He nodded slowly, placing the snake back on the stainless-steel table. His eyes, serious and direct, met hers. “She is preparing. Anya, you said she stretches out along your body at night? And wraps around you, watching how you breathe?”
“Yes…” Anya said, her own voice faltering, a cold dread beginning to seep into her bones. “She hasn’t eaten in weeks. I thought she was just… stressed or something.”
Dr. Al-Hadi shook his head, a gesture of grim finality. “That’s not stress. That’s calculation. A large python doesn’t expend the energy to size up something it doesn’t intend to consume.”
The clinical words hit her like a bucket of ice water. Size up. Safran wasn’t being loving. She wasn’t seeking comfort. She was measuring her. Appraising her.
“She’s getting ready to eat something large,” the vet continued, his tone softening slightly at the sight of her bloodless face. “Something large enough to sustain her for a long time. She’s been testing your dimensions, your weight, your stillness, to see if it’s possible.”
Anya couldn’t breathe. Her gaze fell upon the coiled python on the table. Her Safran. The creature she would kiss on the head when she came home from a long day. The living security blanket she would let sleep beside her when her anxiety was bad.
And all that time, Safran had been looking at her and seeing not a companion, but food.
She took her home that day, but the apartment felt alien, hostile. Every familiar space was now tainted with a new, terrifying knowledge. Every silent movement Safran made—every slow, muscular shift of her coils behind the glass—felt like a threat, a question Anya had been too foolish to understand.
That night, for the first time in years, she slid the heavy metal locks into place on top of the terrarium. Safran remained coiled in one corner, her head angled in that inscrutable way, her obsidian eyes following Anya’s every move. Anya barely slept, jumping at every creak of the old building, her mind replaying the vet’s words: That’s calculation.
Her friends had warned her. Lira had once screamed at her over the phone, “That snake is not a dog, Anya! One day, you’re going to end up on the news. Just a foot sticking out of a cage!”
But she had always believed, with a fierce, almost religious fervor, that animals could feel love. That if you raised something with enough gentleness, it would become gentle in return.
Maybe she had been catastrophically wrong.
