Snake

By Zhakhongir (Joha) Abdukayumov / Spring 2026

I don’t remember exactly what year it was—around 2013 or 2014. South Kazakhstan, hot and dry summer, I remember walking with my mom to our local hospital, she needed to pick something up there, nothing serious. The place we were walking by was about 200 meters away from our home, a gas station and a small building. At the moment I was wondering why this small and unremarkable building has been such a significant presence in my life. I recall being there and dad going there a lot too, but could never think of what was inside it, but that’s beside the point. Summers are hot in our city, so as a kid I was hot, thirsty and tired.

Mom walked ahead minding her own business, while I trudged slowly behind, whimpering. We were walking in the narrow space between the gas station and that small, strange building. The two stood unusually close to each other, almost overlapping, as if the building had somehow crept onto the station’s territory. At the point where one ended and the other began, there was a shallow drainage channel, marking the subtle boundary between the two. And it was there, by that channel, that one of the strangest things I have ever experienced happened. I was walking with my head down, barely paying attention to anything except the ground beneath my feet. As I stepped over the channel, I caught a glimpse of something moving—sliding through the water. It was a long, thick snake, pale white with a yellow tint, of extraordinary beauty—the likes of which I’ve only ever seen in a zoo. Its body was long and heavy, almost as thick as a baseball bat. After looking it up later, I realised it might have been an albino Burmese python. My foot froze mid-step, hanging just above the path. The snake was directly beneath it, close enough that one more second would have brought my shoe down on its body. I did not recoil. My breath did not catch. The snake moved as if it belonged there, and somehow I did too — one foot in the air, its body cutting silently through the dust, both of us held for a moment inside the same quiet machinery. The python lifted its head slightly, as if it had noticed me too. For a moment, neither of us moved. I wondered if it saw me not as a threat, but simply as another body sharing the path.

It was going somewhere and had a place to be and so did I. By pure chance, our paths crossed that scorching summer, right where I lived — in the place I knew as home, and a place a creature like that should never have found its way into. Soon, it slipped across the channel and disappeared into a ditch, its long body twisting as it vanished into a dark hollow where it could no longer be seen. Our paths separated as quickly as they had crossed. We met in silence, and just as silently, without resistance or acknowledgment, we drifted apart — it returned to whatever world it belonged to, and I to mine. Right after, I caught up with my mom and told her about what I had just seen. She didn’t believe me. I guess she thought it was just a child’s vivid imagination at work, maybe that I had mistaken some shifting pattern for a snake. I couldn’t blame her. The snake didn’t belong there. It felt like something pulled from a distant, humid world, a place of heat and water and dense green, not from a dry place like ours.

That moment unlocked a sense of unity in me — the feeling that two completely different things, for a split second, can stop being separate. Since then, I have recognized that feeling in other moments too. Sometimes I am the one at home, standing in familiar territory and watching something foreign enter my world. Other times, I am the snake — the outsider, the stranger, the one who does not quite belong, yet still moves forward through a place that was never meant for him. For that brief moment, the difference does not matter. We belong to the same whole.