CONSTRICTOR
The taxidermist found himself presented with a particularly famous novelty: a snake that had choked on its own tail, forming an eternal knot from its own body in a final attempt to escape starvation. The specimen seemed to be freshly dead and free of rot, as if it had been found immediately upon its heart giving in.
After gently lifting the twin fangs from the final anchoring bite through its own pale, yellow scales, the release of pressure was immediate. With two hands, the taxidermist began to pull the turgid, slippery flesh out its mouth, all fat with itself, dripping traces of bile and mucus onto his gloves as it went. What was once a five foot wheel of reptile had expanded into a long coil of organic rope, twisting down from his workbench for yards and yards. No matter how much mobioid serpent emerged from the singular orifice, he couldn’t seem to reach the end of the animal’s digestive tract, and its death-knot loop remained unbroken.
After two whole hours of futile pulling and stacking, the situation required a change in strategy; what was once meant to be a simple evening project was now a race to finish dressing the whole anomaly in a single night, and if not all of it, as much as he could. This was an extraordinary animal, something that shouldn't exist, and its preservation was now his sole responsibility.
He procured the caping knife from his bench's drawer, and gently opened the skin around the base of the snake’s skull, then followed along its vertebrae with a small scalpel, debriding the delicate skin around its sinews in long, thin, ordered folds. Then, he began to carve the bloody flesh away from its bones in tough, pink-grey cylinders, setting them aside as he went. He alternated between pulling another yard of snake, then dressing another, the patterns on its scales now changing as they emerged like a claustrophobic quilting.
His work ensnared him, and before he knew it, dawn was near. The endless lengths of beast and bone had wrapped around the walls of his shed in a rapunzelian tangle. He’d failed to notice that he’d been fully surrounded by the ouroboros, its reeking blood and digestive fluids pooling at his ankles. It was in this manner that the serpent had devoured him. It slithered away at sunrise, sideways in time, having successfully shed its own death.