Two-headed Rattler

...It was the badly-halved you needed to see, nature's blunder...

...Michael Cadnum...

...But there came a season during our weekend visitations, after the final papers were signed, when every time we bought a ticket you said we had to enter the Hall of Reptiles, and all those fleshy hoops with v-shaped heads, vipers and adders, were not what you wanted...

...Two-headed Rattler At first you took my word for it, the legend rich enough for a child new to tales, and new to the truthhow the big one coiled along the glass wall, and all the smaller could do was raise its head out of the water dish, and keep from being flattened where the huge sleepy lord rounded...

...And when you asked each time how, exactly, I would intone the story of how mistakes cut the world in two, and how when the first lie was told the mouth that uttered it forever dragged the earth...