ROMA Volume I - COMPENDIUM - [The Spoils of A General] by Samuel Kebede - The Roman Memoir - HTML preview

Chapter 1 - Anaconda

My first encounter with the beast was when I was at Harvard a while back. I was catching a bus a few clicks from the University. There were Harvard students there, wearing their represented clothing. I didn’t think much of it at first, but they shouted it out at the end of the tunnel when I boarded. “Anaconda”. One of the ladies bellowed. I thought it was funny since I had known what the creature was when I was a child. When I was a tiny wain to my parents, I used to watch a lot of movies in the house I grew up in. There I saw the fist move I wanted about the creature, the anaconda. It was a fearsome thing that moved around the boat and instigated massive movements to the point the ship captain and the leaders were swallowed whole.

It was funny how they screamed and shouted since at that time, as a kid, all I thought about was lion’s and stuff, where the prey would be killed with massive force after the hunt. The maneuver however, was impromptu. I ran into the constrictor in the movie, and I didn’t quite understand the sophistication, until I realized the animal killed its prey by constricting them. The creature itself removes the air from the lungs of the hunted. The paralyzed victim, without another assisting individual, would have their windpipes crushed and they would try to gasp for air under the massive 250 lbs constricting force of the beast. Sometimes, you need not say much other than the name of a person to understand a whole sentence. You need not understand much 5

more than the name of the animal, the person or the thing, to get a feel of the environment. At that time, standing in the bus, when she hurled out a name towards me, she was describing the event that was unfolding, the delightful nature of the course I was taking was presumably captured in whole by the lady.

I couldn’t help but breath the air in happiness, I was about to go to harvard, and the whole experience can be put in the name anaconda itself, and I think even now I am astonished at how smart the woman was, and if only I knew her name, her phone number and her address, because some things take time to understand, and when I understood it now, all I want is to see her, to be in her train again, so she can riddle me with words I would not understand till later. All because of the name of this creature, I seek to find this woman again so I can listen to her one more time.

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