Python Feeding

Watched, no, served another python feeding today. Danzig eats two medium-sized mice, once a week. We buy them at the snake market, transport them home in a paper bag, or sometimes a clear plastic tupperware box like a TV dinner. They sit in this sombre paper bag until nighttime, when Danzig wakes up. They shit a lot. The scratch of their tiny mouse claws on the hollow paper bag makes them sound bigger than they really are. Once, a mouse died in the bag from unknown causes -- maybe an assault by one mouse brother upon another? Maybe the bag jostled too violently, and the miniscule skull cracked saltine-like? Danzig ate him anyway, cold and dead.

My brother has a policy that mice should be served one by one, so no one mouse must witness the carnage and endure the stress of such a sight alone. As I'm in charge at the moment, I let the first mouse out of the bag onto some newspaper, python ready to strike. But two mice slipped out. The first, a long, light grey mouse was instantly taken; the python whipped his long, brown-spotted body around him in a tight knot. The mouse's two back legs warped awkwardly, then pattered the floor in panic, tail flinging itself across the newsprint.

The smaller mouse, a chocolate colored nugget with a clean white band across his back, had been eagerly sniffing his new environment. But he stopped as if struck when the python nabbed his partner - the predator's bloodthirst electric across the dead space. The chocolate mouse curled into a tiny ball, paralyzed, perhaps begging in his soul for forgiveness of all the bread crumbs he stole, the fuzzies he trampled, the sawdust he soiled. Only inches away, the deadly coil was unraveling.

The python had begun to swallow his prey. Head first, the warm corpse slid through his elastic jaw, down a narrow throat and propelled southward with each curl of the python's contorting body. The little chocolate mouse was now at ease -- the killing had ended and the troubling thoughts vanished like peanut butter at feeding time. His downy nostrils poked the newsprint, eyes like garnets strangely stationary on either side of his snout. He approached the snake as if greeting a neighbor. We flinched. But he scuttled away again, further this time. Danzig was busy stretching out his jaw, demonstated the curved fangs nestled in his baby-pink gums - it seemed as if he had finished for the night.

A new tension in his neck heralded otherwise. One furry, warm-blooded creature remained and he could sense each delicious beat of its precious little heart. The chocolate mouse examined an article on Koizumi. Moved on to obituaries.

The python caught him by the soft skin of his left thigh, releasing a shriek of outrage from the tiny body. He coiled squarely around the mouse's midsection. At first, there was only silence. The mouse perhaps, did not understand why he had such trouble breathing. His oblong mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. His eyes glared at the lightbulb miles above him. For a moment, there was no movement from either party. The mouse, suddenly comprehending that death itself was upon him, sputtered for air, lungs wrenching inside his chest. The pain of suffocation finally ripped through his body causing his tail to straighten into one long obstinate blade before limply giving way, the crush of death escaping into the still air.

Danzig just held him for a while. Then, sure that death had again worked, he unclenched his jaws to show that no blood had spilled -- the mouse's underbelly was rumpled and wet with saliva but otherwise unmarred. The python lifted his head and glanced around him, disoriented. He tried to get at his prey head first, but had trouble finding its head -- his own body obstructed the view. He seemed confused. His triangular face poked, knocked, shoved at his own coiled length until finally flipping over itself, upon which he found his mark, and swallowed it whole. When most of the corpse had disappeared, the python reared as if standing, elongated his neck and sucked down the last two translucent pink feet, claws and all. The mouse's long tail being the last to go, it reached from the python's lips like a tongue - thick and muted - before finally slipping down - one long, furry spaghetti choking in his throat.