Sinister Serpents & Other Creepy Crawlies
Saturday, June 4, 2005
Collette had spent the night at the house, Friday, after Francis and Linnea pleaded with her a good while to do so. And so she borrowed a pair of Carrie’s pajamas and finished out Nancy Drew’s: The Mystery of the Ivory Charm with the both of them, after a viewing of “Finding Neverland” over cheese sticks. As Mom put the little ones down, Rose and Collette waited for her to begin the Walton’s marathon. (Carrie was still at work, and came home by two that next morning.)
“My butt-bone hurts,” Rose squawked, out of the blue.
“Oooooooh!” Mom exclaimed, walking back into the living room. “We don’t use that word, Rose.”
Everyone knew that the b-word was prohibited in the Snicketts’ house… from Mom’s point of view, anyway.
“But it is a butt-bone,” Rose insisted, laughing at another gasp from Mom. “I managed to fall on the only rock in that swamp…”
“Rose,” Collette interrupted, “didn’t this happen over a year ago?”
“Yeah… but it still hurts. That was the day I started baby-sitting for the Nickels. That was the day the world ended…”
And, indeed, how many times had they heard about how Goofy, the oldest Nickels boy, had stuck his head under the garage door?
Meanwhile, they were discussing the snake Ivy had discovered in the church office.
“It was a water moccasin,” Rose decided. “I would know. Remember when I saved your’s and OLeif’s and Carrie’s and Kitts’ lifes?”
“Uhhhhh…”
“Remember?” Mom cut in. “It was the last time we watched the fireworks from that fancy-doodle place at the millionaire subdivision.”
“And I found the baby water moccasin under the blanket that Kitts and Carrie were sitting on? I kept telling everyone that there was a water moccasin there. And everyone kept saying, ‘Yeah, right’, and then I pulled up the corner of the blanket, and Carrie and Kitts were like, ‘Waaaaaaa!’“
Collette didn’t exactly see how Rose had saved her and OLeif’s lives as well, but nevertheless, she had been right about the snake.
“And then I smashed it with my bug barn.”
Collette laughed hard. She could just remember the goggle-eyed-glasses Rose with her shrimpy arms and legs, barefoot, and stringy from head to foot, always swinging her bug barn and butterfly net, catching bees with her bare hands.
And earlier, there was another snake story. OLeif had told about one time a long while back, when he and Kitts were walking in the backyard in Arkansas, and Kitts had stepped on a copperhead, sunbathing.
“So I said, ‘Run!’” OLeif was saying, “and we ran inside and locked the door. And Mom comes in and says, ‘Oh, are you waiting for him to knock?’”
Rose had also stepped on a snake that day and squashed it flat.
“Well, I was wearing big boots,” she said. “And it was all gross and squished up. And it was on the mud.”
She wrinkled her nose.
As they were discussing such things, Collette saw a fast scurrying out of the corner of her eye. Just in time, she managed to detect a creepy-crawl scuttling toward Rose on the carpet. She jumped up from the couch.
“Rose, I would get off the rug right now if I were you,” she warned. “It’s a brown rec.”
Rose hurriedly removed herself as Collette picked up a heavy binder and threw it at the spider.
“Quick,” Rose instructed. “Smash it.”
Rose did a Mexican hat dance around the binder, managing to smash the binder and the spider quite well.
“I’m just going to put on a bio-hazard suit and go to bed,” Rose squirmed.
Meanwhile, Aunt Petunia had received the job. Collette was overjoyed – what an awesome piece of news. She just knew that Aunt Petunia would stay there always; she was so happy about it. And within eighteen months, she would begin her travels across the world to the Orient, China – a land of mystery and ancient arts.
Currently, Collette gathered materials and typed up all of her coursework for the new tutoring sessions beginning Monday. The busy days were coming quickly, and she needed all day Saturday to prepare for them.
Meanwhile, the guys were preparing to hear the last lecture of the men’s retreat at the old monastery. OLeif would then attend two parties and come home in time to crash before Sunday. Poor boy, Collette thought, always running to get everything done. The day was already very warm too, and he was out in it with no air conditioning.
Collette found the end of the day coming already and set about to finishing what she could, with settling OLeif’s schooling. She had stumbled across the Academy of Art University in California, offering a Masters in Photography. OLeif read the material and decided it was what he wanted. It was frightfully expensive but it would give him what he was looking for – he even checked out the photographers working on National Geographic. Collette decided to look over it the coming week.