Jul 3, 2017 3 min read

I have had another backyard adventure with my lawnmower.

Warning: This tale is not for anyone with the slightest case of ophidiophobia.

I was pushing my nearly new lawnmower up a narrow strip of land that separates the backyard from the front yard. That’s when it happened. I unknowingly drove the mower over a snake. On my trip back, to empty the contents of the grass bag, I noticed the headless snake writhing around in my path.

I couldn’t figure out how to get past the snake without coming very close to it. Logically, I knew a headless snake couldn’t hurt me, but it was still slithering around, bleeding on my freshly cut grass.

It was disgusting. Blood was coming out of its neck. It’s a snake … it’s almost all neck. Because of that, I don’t know how much snake I chopped off. Did I just sever it from its face, or was there half a snake out there somewhere slithering around?

I found a big stick to fling the snake out of my path. I scooped it up on the end of the stick. “Headless” coiled around the stick. I remember thinking, “Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew.”

I went to jettison the snake from the stick, but it clung to the stick. I had a stuck snake stick.

Finally, I put the stick and the attached snake down on a concrete wall that divides the backyard from the front. The snake slithered off the stick and moved toward me. I said, out loud, “I didn’t chop your head off on purpose!” It wasn’t listening; no head, no ears. It probably didn’t even know it was moving toward me, because it didn’t have eyes, either. It sure felt like Headless was gunning for me.

I was thinking, “That’s a lot of movement for a serpent without a head.”

Then, I thought, “Where is the head?”

How far can a head get from a body? Can a person be bitten by a snake head? I was pretty sure Headless was harmless, but I couldn’t identify the species because, once again, he had no freaking head!

With the snake out of my path, I continued through the backyard to empty the grass bag. That’s when it hit me. Was the head in the bag?

I emptied the bag, cautiously, carefully. It’s one thing to be afraid of snakes, but it’s entirely a new experience being terrified of a bloody, disembodied snake head hell-bent on revenge.

I didn’t see the head when I emptied the bag, but I was convinced the snake head was in the freshly shorn pile of grass. I didn’t go riffling around in the pile to find out for sure, but there was no other place it could be.

The next day, the body was gone. I assume it was carried off by a crow for a late-night supper, but I wasn’t sure. My backyard has become some cold-blooded version of “Sleepy Hollow.” I was Ichabod Crane with a lawnmower.