Sometimes it’s possible to have a nightmare so mind-numbingly horrifying that it colors the entire rest of the day with a lingering sense of dread. Despite the brain knowing that what it remembers isn’t real—that whatever it conjured up in sleep didn’t actually happen—the subconscious worries over that shapeless terror again and again regardless. The mind can’t let go when it’s been wracked by images seemingly too awful to be real.
Anyway, for absolutely no connected reason, here’s a video that shows a pair of “combat snakes” that fell, like Satan’s house brand of Twizzler Pull-N-Peels, from the ceiling of an Australian home recently with no prior warning.
Uploaded by the steel-nerved proprietors of Snake Catchers Brisbane, the video shows the immediate aftermath of the hellish surprise. An “evenly matched pair of” coastal carpet pythons writhe atop one another on a hardwood floor dusted with bits of insulation and ceiling debris, hissing and darting their heads around, oblivious of their surroundings.
The catcher narrating the video assures us that these two wretched snake bodies are not curling around one another and thumping against the floor in the midst of nasty serpent sex, but are instead fighting for dominance because, horror of horrors, they’ve caught the scent of pheromones from a female somewhere nearby. It should come as no surprise that, for snakes, romance must be preceded by sheer horror.
The catcher says the two “have been a bit naughty” by leaving “a bit of a mess” by collapsing through a suburban house’s ceiling duct and choosing a goddamn bedroom for their coliseum. As she continues to film a scene so chilling you can actually feel it imprinting itself on the mind, the catcher assures her viewer that “they can continue like this for hours.” Take that idea with you and let it fight off any feeling of safety that might accompany the video’s conclusion. Somewhere out there, the snakes are fighting. Maybe even just above your head.
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