Dear Snake in my Backyard

Moulted snake skin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dear snake in my backyard,

Hello there. It’s a bit awkward writing this to you since I have never seen you in person. I don’t actually know that you exist. I mean, I KNOW you exist, but there is no empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis.

The reason I am so certain you exist, though, is, I feel, quite sound. See, the other day when you were slithering your slimy snake body through my backyard, you seemed to have forgotten to take something with you.

That would be your skin.

You must have been in a big hurry to leave something that important behind. I myself have never made such a terrible mistake. I am very good at remembering my skin everywhere I go. It’s one of the things I pride myself on the most.

For awhile after I saw your skin lying there, I was concerned. What if you were missing it? What if, somewhere, there was a snake slithering about naked, all of its snake friends laughing at its exposed snake privates? I found myself feeling very bad for you.

Then, my sympathy grew into annoyance. Days went by and your skin continued to sit in my grass. This wasn’t the case of a misplaced snakeskin. This was a snake carelessly tossing its skin away with no regard to those around it.

Its not that this makes my backyard look bad. Currently my patio is covered in dirt clods and dog poop. My flower beds are constantly filled with the remnants of gardening experiments gone wrong.

It is more of the principle of the matter. I don’t crawl over to your snake home, strip down, leave the clothes next to your hole, and head home. That is because I have a little thing called “respect.” Look it up, snake.

Now every time my dog goes outside, she stares at the skin, confused. Then she poops on the patio. That’s not your fault. She does that all the time. The distress you have caused her, though, is your fault.

There are much better things you can do with your skin. I know for a fact that people pay top dollar for snake skin boots. Maybe you could take your skin and create footwear. Pretty soon you would be driving a brand new Ferrari, ignoring the fact that it is a very impractical vehicle for you to be driving. It would be hard to work the pedals without feet, but you would make it work.

I would like to kindly request that, from now on, you dispose of your body parts somewhere else. If you do not, I will have no choice but to hunt you down.

Unless you’re poisonous. Then you can pretty much do whatever you want.

 

Love,

Nathan

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