Storymakers: The Snake

Storymakers: The Snake

By Kamilah
Sixth Grade
Odle Middle School
Bellevue, Wa

The snake reared up to strike the man's leg and it struck with its long ivory-colored poison-filled fangs. The man stumbled in fear and fell, a big mistake, thought the snake. The man was staring at him in terror, just as all of the snake's pray did, man was his pray. The snakes opened his jaws and...tap, tap, tap...and..."Hay you stupid snake wake up!" yelled the boy taping on the glass wall of the snake exhibit. The small boa hissed his annoyance.

Ever since entering this box, as he called it, people came and woke all his good dreams. They, he meant the men, had taken away the cobra in the box beside his, just because he had spit poison at some kids, who had not just tapped the glass but rapped it so hard it almost broke. When the next day they brought him back he did not have lovely long fangs, but none at all, and when he tried to spit poison nothing came out. They wore tan hats, the little boa thought they must have hearts that color. They were heartless, evil and vile, they took snakes from the pray filled home lands, snakes could go anywhere they pleased.

Of course for him the home land were terrible for him, he was a freak, all the snakes there told him so, his skin, though it had the right pattern it was gray all the snakes, there had varying shades of green, except him. Then there was his size, snakes were long and had long ivory-colored fang, he was very small and his fangs were black as night but they were not rotting. All the snakes called him a freak, except the brother who had hatched five seconds before him, he called him odd but not a freak. The small boa missed his brother and the home lands and even those who hated him. He missed slithering thought all over his brother's territory, thought the long tall grass hunting mice.

Then he remembered the day the men came, not very gracefully through the territory shooting at snakes with little sharp things, a little like bird feathers, he stopped lifted his head to bite one the man stumbled, and fell. The little let his guard down in his pride. A sharp thing had hit his side, he tuned in anger. And two men dropped him in a box smaller then the one he was in now, and then he blacked out. He remembered lifting his head groggily and slithering forward and...bump..."It is glass little one, you can't see it," hissed an old snake in one corner of the box.

He was very large old and, could it be true, a ugly shade of gray. The little boa had, at first had no respect for the older snake, he was old and ugly. Just like me, thought the small snake. But as the days passed the, snake told him things that even make a snake's skin crawl, de-fanging, de-poison and, worst of all pre-dead pray. The ones who did all these horrors and more, were the men.

The men took the fangs of a snake, and the poison, killed the mice before they ripened. The old snake called them zookeepers, men who put animals in boxes for the other men to see. The old boa also thought there was no escape. The small snake thought of the home lands, and all he had loved and hated, the tall grass, the trees you could slither up, fresh rip mice to catch, his brother, and even the snakes that had been cruel to him. As he thought of all this the little boa's heart broke into little bits and he died. A young woman opened the cage and not knowing that the snake was dead, picked him up and took him to the home lands.

Storymakers: A Creative Challenge for Young Writers, is a program inviting students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades living in Washington State and British Columbia, Canada, to submit their own original creative writing pieces.