A couple of nights ago, I dreamed I owned a snake that was as much decorative object as it was reptile. It was like a peppermint stick, all candy colors, Red Hot-red on baby-blush pink. I thought about it several times over the course of the following day, dreamily re-envisioning its deliciously unnatural coloration, its milk-mild demeanor, its just-shy-of-gaudy stylishness. "What a knockout that dream snake was. Would that the world really held it," I mused.

The snake, it exists.