🐍 ⬅🕳️➡ 🐍
One sunny afternoon,
a long green snake came upon two small holes in the riverbank. By poking his head into each hole, the snake could see that they were connected by a short, U-shaped tunnel. This sort of tunnel might belong to a member of another snake species; if it did, there might be delicious snake eggs at the back of the U, just around the bend from where the long green snake could see.The long green snake pushed his head and his first bright green coil inside without fear. If this tunnel did belong to another snake, it must be a small one (since the tunnel was so short), so the long green snake wasn’t afraid of whatever reprisal he might incur for stealing.
He pushed his thick body into the slender hole inch by inch and soon discovered there weren’t any eggs back there, nor even a place for eggs to lie; as a matter of fact the tunnel got even tighter as it turned the corner. He hissed in annoyance and tried wiggling himself backwards to get out, but due to the shape of his scales and the width of the tunnel walls, he could only make progress going forward. So he shimmied in deeper, aiming to round the bend and come out the other side.
By the time he saw sunlight again, he’d felt his next two coils follow him into the tunnel. Only the tip of his tail ought to be protruding now. As soon as he got his head free, he turned in that direction to look. It would be a strange and interesting thing, he imagined, to see his own tail wiggling and twitching in the side of the riverbank all by itself. Many a rodent or an amphibian must have seen just this sight many times in the past and gone ice cold with terror, he thought to himself smugly.
But the snake’s bright green tail wasn’t wiggling or twitching. The snake stared in bewilderment. The end of his tail stood rigid, at attention, vibrating a little as though the muscle were really working, but otherwise frozen. It looked like his tail was being Tazed. But the bright green snake didn’t feel like he was being Tazed. He shut his eyes and told his tail to move. It obeyed easily. He could feel it swish through the air; felt it thump against the heavy clay around the mouth of the tunnel. But, disturbingly, he couldn’t hear any sound or sense any vibration in the earth. His senses absolutely convinced him of two incompatible propositions, one the perfect negation of the other. He couldn’t even weigh them against each other in his mind: when he thought of one (“my tail is moving”), his proprioception, his body-sense, stood in favor, argued its case, and he believed it. When he thought of the other (“my tail is not moving”), his inner ear and his quadrate bone stood opposed and he believed them. He could not simultaneously consider either possibility and doubt it. Thinking about the question was like entering zero gravity and having to make do without the cardinal directions.
He opened his eyes again and discovered that, in reality, his tail stood frozen stiff, just like before. There was no mistaking it, either: it protruded from just the hole he’d come in by. There weren’t any other holes in this part of the riverbank anyway, and besides, he could see the place where he’d come out of the water and the little trail he’d made in the sand. The trail led directly to that bright green, rigid, vibrating thing that looked like his tail but couldn’t be.
Had he underestimated the tunnel’s length? Was it, in fact, long enough to accommodate his entire body and the body of a second bright green snake who looked just like him, who’d entered just behind him, and whose tail he was seeing now? The snake shivered. That thought wasn’t as comforting as it had seemed at first. If there were a second snake in the tunnel, it would be right behind him, its head just inches from his own, actual tail.
Thinking this, the snake wriggled and squirmed with all his might to escape the tunnel. He came free an inch at a time and watched that mystious other tail disappear at the same rate, though without any wriggling or squirming. It glided out of sight into the riverbank as if it were on rails. Soon it vanished and the snake got the rest of himself out. His tail came last, of course. He rounded on it and inspected it with narrowed eyes and flicking tongue. It seemed to be moving normally now. It obeyed him again, anyway, and it looked undamaged - unchanged, in fact.
He turned back to the hole he’d just left and wondered if a hypothetical second snake would soon push its head into the sunlight. But only silence and darkness answered from the bend.
The long green snake wasn’t known on the river for his thoughtfulness or his wisdom. As a matter of fact he had, so far, lived a life of small-mindedness and cruelty. He liked to play with his food before killing and eating it, for instance. And he’d been known to torture and kill small animals he had no intention of eating, out of boredom and to self-soothe. Local carrion animals kept tabs on him as a result.
But today, as he looked into the cool darkness at the back of the tunnel, a wily, snakey sort of wisdom came over him. He reasoned that, practically, he had absolutely no business going back inside, whether there were a second snake in there or not, curiosity be damned. Skepticism was already growing in him, anyway. Which was likelier: a fault in reality itself, or an error in his perception (or his memory)? And since this line of reasoning seemed to lead away from the tunnel, he focused his attention on it. In a rare moment of self-denial, he put a lid on his animal urge to investigate, turned in the opposite direction, and slithered into the water. He swam away and never looked back.
Afterwards, the tunnel lay quiet in the sun. Nothing emerged.