It is not an okada o.

It is not an okada o.

It’s a long tori.

It started with a green snake.

It entered the house and crawled into bed with my friend.

I was in the other house, painting, when my friend came running in. “A snake! A snake. Quick!” She said, breathless. “Come, quickly. Please! Come and kill it!”

My macho mechanism kicked in. I turned up the adrenalin, jumped up, snatched the nearest club in sight and raced toward the direction my friend pointed to go and battle the snake.

It was a beautiful snake, slim, elongated and graceful, with a glossy green sheen, spotted with yellow and orange highlight. The head was chiseled to a pointed apex, and it rose up to an S-formation, surveying me as I made toward it. As I moved near it, it moved elegantly but swiftly to my left, and disappeared from sight.

My friend pointed, “Look! There! It is gliding up to the roof!”

I saw it slinking up, unhurried, it’s movement oiled and charming. It quietly settled on the rooftop, and began to survey us from its bird’s eye view.

“Go get him!” my friend pleaded.

I found a ladder—my undoing. I placed it against the wall. I balanced my cudgel in one hand and made my way up the ladder with the other hand.

That was the last thing I knew.

The rest is human history. The doctor said the fracture was not bad, putting the X-ray film against the window pane to catch a good reading from the sunlight streaming into the room. “In the US you could have had a fine MRI image done to give you a perfect picture. But here we still make do with the old-time X-ray shot.”

The doctor looked at me. “We will give you a cast. You should be ready to go in, say, four weeks.”