A big, ugly Ramon Noodle With Fangs

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A Big, Ugly Ramon Noodle With Fangs

1.
The phone rang.
I was sleeping on the floor to avoid the numbing electrical current running from the base board to the head board. Evidently there was another surveillance device in the bedding in case I talked in my sleep or there was a variance in my night flatuli routine.
Things like that are evidently important in any investigation. Patterns beget pictures like little Light Bright screens. As a possible Federal witness in several cases, credibility also figures in.
On the second ring I startled to wakefulness.
I jumped up twisting my ankle, kicking my guitar off the stand.
The stand itself fell forward on the front of my foot.
I could hear the small bones of the arch crack off like iced celery does when you break it in half. The ligaments snapped like rubber bands.
The pain shot up my leg like a lead puck and binged a bell in my head.
Everything caboodled and went dark.
I went down again, out cold.
I woke sometime later hearing a knock on my door.
It was the X-ray woman I’ve been dating.
She wore black scrubs and looked like a ninja standing there as I crawled up to her moaning like a cat in heat.
She’s used to that.
I had just been in the emergency room a week before.
I evidently was going back.

2.
I come out of the sliding glass doors on crutches.
My foot was in a bright blue boot.
I dragged it where ever I went.
It was like parking a Volkswagen every time I sat down.

3.
“It takes a long time to heal” the Doctor said.
I spent the next week sleeping before pulling several more tendons getting up.

4.
I realized the terrible truth.
I was alone.
If something should happen to me, I’d have to handle it on my own.
I missed my recently diseased cat, Nadine.
I had gotten a bird and two cats to replace her.
The bird is good. She hangs upside down and spreads her grey and white wings out wide when she is happy.
I’m trying to teach her to recite The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, the “never more” part.
I’m moody.
The kitten is a dark tiger stripe that cries all night long and runs from me when ever I show up. The other is a beautiful tortoise shell Siamese that practices invisibility.
I haven’t seen her since she moved in.

5.
Intimidation is a job that never ends.
As you may recall I got bit by a snake a couple of months back.
This followed several weeks of threats.
The threats have started up again, though they are more subtle.
“Remember the snake?”
The likely snake in this rainy season is probably a water moccasin.
They are big and ugly from my point of view. Not as big as the Burmese Pythons that have come up the river from the Everglades after the hurricanes, but nasty crackers just the same.
I take all threats seriously.
I have to.
As I go through my daily routine in terror, chasing cat and bird around the cage of my apartment saying “never more, never more ( the bird is the one I’m trying to get to talk to me, the cat I’m merely trying to calm)” I have time to think about things.
What if they really put a snake in my apartment?
It could happen.
It did happen.
What do I do?
So much of it is keeping cool and having the right tools.
What do you use?
Two giant chop sticks to grab it on either side of the head like a big ugly Ramen noodle with fangs?
I don’t know.
I’m doing research.

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