Kim entered Uncle Tim’s ‘dark room’. Thousands of warnings and threats couldn’t deter his resolve. The reward was beyond expectations. The room’s capacity seemed magnified by the presence of mammoth taxidermist species set inside. There was a crocodile, a baby whale, a vulture, an eagle and few jack rabbits in the centre. The rabbits seemed carnivorous amidst these beasts. Kim walked towards the wall where an elephant, looking more real than he probably looked when alive, stood. He made his way through the cheetah and monkey. He felt the monkey stealing up on him from behind and jerked back only to find that the bulb was casting its shadow on the monkey, paying obeisance to the setting sun. Kim pried the monkey’s eyes, trying to close them but they wouldn’t. No six year old must have seen animals in this state before. He wondered whether this experience would change his outlook towards his pet dog, Tuffy. As he advanced, he saw a huge giant cobra tugging at his feet. It was ten feet long and its mouth was open wide enough to let in a basketball.
Perhaps Uncle Tim thought him faint-hearted and thus prohibited him from seeing this unusual way of preserving the dead. He wondered why human beings too couldn’t be preserved like that. His momma always encouraged his quest for knowledge. Or rather she fostered it. She proactively asked him questions about everything around him so that he becomes more informed than his peers. His mother was obsessed with general knowledge and wouldn’t pass off a single chance of sharing her knowledge with him. It was she who told him about cows regurgitating when the former incidentally grazed on their harvest.
The cobras’ outstretched mouth too reminded him of something his mother had confided in him some time ago. In a flash, it came back. One day, a snake had entered their kitchen and before even shooing it away, Mom expounded all about the snake family to him. This included the fact that cobras can easily swallow full grown-up adults.
‘Surely, I could go inside the cobra and see its innards,’ thought he. Pleased with the idea of adventure before him, which welcomed him with open jaws, Kim went head first inside. The inside looked real. To his delight, this one wasn’t stuffed from inside. He crawled further till he reached the end of it. In his excitement, he had neglected the moisture on the subcutaneous flesh. The moisture, now crystallised, pushed him. He had himself swallowed in.
Post dinner, Uncle Tim entered the room. He saw bits from Kim’s clothes strewn around the cobra and its tail
in the shape of its last meal. “Tsch. Too bad. Look what curiosity did to him. If only he had waited for me to stuff
it.”
