Skeleton Story-- The Escape

I am barely one inch wide and eighteen inches long, which is a frustrating form of existence, let me tell you. This world is made for tall people with opposable thumbs, and I'm neither tall nor do I have opposable thumbs. Or hands, for that matter. In fact, this world is made for humans, who ought to try living at the bottom of the food chain and see how they like it.
What's their problem, anyways? For instance, which one of them had the bright idea of breeding pigeons and keeping them as pets? “Whoopee, we have conquered a species of deranged birds that warbles and has a neurotic, eye-balling stare.” That must have been a greeeaaat success.
I'm not a pigeon, by the way—thank god. My neighbor is, though, and oh joy, he's a great conversationalist. He's a twitchy little freak. He makes that stupid cooing noise incessantly, which makes him sound like he's drowning in his own spittle or something, and it's just my poor luck that he isn't.
Did I mention that I'm unlucky? Well, I am. I live in a glass box that isn't big enough for me to lie out in a straight line and the oh-so-intelligent humans keep dropping dead mice on me and expecting me to yum them up like candy. I'd rather eat the damn pigeon. His name's Alfred, by the way—not that that means anything. Oh, and that's something else—on top of everything else that sucks in my life, the humans named me Wilberforce.
It takes a special kind of person to name their pet milk snake Wilberforce—special as in the kind of person who names their child Winnifred and wonders why the poor kid gets picked on at school so much.
And to put the cherry on my Misery Ice-Cream, god hates me. Why else would he make me a milk snake? I was just this close to being a coral snake and having deadly poison and a death clutch to be feared. Red on yellow, kill a fellow—but here I am, red on black, friend of Jack. I've made it my lifelong goal to loathe this Jack person.
Of course, hating him is difficult, since I don't know a single person named Jack. You'd think it would be easy—Jack's a pretty common name, isn't it? But no—my human slavers-slash-jailers are named Chuff, Edna, Dwain, and, you guessed it, Winnifred. Stupid names, it's true—that's why they feel the need to name their pets Wilberforce, Alfred, and Daphne. They get some kind of vindictive pleasure out of it, no doubt.
So, here I am in my little glass box, with no one to talk to but Alfred. Daphne the hamster is kept well away from me. As if I'd eat that mangy little rat thing.
“Hey, Alfred,” I hissed, my tongue flicking towards him. He hates it when I do that. He shuffled on his perch, eying me with his mad bird eyes. Twitch, twitch. God, he's a little creeper.
“Don't you look at me like that, like that, like like likelike that.” He sounds like a broken record that occasionally gets stuck on a word and it replays ten times before getting a move on.
“Sssssorry.” Not that I'm actually sorry, of course, but there is a shred of pity in my cold reptilian heart for that dumb bird.
“Good, you should should you should be.” He capered in his wire cage, rather like a jester with a bad case of constipation. He twisted his head around until he was peering at me almost from an up-side-down angle, his insane, beady little eyes fixing on me. For a couple minutes we sat like this, staring at each other. I didn't move a muscle, but Alfred tried out new and exciting ways of peering at me. Finally he hopped around and stood facing the window, his feathery back towards me. That didn't last long—after about half a minute with his back facing me, he fluttered back around to glare at me.
“Stop it, stop stop stop staring at stop at staring at me!!”
I let my tongue flicker again, and I pulled back my second eyelids. “What'ssssssss the matter, Alfy? Do I make you... nervoussss?”
I spent another ten minutes toying with him, and then I got bored. It always ends like that. Whatever entertainment I manage to squeeze out of my pointless existence generally gives way to boredom. I coiled up and pretended to go to sleep.
I daydreamed. I can see out the window into the yard behind the house, you see, but I've never actually been out of my glass box, not counting when they take me out to squeeze me in their hot little hands and to take me to the vet.
The window is... well, it's nice. I can see grass out there, and the sky. At the moment, it wasn't very blue—more like a heavy cloudy gloom, but it was a better sky than a plaster ceiling. And there have to be live mice out there, or live rodents, or live insects, or any living food. Do you know what it's like to eat pre-dead mice that Dwain buys from the pet store? It's awful. He buys them in bulk and freezes them until he feeds them to me. Frozen and thawed-by-microwave mice taste like...well, I'm assuming the only people that will read this will be humans, so describing the taste of mice would be rather pointless, since you have nothing to compare to it. Humans don't eat raw mice, and usually not cooked mice, though that depends on how desperate they are. Ever wonder why you humans don't eat mice?
Don't get me wrong, I love mice—proper mice, though, not scarily inbred rodents that have been frozen for months before I get to eat them. Fresh meat, that's the thing. Squirming, living flesh, where I get to make the heartbeat stop... I'm a snake. It's what I do. Or what I would do.
I stared out the window some more. Slithering through grass would be pretty cool, I think. Better than crawling around on dry sawdust, at least.
I was hatched from the egg in this glass cage. All I've got is the window. Bit depressing, really. But they don't have anti-depressants for snakes. The vet thinks I have a 'mellow nature, har har'. He's a scary man in a white coat with pointy objects he likes to prod into animals.
And then my window smashed into a thousand pieces. A heavy-set human hauled himself into the room—and he definitely wasn't Dwain, Edna, Dana, or Chuff. They'd left some hours before to go do whatever it is humans do during the day.
I lifted my head, watching him. He stumbled into the house and—
It's very disconcerting to have what's basically your house with you in it shoved onto the floor. My aquarium-cage smashed onto the wooden floor, adding its broken glass to the shards of glass from the window. Sawdust poofed around me as I flopped onto the ground, and a few slivers of glass thrust themselves through my scales and into my flesh.
Snakes can't scream, something that I've often lamented about—but we can hiss in a most distressing way, and as those splinters of glass stabbed me, I was quite distressed. The closest I can get to the sound with the mere written language is something like this: HSHRGHGSSHSHSHSSSSSSSSSsssssSSSSSSghhshhhshsssss!” Maybe a few more exclamation marks, too.
And then the idiot human started stamping around in panic, trying to crush me with his Nike tennis shoes. I wriggled away as I had never wriggled before—the threat of imminent death can do that to a person—or snake—no matter how many sharp pointy objects you have stuck in your body.
I swiftly hid myself among the piles of clean, unfolded clothes that were piled on the floor—a stroke of luck in my usually luckless world. I peered at the human invader through a gap in the clothes. He was breathing hard as he looked at the clothes.
He knew I was here. I knew that he knew that I was here. He knew that I knew that he knew that I was here. I knew that he knew that I knew that he knew that I was here. He backed away from the clothes pile. Maybe he thought I was a coral snake—who knows. He disappeared into the rest of the house. I heard rummaging noises and made an educated guess—burglary. Which wasn't really my issue at the moment, since I was bleeding from about five stab wounds in my sides. In a couple of the wounds, the glass was still stuck fast in my flesh.
And then I saw the window.
Fact number one: The window was devoid of glass, courtesy of the crude entrance of our friend the burglar.
Fact number two: I was out of my cage, also thanks to Mr. Graceful.
Fact number three: Snakes can slither up walls.
Put them together and what do you get?
A free snake, that's what you get.
I listened for the burglar, but by the sound of it he was shifting heavy objects. I wished him a merry looting and squirmed out from underneath the clothes pile. I wormed my way to the wall, managing to knock one shard of glass from my flesh. I peered up at the gateway to freedom and wished it wasn't quite so steeply positioned, but then, life's a—well, life can be a bit trying sometimes.
“What are you you what are are what doing?” Alfred gurgled, prancing on his perch like a bird with a serious case of palsy.
“Essssssssscaping,” I said. Even Alfred couldn't dampen my new-found determination to get out that window. I began to pain-staking-ly crawl up the wall towards the window.
I said snakes can slither up walls, but trust me, it ain't easy to defy gravity like that. For a human, I expect it's akin to clinging to the side of a cliff with nothing more than the stickiness of your sweat gluing you to the rock.
And then I was there, slumped over the window sill, my muscles going loose.
You know, the weird thing about the prospect of freedom is that it looks a lot better from inside a cage.
Could I even catch live mice? I'd never actually had to before—the concept was simple, of course, but... there's a difference between snapping up dead mice and snapping up a scampering, panicked dinner. And weirdly enough, Alfred was a fun companion...in that he was fun to torture, I mean.
I know I didn't sit on that windowsill for long, but it seemed to last forever in my tiny snake-head. It was Alfred who made up my mind.
“Well fly fly fly away, you moron moron you you moron!” He said in his incredibly annoying voice. He shoved his head between the bars of his bird cage and grabbed the last shard of glass and yanked it out of my side.
“Thankssssss, Alfred...” I slipped out of the open window, leaving Alfred and the smell of his moldy bird food.
The dreary sky never seemed so beautiful. Fat raindrops began to plop down around me in the tall grass. Behind me, I heard Alfred give a last warble before I slithered off in search of a mouse to make a brief friendship with.