First of all, this is the funniest thing I saw in 2022, hands down. “Cow caught chewing on a large python in outback northern Australia” ABC Western Qld / By Damien Larkins and Dan Prosser.
The pictures are incredible. Just the look on the cow’s face! And the poor snake, practically headless in the end (I think you can see what’s left of its head in the last photo, but I don’t know that having one’s head ruminated into mush could count as having a head lol).
I had to turn this into a fable!
By the time the Farmer arrived, our sweet heifer had become thoroughly bemused. She’d been plodding along in search of a bit of grass in this barren dried up field, testing the stubble on the parched earth, when to her surprise, and—we’re obliged here to be frank—her utter indifference, all the sudden she felt something pinching her tongue. In a burst of concern, she stomped her front hooves into the dirt, but only once. Actually—and, again, we’re obliged to represent her perspective—she found the feeling kind of pleasant: the pinch had begun to turn into more of a massage.
But what this increasingly confused cow couldn’t figure out for the life of her was how her tongue got so long that she couldn’t close her jaw without biting into this new tongue, or was this always her tongue and she just forgot how to pull it back in. This was one perplexed cow! What convinced the poor ol girl that this was her tongue was that when she bit down on this new length of would-be tongue, she felt an unpleasantly sharp sensation instead of the constant, but definitely not unpleasant, massaging she quite liked, truth be told. But again, this tongue situation… She looked around for a human she recognized but saw no one until almost mid-afternoon when finally the Farmer came up to her and she gave him a look concern mixed with not a little pleasure.
Meanwhile, poor Ms. Python, who’d either taken offense to or else found herself enticed by the lure of a cow’s tongue suddenly so near to her as she coiled on the ground, unable to find a more suitable place to rest herself under cover—in any case, whether from outrage or hunger, or else both, Ms. Python found herself latching onto the business end of a cow’s tongue, and her jaws did that locking thing they do when she’s hungry or in a mood or both, and so she found herself suddenly airborne, lodged headfirst in the mouth of a mildly troubled heifer. Until suddenly the cow tried to bite down and in fact bit into the snake that had bit the cow. The Law of Mouths and the Law of Teeth hold that the one with their mouth around the other and the one with the bigger teeth around the other, simply stated, wins out in the end, as was the case here for poor Ms. Python, who’d made a terrible error, just the most grievous mistake, though we’ll never know her motivation.
But our heifer has already moved on, having finally managed to bite down, and without much more pain either, once she’d decided closing her mouth to swallow and chew were more important than maintaining such an extravagant tongue.
Check out my other Cardboard Fables:
and whatever else I’m doing with cardboard:
Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog! 
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