My pet is named Jessica. She is a lovely corn snake and you can see a picture of her in my scraps gallery. This evening I have watched a play of Shakespearean proportions.
Lifting the lid of her enclosure I dropped in a male, white mouse, as I do each week. She was hungry and ready to strike but too eager. Rather than biting on the face or head as she normally would, she bit more to the rear. She wrapped herself around the quivering albino rodent and began her usual work of squeezing the living breath from prey.
Alas, the poor creature would not expire. Her gripping coils were far to low. Face to the air, like a man buried to the waist, arms trapped at his side, he, and by this I mean the mouse oh best beloved, struggled for each breath panting, gasping, straining for each inhalation.
After an eternity, my treasured reptilian familiar began the dangerous task of rearranging her grip on her next meal.
Slowly she wound her rear coils tighter and closer, unwound her head, neck and beyond, while keeping her jaws locked into her dinner. The creature continued to pant, fighting for each moment.
For one brief moment he had enough room to move his torso and try once more to move and break free but at the end of that moment her coils came from above and the sides, pulling him inexorably into his death.
Wrapped tight as a ball, she killed her food. His mouth was puckered to the air, the only part left unwrapped, motionless and devoid of struggle. I know the mouse is dead when she, feeling that his heart has finally ceased beating, releases her griping jaws and begins to follow her own coils till she can find his face, and with a final kiss embrace the whole of him in one long swallow. Her body pulled him from her central rapture and as she swallowed him her body formed a perfect spiral, head pulling the mouse, leading left and over to her very center and thus spiraling out to her tails conclusion. Her head poised over her tail as the mouse’s own disappeared between her lips.
We all die and we all kill. Some say we owe a Karmic debt for each thing we destroy. I say we embrace it or forever wallow in guilt. Even Vegans must destroy life to sustain their own. I know what horrors exist in an abattoir and I know it makes me hungry.

~Will~