Once upon a time, there lived a snake. He was a handsome-looking snake, a King at that!, with a sprightly gate. Black he was, and marked on his stomach. Handsome as can be.
He came upon a house, on Jessup Grove Road, a house directly across from where Ricky Proehl, a washed-up football played from the Carolina Panthers and St. Louis Rams, decided to destroy a naturally green piece of land with a completely unnecessary baseball/soccer/REALLY BRIGHT LIGHTS ON ALL THE TIME park "for the needy kids," and charge $75 a month. Because poor kids can afford $75 a month. And, somehow, get transportation to the edge of Greensboro. OK. There are also a million other baseball and soccer parks around, and they're completely free to use. He dubbed this monstrosity "Proehlific Park," and yeah there's a red line under Proehlific because Mac knows it is neither spelled correctly nor pertinent at all.
Removed from his native lands across the street, King Snake decided to move in with the family across the way. They'd see him scurrying across the drive way, diving playfully into the recycling bins, and curling under their cars. They laughed and frolicked with him, and the youngest sister even named him: Bociefus, a very manly name to fit his manly charge.
And then one day, as the youngest sister was readying herself to visit a beautiful horse on the outskirts of town, Boceifus, upon thinking he had been invited to dine with the family, came "a bit too close for comfort." The sister opened the door and screamed: he was right there.
The elder sister and father, who happened to be standing nearby, came to see how close Boceifus was to the house. The elder sister looked on the ground and under the cars in the car park, but didn't see Boceifus. No, it wasn't until she looked up and saw Bo's head poking halfway up the door frame, and inside it at that. The elder sister screamed, and the elder father also screamed and shut the door in Bo's face. Luckily, his head was not smashed, but just confused at the slight.Bo skulked back to the cabinet beside the door, on which he was perched and which allowed him such access to the doorway. The elder father ran out the side door, and the two sisters followed him, the elder begging her father not to kill Bo and the younger assuring that he would not.
With much effort on the younger sister's part and not so much at all on the elder's, the trio caught Bo in a box. The younger sister acted in a snake-catching way only Steve Irwin could truly appreciate, and lifted him, situated safely inside the cardboard box, into a large plastic container with a secured lid.
The elder sister and father hopped quickly in the car, with Bo sitting in the trunk; not because he was unwelcome, but because trunks are the preferred sitting places of most snakes (with the exception of pythons, who would rather be situated around your torso eating your head).
The duo took Bo to a location near a lake, four miles away from the homestead. They walked down through a forest in a very secretive manner, hoping no one would mistake the snake inside for a dead body. Once they got far enough in that Bo would most likely not want to slither into the road, they grew wary of Bo's wrath.
"I wish I'd thought to bring a broom," elder father said to his daughter (or the snake), "so we could defend ourselves if he's a bit too feisty."
But elder daughter, accustomed to forests since her early days of Girl Scouts, smartly looked around. What are brooms made of, she thought. And in a forest as they were, with ample amounts of kindle and branches, she grabbed one, breaking off the unnessecary length and twigs, and skillfully tossed it to elder father. Equipped with a weapon, in case Boceifus was too rowdy from his entrapment and uninvitation from the house, he opened the lid. Bo slithered out, quickly, from the case; he stopped for a second, orienting himself to his surroundings; then he climbed on a tree and ate them both.
When Warner Bros. studio learned of the escapade, they decided to make a movie -- one that would both serve as a true-life warning to all, and be a sequel to the Bill Murray movie of the early 90's -- entitled What About Boceifus?
Not really, to both the head-eating and the movie deal (the family would never sell rights to that movie). But the lesson there was: making someone (or some thing) think they would be welcomly invited into your house is just as bad as actually inviting them, even if the whole invitation is a delusion.
As the elder father and daughter climbed the forest's hill and returned to the car, the elder daughter, clutching two plucked flowers in her hands, called out to the handsome intruder.
"Good-bye, Boceifus!"
But the elder father, who discerned that it was the naming of the snake that had made him feel he had an invitation to dine inside the house, cautioned her against it.
"He doesn't know we named him," elder daughter said. "He thinks it's the same as if I'm talking to you."
She thought this was the truth, until one night she awoke to a slithering sound; Boceifus' face inches from her own; his snake mouth was open; his eyes were glaring in the way of the hunter about to catch his prey.
And then he bit her head off.
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