I’ve been running errands, in and out of the car, all day. A few minutes ago, I went out to the car to put some laundry in the back, and discovered something pale hanging from the driver’s side, where it had been slammed in the door.

It looked pale and swayed a little. I thought “Oh, god, is that a snake? Have I caught some poor reptile in the door?”

I was…sort of right, but it was no worse for wear. Investigation revealed that, against all odds, a glow-in-the-dark rubber snake was hanging from the car.

One might expect that I would know the rubber snake, that I would yell “BINKY!” and run towards it with arms outstretched, but as a matter of fact, I’ve never seen it before in my life. No clue how it got in the car. Mosquitos, bees, flies, the occasional spider–I expect them to wander into the car, because I live in a bloody swamp, after all. Rubber snakes, however, is a new one. It’s possible that, like locusts, the rubber snakes only rise from hibernation every few years, and this is their year. Am I at ground zero for this miracle of nature? Will hundreds of small, glow-in-the-dark snakes burrow up from the bowels of the earth, to bask and spawn and die, possibly in and around my car? Of course it will! Nothing surprises me about the local ecology any more. If there is a Greater Southern Rubbersnake, of course it would live here. How silly of me to think otherwise.