It seems as if I'm celebrating my birthday on the 4th, the 5th, AND the 10th this year (apparently I was born on three days...) ; on a normal year, 'Star's Birthday' would mean nice food and a cake and that crap, but this year means my sister wants to be an ogre and everyone wants to whine at me. Birthday Cake was done yesterday, That Crap I'm getting today, and Nice Food I have to wait until Saturday for. Plus I have work today. So far, being 19 is anything but good.
But seeing as it IS my birthday, I'm going to tell a story. It's a story my sister told me last week, (the same sister whining and bitching at me, lets codename her 'Azure') and as she told me and my other sister (let's codename her 'Aime'), all of us were horrified, damn near-traumatised. The story has spread so fast that even the most unlikely people know about it. So here's the story. Happy Birthday to me.
This is the story of something that happened to my sister's colleague's girlfriend's colleague's friend. So when she heard it, it was the story of her colleague's girlfriend's colleague's friend. In brief, it's a true story, passed from person to person, that really, happened.
So this woman, she loves snakes.
She LOVES snakes. She owns a pet python that she's had since it was a baby, and because she adored it so much, she let it roam out of its cage around her flat, like any other normal house pet. She fed it dead mice, as you do with snakes, and it grew to adulthood. One day, it stopped eating the mice. She thought this was odd as it hadn't done that before, and thought something like, 'Okay, maybe I should ring the vet about that...'
Then, one morning, she woke up to find herself looking at the snake.
Its face was right beside hers when she woke, and it was lying in a perfectly straight line beside her in bed. Now remember - as she loves snakes, and she lets it go wherever in her house, even in and on her bed - so this wasn't very shocking to her. But it was very strange to find it lying like dead straight, as everybody knows snakes never lie in a straight line, they are always curved. She thought 'Oh, that's really odd...'
So she got dressed and headed to work, but on the way she called the vet and explained what her snake had been doing. After listening carefully to her story, the vet eventually said,
"... are you in the house?"
She told them she wasn't.
The vet then said, "......... do not got back in that flat."
The snake had been lying in a straight line, the vet explained, because it had been measuring her with its body, to see whether SHE WOULD FIT INSIDE IT. And it had stopped eating the dead mice, because it had been starving itself enough to eat her.
.... I'm sorry, but that shit gets me every single time.
The most ironic thing, was that the python actually was longer than the length of her body, as it had grown a lot bigger than it would've done if left inside its cage - so at some point the mice wasn't sustaining it any more, and the next biggest mammal to the mice was the woman herself. And here's the thing too - as she was clearly comfortable with her pet, she most likely would have allowed it to climb her shoulders and would've been unprepared if it had strangled her with its body - a snake's body is one long muscle, so once it's contracted around the neck, there's no fighting it. It gets even more horrific. When snakes eat large mammals, they can last for months and months on end. If he had managed to consume her, it would've been able to survive in that flat for, what, a year?
... the only way me and my sisters can get over something as unbelievable as that is to joke it off; every time Azure's cat growls at any of us, I say mischievously, "Be careful, you might wake up to find him lying in a straight line..."
But obviously, its not funny. It's very, very traumatic. Especially for a woman who loves snakes.
I'm going to quote something my sister Aime said; "Well she's still alive, so the story doesn't end there. What happened to her?" Azure didn't know. All she knew was that the woman later returned to the flat with someone or maybe a few people - and the snake was put down. But what gets me the most, out of this entire story - and I know it isn't 'planning' really because its simply instinct for a reptilian creature to behave in this way, especially a God damn python - is how it seemed like the snake planned so meticulously to kill her.
Star xx
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