We Had A Scare

Last summer, I was taking a wonderful nap. It was August and the best thing to do when the summer heat is beating down is to find a nice cool spot to hibernate.

You know that moment when you’re kind of asleep, but you can hear everything around you? I was at that point and trying to decide if I wanted to wake up or not when I heard this blood curdling scream. Over and over again. I recognized it as my mom’s scream and before I was fully awake, I was out of bed and running to find out what was wrong.

She sounded like she was being murdered. As Jillian pointed out yesterday, a writer’s mind can sometimes be a terrible thing. Everything happened so fast, I’m not even sure what I imagined. Zombies, serial killers, ghosts. Or maybe she’d sliced her arm off somehow. I wasn’t really prepared for what had her screaming like that.

I stormed into the living room and saw her standing in the kitchen, her eyes wide, her hand over her heart and her mouth open as she screamed and screamed again.

Me: Oh my god, what’s wrong?
Her: S-s-snake!

Y’all, I’m not graceful, or athletic and I don’t pretend to be, but the minute she said “snake”, I somehow managed to jump two feet up and four feet to the left, landing on the sofa. Jackie Chan couldn’t have managed that feat any better.

I started looking all over the living room for this massive creepy crawler.

Me: Where?
Her: Right there!

Luckily, she pointed at the floor directly in front of her which means I could get off of the sofa to see where this monster was. It was maybe two feet away from her and my heart sort of dropped. I ran to my room and grabbed my phone to call my brother, leaving Mom in the kitchen with the thing.

He lives near us, so he was at our house with his steel-toe shoes and a shovel within minutes. The snake had slithered beneath one of the cabinets, a spot way too small for the shovel. He had to threaten my mother with the snake (he told her he was going to throw it on her if she didn’t stop screaming and get away) before she would go to her room and calm down.

He needed to find something smaller than the shovel to get the little monster and told me to watch it. This entailed me stretching out on the kitchen floor with a flashlight to stare in horror at the snake as it slithered back and forth beneath the cabinet. *shudders*

In the end, my brother killed the snake, but the fear still remains. For months my mom wouldn’t sleep without all the lights on because she just knew another snake would get into the house with the sole purpose of finding and biting her. What probably makes this entire story worse is that at first she thought my nephew had thrown a rubber snake on the floor to scare her. At twenty-three years old, he finds pleasure in life by leaping out at Mom and things like that so I can understand why she would have thought it was a prank.

I think this is going to be one of the scariest moments I’ve ever had. I can still hear her screams. I’m only surprised the neighbors didn’t call the police.