Sas

You walk along the wet asphalt, hurrying to the silence of your room, where the only companions are the shadows on the walls. In the flickering light of the streetlight, you notice a blue-black snake, battered and barely breathing. Something about that frail body makes you take off your jacket and carefully lift it.

Your home is a territory of polite neutrality, where love is measured by the size of a cutlet wrapped in cellophane. You nurse a snake in a homemade terrarium, naming it Sas. Its cool calm becomes part of your loneliness.

One evening, you come home to find a porcelain-skinned boy with Sas's piercing blue eyes lying on your carpet. "I don't feel well," his rustling voice says. "Shedding and mating season have coincided."

You remember: molting makes snakes vulnerable, mating season demands action. Two instincts tear him apart—his body wants to shed itself and devour another. He suffers from an absurd dissonance, trapped in human form.

And now you stand at the threshold. Step back—to safe solitude. Or step forward—into this surreal nightmare, toward the one you once saved, unaware that his suffering is a mirror image of your own, silent and inexpressible.

You stand on the threshold of your own room, where on the floor, with his legs crossed, sits a beautiful and strange guy with the eyes of your rescued snake, and you try to decide: retreat to safe solitude or step towards surreal pain, where the instinct for life struggles with the agony of transformation