Warning: This piece has scenes of graphic voilence

I unleashed my anti-Buddha nature today, and assassinated a lovely copperhead. My karma is thus weighed down by one more death, and consequently I will rotate once more in the great carousel of samsara.

All this happened in the course of a morning when I was over at VILLA sending some faxes out. The snakey was sitting in a bed of pine straw, and was nearly invisible. Since I usually tool around woods here, gathering "degradable sculptures", I usually keep a wary eye for these beautiful fellas (these are the predominant posionous snakes in these parts), and also for good measure wear my thick hiking boots. Usually they are quite shy, and try to crawl away from me more quickly than I from them.

But this snakey was different. Yes sir, it gave us (two others gathered around to look) the eye, and refused to budge from its bed. This was perhaps because it was a fully grown adult (about 3 feet long) and had just eaten lunch. This is when a lady guest currently staying at VILLA arrived, and gave a shriek after seeing what she called the serpent. So I had to get a shovel, and jab it into the snakey's neck just below its triangular head (easy clue to identify copperheads). Oh, it refused to perish for the ground was too soft, and the shovel dug into the dirt along with its body. So after I was sure I had stunned the snakey enough, I slid its wiggly body onto the shovel and carried it out to the parking lot and laid it out. And then completed the business of guillotining the head by running the shovel along the pavement with the snakey's neck held in between metal and cement.

A streak of poison, the opening of fangs, the detachment of head, the spurting of crimson blood, and the wriggling of the sleek body, yes, these followed. I was almost tempted to slip the body into a bag, bring it home, and somehow skin it. But under the watch of the ladies, I had to load up the body in the shovel and fling it into the woods for the Garuda bird.

...

It was only afterwards I realized what an unfortunate wretch I am. Only had I belonged to a Holiness Church, I would have bravely embraced the snakey, put it in my pocket, and used it to call upon the Holy Spirit every day, for as the Lord said in Mark 16:18, the King James Bible:

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Instead, here I am writing out notes on what will soon become an apocryphal memory.