Today I woke to find a snake coiled at the bottom of my bedside water glass. It was past 10 and the only thing that propelled me awake was the promise of fresh, Monday content on the Internet. My mouth was dry, my head wrapped in a towel of sleepy anxiety, so I did not notice the beast from my hunched position in my bed. Lifting the glass up to my mouth I finally saw the grey serpent at the bottom, wedged in the lower third. The water it displaced was sullied a sort of yellow and smelled. Disgusted, I simply put the glass back down on my nightstand. The snake writhed.

I went about my mid-day routine, forgetting the snake as I brushed my teeth and made my bed. Once or twice I heard the snake spasm at the bottom of the glass, but ultimately paid it little attention. As I ate my microwave lunch at my desk, I looked at the glass just in time to see it sputtered and die.

Over the course of the afternoon, the snake decomposed – the flakes of dead skin and muscle tearing and rising to the surface. By evening my room reeked of wet, fallen leaves and I decided to finally throw the snake out. The sun down, I took the glass into the kitchen and dumped the white, dead snake into the sink and went back into my room.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.