Home > Ellen VS The Snakes [Episode 1]

Ellen VS The Snakes [Episode 1]

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a story from "It Ate My Sister"

by Mark Binder

(To listen to the Episode 1 CLICK HERE)

Episode 1 - "Snake Phobia"

This is a story of the fights between brothers and sisters, of cruelty, revenge, fear, danger and heroism. It's about adventure, wilderness, destruction and redemption. It's why even though I have problems with my sister, Ellen, I can't help but love her too. But before we get to that, let me start at the beginning...

     My sister, Ellen hates snakes. I love them. This is a basic and wonderful conflict.

     Ellen is two years older than me, and like most older sisters do, she drives me crazy. Once she superglued all the drawers in my desk closed, and when I finally pried them open with a crowbar, I found that she'd managed to put them in upside down, so that all my papers and things came crashing out onto the floor. My Dad didn't believe that was her fault. He said it seemed more like something that I would have done to her. Once she drove me to the mall and left me there. Later she claimed that she just forgot, but trying telling that to me -- the kid who ran down four flights of parking lot stairs screaming for her to stop and then watching and panting as our car patched out as it headed home. She didn't get in trouble for that either. My parents love my sister. They tolerate me.

     The truth is that I can be pretty wicked to her, and I do like playing pranks and tricks. Can you blame me? She's bigger, older, has more friends, more money and my parents love her more. I call it "justifiable cruel-i-cide." My biggest problem isn't thinking up something horrible to do to her. Any boy on the planet can devise an evil and not lethal way to deal with a brother or sister. The real challenge is getting away with it -- making my own behavior in the circumstances seem totally legal and justifiable, or even better, invisible.

     Her fear of snakes, for example, is totally my fault. I used to take great pride in that.

     We had a pet snake in our science classroom. It was the coolest thing! It was a common garter snake that our teacher, Professor Sinkovitz had rescued from his swimming pool. The day he brought it in he explained to us in his weird German-Texan accent, "It would haff to been killed by the chlorine, pardners." It was about a foot and a half long with a checkered back and a darting tongue. The Prof kept it in a nearly empty fish tank with a branch and a heat lamp.

      Every morning all the guys would run over and see what it had eaten. We filled its tank with crickets, grasshoppers, aphids, ladybugs, slugs and even tiny mice. Sometimes you could see the critters it was digesting still kicking around. Talk about science!

     At dinnertime, when our family gathered to feed, my father believed in "Everybody tells something about their day." He preferred to hear something new that we learned, but over the years, he had given up and settled for bits of news like, "I lost my sneaker in the mud near the gym and had to wear one shoe and one sock all day, so we need to buy me some new ones by tomorrow or else I can't compete in the track meet." (That one, believe it or not was Ellen's, and the fact was I didn't believe it. I knew that Ellen didn't think her sneakers weren't fast enough so she'd lost one on purpose. The funny part was that because the sneakers were brand new, she lost at the track meet and came home with a blister the size of my thumb.)

     The day the snake arrived, I couldn't wait to talk about it at dinner.

     "He's got a checkered back," I said, "so we call him 'King Henry the Eighth."

     My mother looked puzzled. "That doesn't make any sense. Why don't you kids call him Checkers?"

     I rolled my eyes. "Because Henry the Eighth played chess and ate everything in sight!"

     My dad nodded. "That makes sense."

     Ellen, however, kept mum, which was weird because she usually liked to rag on anything and everything I said.

     "He doesn't wriggle either," I explained. "He slithers."

     "Now I don't understand," Dad said. "I thought snakes wriggled."

     "Nope," I shook my head. "Worms wriggle and writhe. They twist and turn. Snakes oscillate and slither. We looked it up in the dictionary."

     Dad pursed his lips. "I'm pretty sure that snakes can wriggle and writhe in addition to slithering."

     "Well, it sounds like you're learning a lot in school these days" Mom said, heading off any argument.

     Ellen was still quiet. She was staring at her food, not touching a bite.

     I grinned. "Great spaghetti, Mom!"

     That's when I knew she was afraid. She kept quiet. She didn't want to call attention to the fear, and I can't say I blamed her. Because she knew that if I knew I would do everything in my power to torture her.

     Later on, I did some more research in the dictionary and I found the words that described it perfectly. The general name for a fear of lizards was herpetophobia. The specific clinical name for the fear of snakes was ophidiophobia. But on the Internet, if you looked up a picture of my sister Ellen, you'd find it right beside word, Snakephobia.

     Which was why I volunteered to take King Henry the Eighth home over Thanksgiving vacation