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Srinivasan was at the
village well one night when he was bitten on the left ankle by a snake.
It wasn't a snake he had seen before, and he thought he had seen all
the snakes. The wound swelled. Srinivasan hobbled back to his hut, and
had his uncle look at the bite. Uncle sucked on the bite and spat out
anything that might have been inside, and said to go to the doctor to
get the snakebite medicine. That was a large needle in the rump, which
did not make his ankle feel better but made his rump feel worse. The
ankle reduced swelling, and in a week it was back to normal. Srinivasan
was relieved the wound was not fatal. But it did have lasting effects.
Four weeks after his bite, the wound began to be irritated. It turned
itchy, and greenish, and Srinivasan worried it was gangrenous. But it
was worse. Srinivasan's left leg began to pull into his torso, as if it
were a turtle's leg. The right leg did so, too, as did his arms.
Srinivasan was changing, becoming some malformed stump. But his neck
felt longer, and the feeling wasn't horrible but invigorating. His
clothes began falling away from him, and he crawled, slithered more
aptly, out of them and out his hut's door. The last conscious thought
Srinivasan had before a night of mindless killing was that he thought
this sort of thing only happened with wolf bites. |
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