The Deadliest Snake by Grant Gillard
“The Deadliest Snake”
A Short Story
Copyright 2011 Grant Gillard
As a society, one of our greatest phobias is the fear of snakes. I don’t know why this is as few of us have any reason to encounter snakes in our urbanized, technological world. Still, given any top ten list of phobias, snakes will always rank in the top three.
As for me, I’m not afraid of snakes because I believed my grandmother. My grandmother always used to say, “That poor snake is more afraid of you than you are of it.”
I never questioned my grandmother, or her wisdom, but looking back over the years I’ve wondered how she knew the fear level in snakes. I did, however, witness her pick up snakes in the garden, barehanded, and toss them over the fence into the hay field telling the snake to go catch some mice. My grandmother was a brave woman.
But snakes can be deadly. When I contemplate the deadliest snake, my first thoughts jump to the rattlesnakes, which are, in actuality, members of the pit viper family. Where I live in Missouri, rattlesnakes are common, as are cottonmouth snakes, but ironically there are no known fatalities from snake bites in Missouri.
Yet, when I put my mind to it, thinking of deadly snakes conjures up mental images of coral snakes, death adders, pythons, cobras, and the dreaded, African black mamba. To be sure, these snakes can kill.
However, the deadliest snake will fool you. It looks harmless. It’s said to be harmless. It’s only as big as a short coil of half-inch rope. Yet I have it on record that this deadliest snake is the common grass snake, aka, the “green garden” snake.
Instantaneously, your common sense recoils, “That little thing? Deadly? C’mon, man!”
Don’t let the innocuous name fool you. I’ll let the evidence speak for itself. The presence of this snake results in death, as such was experienced by a loving couple in Sweeetwater, Texas.
John and Sandy Miller had a lot of potted plants. Actually, Sandy looked after the plants. John merely tolerated her veneration of the plants, each one she named according to extra-biblical saints and martyrs of the early church. Sandy majored in early church history at Baylor University and fully engaged her education in her hobby, even though she was a certified nursing assistant at the Lawnview Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.
A cold spell rolled out of the Rocky Mountains into Sweetwater causing great anxiety for Sandy. The weatherman called for a potential freeze endangering her foliaged friends on the outdoor patio. She coaxed John into helping her bring the potted plants into the sun room off the south side of the house. John made two trips into the sun room before he excused himself to the shower. “Big day, tomorrow, don’t ya know,” he said in his Midwest accent as he left the remaining plants to Sandy’s care.
Sandy brought in the last of the plants. The cold air penetrated her light jacket. Closing the sliding door to the sun room, she felt her plants were secure. The house was secure. She felt secure. However, unbeknownst to Sandy, curled up at the base of her Lucky Bamboo, the plant she bought earlier that summer from the House of Jade Chinese Buffet and Eatery, was the indistinguishable green garden snake, somewhat paralyzed from the chilling evening temperatures.
Once inside the house, the snake warmed up and slithered from the sun room into the living room where it quickly sought refuge under the couch. Sandy was coming from the kitchen with a bowl of nacho chips when she saw the snake slip under the couch. Though Sandy was still at least ten feet away, she let out a blood curdling scream that shook the windows.
John bolted from the shower, dripping wet from head to toe in the full glory of his nakedness.
Sandy pointed to the couch and stammered, “S-s-s-s-s-snake!”
John dropped to the floor on his hands and knees to look for the snake. About this time, Dusty, the family dog came into the room. Curious as to what all the ruckus was about, she “cold-nosed” John right in the crack of his naked hind end. He thought the snake had bitten him, and John immediately fainted, dead away. Sandy presumed he had suffered a heart attack, so she ran back into the kitchen and called an ambulance.
The attendants arrived, rushed in and rolled John’s wet and slippery, naked body on the stretcher. As they lifted the stretcher to carry him out the front door, the snake popped out from under the couch, heading back for the sun room. One of the ambulance attendants saw the snake, freaked out and dropped his end of the stretcher. The commotion scared the snake and it retreated back under the couch. But in the attendant’s panic, John’s wet body slid off the stretcher, twisting his leg and fracturing his knee cap on the floor. Once the attendant regained his composure, he got John’s unconscious back on the stretcher. The two attendants loaded him on the ambulance and headed to the hospital.
With the snake still under the couch, Sandy phoned a neighbor, explained the circumstances and requested help to get the snake out of the house. He came right over. Armed with a rolled up newspaper, he began poking under the couch. Unable to provoke the snake to come out, he declared the snake had left and Sandy plopped her emotionally-drained body on to the couch.
But in relaxing, Sandy allowed her hand to dangle between the cushions where she felt the snake wriggling to escape. Sandy screamed, fainted and slid off the couch to the floor. The snake burrowed itself into the back of the seat cushions.
The neighbor, seeing Sandy had fainted, tried to revive her using CPR. The neighbor’s wife happened to come over to see what was taking her husband so long. Seeing her husband’s mouth on Sandy’s mouth and how his hands were rummaging all over Sandy’s breasts, the wife grabbed a vase of flowers from the nearby table and slammed it into her husband’s head. The blow knocked him out, cut his scalp so bad it would need stitches, and he collapsed upon Sandy. His wife fell into a chair and began wailing; confessing how her mother was right and they should have gone to counseling years ago.
Wiping away her tears, she called the ambulance. The authorities were immediately dispatched as the descriptive phone call to 911, and the distraught emotions she struggled through to make the call, seemed to warrant urgent medical care. The noise of the siren woke Sandy from her dead faint and seeing her neighbor passed out on top of her, she assumed the snake had bitten him. Rolling him off of her, she ran to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of whiskey, something she thought she remembered from her days with the Girl Scouts and proper first aid techniques. Tripping on the shards of the broken vase, she spilled the whiskey all over the carpet.
The ambulance arrived with a policeman right behind. The policeman saw the unconscious neighbor, the shards of the vase, and the two disheveled women. Smelling the whiskey, he quickly concluded it was a drunken, domestic dispute surrounding an affair. As he handcuffed the two women, and as they kept explaining about the little green snake, the snake emerged from the couch cushions and dropped to the floor, slithering toward the direction of the sun room and the shelter of the potted plants.
The policeman drew his service revolver and fired two rounds at the snake. He missed the snake, but one of the bullets ricocheted into the leg of the end table next to the couch. The table fell over, and the bulb in the lamp shattered and ignited the spilt whiskey. The couch and the drapes began to burn.
The other policeman tried vainly to beat out the flames with his jacket, but became light-headed from the smoke. As he staggered across the living room to open the window, he instead fell out the living room window, onto Dusty who had sought refuge from the chaos by laying in the flower bed. Dusty was so startled that she ran out into the street where an on-coming car swerved to miss her and the car careened into the parked police car, setting it on fire.
The neighbors from across the street saw the smoke and called the fire
Time passed. John was discharged from the hospital. The insurance company paid to have the house rebuilt. The city reconnected all the downed wires. The police car was replaced. The helpful neighbors found a caring counselor in their pastor and are still married today. The local chapter of master gardeners replaced all of Sandy’s potted plants, which, this time, she individually named after a host of Disney characters believing this would improve her success rate.
About a year later, John and Sandy were watching the evening news on the television when the meteorologist warned of a pending cold snap with unseasonal cold temperatures later that evening. John turned to Sandy and lovingly suggested they carry the potted plants in to the sun room.
Sandy snapped and shot John dead, proving that little, green garden snakes are the deadliest snake known to humanity and should be rightly feared.
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