Broad-headed SNAKE

• Joshua Persen, Grade 4
• Short Story
• 2018

Drip, Drip. I wake up to the ever annoying sound of rain. It is night. I am a broad-headed snake with a big appetite for lizards. Speaking of that…. Creep, Creep. Oh!!! I have found enough food to feed my whole family! I quickly slither back to my sandstone habitat. That was yesterday. Tonight I am going hunting for those, bolting rascals, those big animals called lizards. I just woke up and I have caught a whopping 35 lizards!!! Sweet!!! I have come back to my sandstone habitat to greet my loving family and feed them.
“Have you seen my adventurous babies?” my wife asks all of our neighbours, who all reply with the same answer.
“No, but I hope you end up finding them”. All of us go check the road and come face to face with a horrible sight. A traffic jam with our poor little broad-headed snakes in the thick of the action! We slither onto the road just in time to save them but, only with the help of a desperate leap. We end up alive, surprisingly! I guess that’s why we are nearly extinct.

. Oh no! We are living on a titanic acre of farmland! And to make matters worse, the farmer has a feral cat and six injudicious, ugly foxes on his vast property. Those half-a-brain nut-jobs are digging up our permanent homing space. They also ate our food and sadly, killed our lovely, sweet uncle Benny! Poor, sweet Benny killed by those dumb losers. We will find another habitat to live in even though our old one was great! At least those savage beasts will never find us down here.

“Mummy, Daddy, there is a big thing over there
“Um, kids that big thing is a humongous steamroller that’s coming towards us, so run.
“Wait,” says our other uncle, Uncle Tom. “I think the person in the steamroller is actually coming to help us.” And right was Uncle Tom because the person in the steamroller put us in a delivery truck labelled Taronga Zoo. Life in a zoo is treating us good and everyone is so happy for us, even the deadly animals like the lions and the cobras, they were even smiling. The best thing is that they feed us all of our favourite foods like possums and lizards. . And boy doesn’t that sound amazing! This is the life. We get to have this whole habitat to ourselves! There are no cats or foxes to hunt us, or at least nowhere near us. Or any birds to hunt harm or humiliate us. Our habitat is eight metres tall and we say that it is the size of a jungle canopy or skyscraper. We have some very major changes to our lovely family in the past fourteen years or maybe more. One of the major changes that has occurred is that our adorable kids have all had babies. And that is my family’s story.