Butterscotch

By Perry McGee



As of the middle of last month, Butterscotch measured eleven foot one and an eighth inch—at just a few days over three years of age, her length was a small percentage of what she’d become given a chance to mature in a correctly sized (locked) environment. She was an articulated python (just like Alice Cooper’s) with a calm demeanor, a curious nature, and eyesight that could pick up movement in infrared—far beyond the scope of humans.

Ed, Butterscotch’s owner, gleamed with pride every time he—or anyone within earshot—mentioned his slinky pet. He’d go on for hours given the chance, talking about this, that, and the other.

Roberta wore Ed’s ring and cooked Ed’s meals and raised Ed’s children, but she knew she was a distant second as far as any feelings of love Ed had. Those deeper intimate emotions were for Butterscotch. Sometimes Bert wondered if she’d understand a little better if her husband’s sensitivities lay with another woman instead of a beady-eyed serpent in a glass cage. Were Ed to indulge one of his young coworkers (or maybe the bartender at his favorite watering hole), she’d have the ability to wrap her mind around that. But a snake?

“That’s my baby, that’s my baby” said Ed Rosington, dangling a mouse near the coiled python. Butterscotch was fast, but Ed (usually) was faster; jerking the live prey away quick enough to keep fangs out of his hand. Once, she got him good, shredded his palm and tore away the first joint on his ring finger (which is why, he explained, he couldn’t wear his wedding band) with a sudden and unexpected lunge. Nowadays his incomplete hand was merely an item of conversation. But at the time, boy, he was pissed; locked Butterscotch in a tiny cage in the basement for seventeen days as punishment.

That was the one incident Bert took issue against. Her contention was the snake didn’t do anything wrong—stupid Ed shouldn’t have played with her food like that—like he was doing now, too. She secretly hoped Butterscotch would strike and rip his damn fool head off, is exactly what she wished for.

And as if Roberta Rosington had rubbed a magic lamp and received a wish from a genie, Butterscotch shot from her circular stance on the carpet, past the squealing rodent (Bert would later swear that the mouse sighed a sigh of relief) and latched onto Ed’s lower face.

Missus R took in an amazing sight: a very long (and rather thick, muscular) snake with its jaws opened and Ed’s face somewhere in that black vice-grip of a chomp—her body slithering around his upper torso going for a kill position. It took the snake less than five seconds to assume a fatal pose—it took Ed almost two minutes to die. The cracking sounds (bones shattering) and moans and blood squirting out Ed’s eyes and ears would have been unbearable had it not been for the fact this scene had been hoped for for months—Bert was desensitized to the point of apathy, she was emotionally dulled so much she actually enjoyed watching Ed suffer.

When Butterscotch sensed all life had left Ed’s body, she clamored off the inert corpse and curled around Burt’s ankles. Gently, unlike the death grip that’d killed Ed. The snake and the widow exchanged a knowing look.

“That’s my baby, she said.