yellow light of the streetlamp would allow me to see: scales covered the entire body except the tiny head, which was glassy and smooth, and I wondered why and how that worked. After getting over my initial “Mom told me not to touch dead things” aversion (hey, I can pick up a chicken breast, right?), I ran my finger a few times across the snake’s skin, warm as the surrounding air, rough as an ancient creature, protective enough to deal with things not as crudely-but-powerfully engineered as automobiles.

I left the snake there, that it might satisfy someone else’s curiosity, or at least make some undergrad girl shriek, the thought of which lent me a childish chuckle. It didn’t even seem appropriate to give it some kind of symbolic burial by throwing it into the drainage ditch, as snakes certainly don’t do that sort of thing for one another. It was still there when I returned from the library at three A.M., and again at seven A.M. when I was on my way in again. But by sunrise a group of various and competing insects had pitched camp at the feast and were busily enjoined in nature’s cleanup work. Among them were a group of tiny snails, perhaps a quarter the size of one’s thumbnail, attached and engorged on the snake’s outer body. I’d never seen this kind of animal before, and was happy for them and their good luck in wandering upon such an abundant caloric source. And then I giggled inwardly, at my morbid curiosity and the scene lain out before me. Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, I thought: that’s what little boys are made of.