Reality? Check.

Some of you already know that I have a vivid imagination. And sometimes, late at night especially, I hear things. Sometimes they're false alarms and sometimes there's actually something to them.

Like last week. I heard a bang and a squeal of tires and announced to the girls that I thought I'd just heard an accident on the highway, maybe right at the top of our street. Sound travels very well up the side of our mountain. "Yeah, right," was the general consensus. I was vindicated 15 minutes later when we heard a siren. We knew it was pretty serious when we heard the helicopter about 20 minutes after that. Our neighbors' horse escaped his paddock and was hit by a van with eight passengers. The horse split the van in half and came to rest inside the vehicle behind the driver's seat. The van rolled over, but everybody, except the horse, survived with minor injuries.

And then, the night before last, I awoke to a loud ssshhhhhhh-ing sound. I bolted out of a deep sleep and after finally getting my gummy eyes to focus, noticed the room being lit by a rhythmic pulsing glow which caused further disorientation until I realized the power had gone off and then back on resetting the clocks on the microwave and stove and restarting the ceiling fan. Phew. Then I heard the noise again. A few possibilities shot through my mind: The wind? The water heater cycling on? The water heater springing a leak and shooting high-pressure water all over the place? And then I realized it was coming from directly overhead. Up in the attic, whose floor creates the ceiling of the small nook where I sleep. I held my breath. My fingertips were buzzing with adreneline. It sounded like a sandbag being dragged around. A very heavy sandbag. A very, long, heavy sandbag that could be dragging around on both the left and right side of the alcove ceiling simultaneously. It was a snake. A big one. Lulu, our faithful guardian and protector, looked up at the ceiling and whimpered. Little bits of plaster fell inside the wall behind my head as it shifted around and that's when I remembered a) the news story of the local man who had a snake so large in his attic it collapsed his ceiling; and b) the attic access door in the girls' bedroom. It was headed that way. Luckily the door only swings inward, so unless a big gust of wind chanced to blow it open, as it has done on occasion, I figured that was fairly secure. I wanted to wedge a fishing pole through the door handle but I needed a ladder and I was not going outside in the pitch black to drag it in. Except, really, what did I have to fear, the worst thing out there was already inside my house. Then I set to worrying about the hole in the wall, a snake-sized gap cut to allow the knob on the door between our rooms to swing fully open and not dent the drywall. I propped the door open with a large trunk, doorknob filling the hole, and hoped for the best. I listened hard thinking that if the basilisk started whispering to me I would lose it. After an hour, the noise became almost inaudible and concentrated near the outside wall, where it presumably slipped back outside through the eaves.

I'm guessing (hoping) it was a python and it was just wandering around looking for some tasty vermin and that when it didn't find any (and since we didn't hear anything last night) it decided to keep wandering outside. I'm sure this one wasn't a figment of my imagination, and I'm sure not going up there to find out.


Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.

-- Francisco Goya