The Python

A scream from the kitchen. I ran from the family room, down the hall, and into the kitchen - after all, my wife seldom screams from the kitchen. Yes, there was the time a handle broke on a saucepan and a quart or two of marinara sauce splattered on the floor, the appliances, and the cabinets. I knew what to do then, I knew to calmly ask her to leave the room and let me clean up. But this scream, what did it portend? What would I find? A snake? A rodent? A wood roach crawling out of a coffee mug?

Just minutes before the scream she told me she was going to try some of the persimmons pudding friends had made and given us.

When I entered the kitchen Vickie was standing by sink looking down, “It’s still coming, it’s moving, it’s growing, it’s coming for us, it’s coming for us all.” (Well, maybe those weren’t her exact words, but they are pretty close, and they are perfect in sentiment).

On the cabinets, on the countertop, and on my wife were globs of an orange substance. Looking down into the sink I saw that it was indeed still coming - for foaming out of the jar was an orange python, and it kept coming and coming, its slanted eyes looking at us as if communicating, “I am coming for you, I am coming for all of you. I will start with you and then I’ll get your neighbors.”

I ran into the washer - dryer room, grabbed a plastic bag, ran back to the sink, bravely picked the python up and put it in the bag, ran outside to the deck and down, over to the woods and heaved the python into the woods. “There,” I thought, “let it find its way to the Everglades and then let a bounty hunter get it.”

The persimmons pudding had been given to us in a jar - thankfully a plastic jar. When Vickie started to turn the lid the lid blew off and the python came out, and kept coming and coming. Suppose it had been a glass jar? It might have exploded either in the refrigerator or on the countertop. Within a few days fermentation had produced a python, worthy of Stephen King, poised to devour the world...or at least our neighborhood

The next morning I called Animal Control and reported a python. When the officer arrived I wearily led him into the woods in the direction I had thrown the bag. When we came upon the gooey substance it covered the bag and extended at least four feet from the jar within the bag - it had tried to escape down to the creek, no doubt to take over our waterways and devour our domestic aquatic life.

The officer looked at me as if I were nuts and said, “This doesn’t look like a python to me.”

To which I replied, “Well last night it was a python. If that isn’t apparent to you I wonder what kind of training you’ve had in exotic reptiles. All I know is that when I threw it into the woods that its last words were, ‘I’m melting, I’m melting.’ ”