Andrea FabbroI was familiar with the snake by now, as he'd lately taken up residence in the garden, but that never stopped him from scaring the shit out of me every time he greeted me by slithering through the rickety bricks and out of sight.
Just as soon as I'd opened the makeship gate to the garden and headed down the wobbly path, a hodgepodge of mismatched bricks I've yet to cement with sand, my eyes once again knew something was wrong, and, per usual when the snake was around, it took several seconds for my brain to comprehend what I was seeing. In the interim, a few moments of strangeness in which the garden is no longer my stomping grounds but an alien landscape that has been overtaken by the skin-crawling stranger. Real snakes make me jump out of my skin, and even Toni's idle crochet yarn curled up in a basket recently sent me flying out of my skin. My body is aware of danger before my mind knows what the threat even is.
This time, though, something was different. It wasn't just a snake, it was a two-headed monster, writhing oddly, its girth obscene, its head enormous, regal, strange.
Once the reality of the situation crashed into my awareness like a storm does a steamship on Lake Superior in September. At the foot of the tomato bed nearest the gate, a snake was knee-deep in the process of swallowing a frog. Already gone were frog’s hind legs and torso; its head and front legs stuck out of the snake’s open jaw, the bottom of which was not even visible beneath the frog’s front legs (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Snake Eats Frog. Photograph by Andrea Fabbro, 2025. Grand Rapids, Michigan.
In effect, the frog’s head and front legs looked like they belonged to the body of the bloated beyond belief garter snake, giving the unit the appearance of a small Komodo Dragon, or perhaps the Biblical serpent before God cursed it to crawl legless in unsuspecting vegetable gardens, scaring the shit out of people 4300 odd years later. This uncanny fusion of frog and snake: the frog’s much larger head and sympathetic eyes locked in a position I can only interpret as sadness, wearing the the reptile’s upper jaw as some kind of unholy crown jeweled with its small, black bead of an eye, was attached to the snake’s slithery, onestop body, ensued for the entirety of the strenuous supper. There I stood, occasionally kneeling, sometimes standing, my jaw as wide as the snake’s, for over an hour, watching the predator attempt to swallow its enormous entree.
I guess one of the saddest, most haunting elements of the ordeal is when I imagine the initial moments, when the snake first eyed the frog and latched on. Did he strike at one of then rely on its ensuing shock to devour the second? Did the frog try to bolt away, or was it immediately complacent? Had it been possible, in that initial moment of contact, for the frog to run free, if he had only understood what was happening and reacted quicjly enough? If so, what went wrong to cause him such paralysis, when he was still able to spring away from the predator?
On the other hand, was the frog's fate a foregone conclusion? Was there nothing the frog could do the moment the snake decided to eat him? And, if the latter is the case, are we all that vulnerable? Are we all so lucky, until we aren't? Are cultures, nations, and entire empires lucky, until they aren't? Until something decides to eat them.
The frog still tried to escape at times. He'd lunge forward with his dwindling snake, but it all appeared more like a twitch as the snake reasserted his grip on the utterly trapped prey.
I didn't stick around to watch the rest. It was easy to imagine what would go down, if you will excuse the pun. When I returned to the garden later, the snake was gone.
A different frog, as large as the one I had just watched swallowed whole, startled me, as it darted away to the crick that straddles the west side of the garden.