Don't Look at These Dead Snakes, Part 2

The futon is to the left of the non-working stone fireplace and last night lolling around reading about celebrated idea-people and profound thinkers I happened to peripherally see that the brass fireplace frame had been re-molded with swirls and stuff, like Baroque or Louis XIV, and for a nanosecond wondered who installed that and when, and then I see they are dead snakes.

I already told you I taped the fireplace edges so snakes bred in the hearth would stay there, but tore the tape off in April yet some adhesive invisibly remained, and it trapped these four small Prairie Ringneck snakes, who died of dehydration. The top one has its head lifted. Death be not proud.

You'd think after one had been trapped there the others would avoid the area, but they think differently.

After I got over the shock I wondered what to do and am still wondering. In the Divine Cabin 16 years I have never seen the like. I don't mind live snakes, but the idea of peeling off dead ones (how stuck are they?) and tossing them (where?) makes me feel unwell. And then the adhesive must be scrubbed off.

But I can't just leave them there!

(The first thing I'd thought was that they were art!)

Ma'am, Change Your Air Filter?

The car's fan blew out stenchy air for a while, but then the smell subsided and I went my merry way, thinking I could get the car's oil changed and the car vacuumed out and the state inspection/emissions test done all at once if I went to the Valvoline oil-change place. Their records said I hadn't visited since 2009, and this is because they charge a lot; in my view they overcharge, but you know how it is, you have to do all this, so, like a colonoscopy, you just get it over with, and before long, as I sat in the black linoleum waiting room on a black plastic-upholstered chair reading Missouri Conservationist, comes one of the meticulously clean and barbered well-pressed young men in his Valvoline shirt carrying my cabin air filter. "Miss, this is what we found," he said, and I knew he wasn't lying because about every two years a mechanic (whose face turns green as he does it) pulls an enormous stinky mouse nest complete with cadavers out of the exact same place, and this one at the Valvoline had a dead snake in it, too. He offered to change my air filter at a cost of $39.99. What could I do? Tell him to put it back in there? Most expensive oil change ever at $117. And when I got back in the car I said what, you didn't vacuum it? See, the cabin air filter is accessed behind the glove box, and it's changed by pulling it inward into the car, and rat's nest fuzzy shreds had sifted all over the passenger side. He said Valvoline hasn't vacuumed out cars for nine or ten years.

I was desperate because the interior was grubby, I'd already been to two car-vacuum cylinders, fed beaucoup quarters into both of them and neither worked, so I went home and risked my life taking my domestic vacuum cleaner outdoors onto the damp concrete and grass (never do that!) and vacuumed it out myself with the wand, because I had a hot date.