snakebit
i got bit by a snake today. you could say i deserved it for taking a shortcut through an overgrown field. and normally i stick to the flat bits where the hoons do their burnouts, but the council had built new bollards and the weeds had grown as high as my knee so this arvo i was jogging blind, thinking i hope i dont get bit by a snake i hope i don’t get bit by a snake and i did.
and i didnt see or hear it but i felt it and it felt very bad. i had to stop jogging because i know from various cowboy books that as soon as you get bit by a snake, you aren’t allowed to move another step or the poison will spread through your blood stream. so i paused frankie teardrop on my phone and put on some ambient lofi hip hop and laid down in the weeds and tried to chillax. but it is very hard to chill or relax when you are covered in tiny ants and being continuously rumbled by the sound of low flying planes. i wished i had bought a laser pointer.
in 2008 the western australian government placed heavy restrictions on the importation of laser pointers because a group of malicious children had blinded a pilot in the sky. as a result, one of bali’s major industries crumbled. one time at the junior school barn dance, we saw my friend’s older brother making out with a girl down at the bottom of the ampitheatre. my friend changed the cap of his laser pointer to be the silhouette of a naked woman, and we pointed the smut shaped light at the dudes groin and waved it around. neither of them saw it, they were both kissing with closed eyes. so we danced the light across their eyelids, and when she did open her eyes, she saw the rudeness printed on his face and slapped him hard.
i was getting some mileage from remembering this, but i was still stuck in a mediocre field and starting to have a bad time. then i remembered that you can cure a snakebite by sucking out the poison from the wound. i located the bite marks on my ankle and gave it my best try but i am no marilyn manson. i tried calling out hellllllp, because usually there is a tradie smoking cigarettes on the mound in the middle of the field, but it was a sunday, day of the sabbath. no bloke. i thought, well if i sit here all day the ants will pick me clean, but i didnt want to risk moving my leg up or down, because poison travels vertically. but the cowboy book didn’t say anything about poison moving horizontally, so i figured if i made my legs limp and commando crawled out of the field with just my elbows i’d get out okay. i started wriggling my way through the field.
i could barely see above the long weeds. i realised i was crawling at snake level, reptile POV. i was crawling and my elbows were aching and i was becoming increasingly wary of getting re-snakebit, so i folded my arms inside my tshirt and pulled the t-shirt over my head. now the only body parts snakes could access were my legs, which they’d already bit so they didn’t matter. i wriggled for another ten minutes and then collapsed exhausted. i have no arm or core muscles, despite a month of playing switch ring fit adventure. i was glad the weeds were so high because i didn’t want anyone to see my wretchedness.
the bite wasn’t hurting much now which made me think the poison had already spread. i started to worry. when death comes, i always planned to accept it, but the trouble was that i had work the next day and didn’t want to call in sick in case i lived, but i also didn’t want to suddenly die and shortstaff them. you have to give notice.
i looked up what to do if a snake bites you, and the first thing the people on reddit said is to identify what kind of snake. i didn’t catch a glimpse, but fortunately i found an app that could scan the bite marks and match it to a breed of culprit.
i gave it a try, but before it showed me it said i needed to sign up for a 7 day trial of the snakebite app. i said ok, reminding myself to cancel when i got home. then it said are you located in oceana? and i had to look up what that meant, and then i clicked yes. then it informed me that i needed to pay $15 for the oceana expansion because the vanilla app only would identify brittish snakes. i decided it wasn’t worth the money and uninstalled and wrote a 1 star review on the play store.
i decided to call my brother who lives nearby but he didn’t answer. my grandmother was playing scrabble. tim was rock climbing. i didn’t want to worry my parents. i kept wriggling.