Runaway Snake | Odie&Simba
Odie lived alone, far out as close to the lake as she could physically be. While she was no means poor, Odie lived life as though she were more often than not. She heavily relied on the little garden she tended to with hoodoo, using it for food and supplementing it with a run to the market if she couldn’t grow it at home. She rarely bought packaged food, only really eating it when she was at board meetings and couldn’t run back home to make some food for herself. Odie was a woman of simplicity. She relied heavily on her relationship with her snake and the spirits, rarely maintaining friendships outside of those.
Some people around town thought of her as a friend, others knew her as a crazy bat that lived by the lake. Either way she was looked at, Odie never really cared. She was too busy living her own life, not bothering with others and the trivial daily life they led. She enjoyed her own life far too much for that.
In living her simple life, though, Odie had also not managed to join the trend of electricity. She had no desire to worry about bills or to listen to the soft hissing created, sacrificing her peace of mind for warmth. Instead, Odie preferred the warm, crackle of a fire in her little fire place. The fire was normally maintained by her, however, she couldn’t seem to do it when she had to make trips to the town center for board meetings and various business (it was very difficult for her to grow food in the cool climate of Swynlake).
With her absence, though, the normal fire that was blistering hot and kept her home warm and balmy like her normal life in New Orleans had faded into mere embers, hardly warm enough to keep the few feet in front of it warm, never mind the rest of the house.
Hoodoo wasn’t a large fan of such cold, though. He had loved the warmth of New Orleans, the moisture in the air and the sweltering weather in his cold blood. The radiating sun was no longer available to keep his cool body at a decent temperature.
Since Odie wasn’t there, Hoodoo had managed to slither his way out of her home (it wasn’t that hard, really, she was fairly careless in her blindness), and away to the next available source of heat: a neighbor’s home.
When Odie returned home, though, she was very surprised to find her friend no longer there. She yelled and bumbled about for a while, searching for a place she figured might be warm enough for the little reptile, but came to no avail.
Not finding Hoodoo, Odie determined he must of found a new, warmer home. She knew the snake far too well at this point in her lives, and basically felt connected to it. It was like her seeing eyes most often, keeping her from falling into dangerous circumstances. Without him, she ambled out of her house, down the road to where she knew the neighbors was at times her body lurching forward as she tripped over a tree root. ‘Where is Hoodoo when I need him…’ she thought to herself many times over that journey until finally her feet found the path to the closest neighbor she had. She had heard the people before, seen a rough outline of them with her limited vision, and figured the boy and girl wouldn’t mind Odie just walking in. Grabbing her snake and leaving.
Odie reached out, her hand on the knob and turned it gently, happy to discover it was open. She wandered in, her arms outstretched, trying to feel any sense of warmth in her fingers to figure out where Hoodoo would be. It was definitely much warmer here, Hoodoo definitely would of hidden here if he stumbled across it.
Determining to yell out, hoping her snake would come to her, “Hoodoo, where are you? I was gone a day and you left, really?” she yelled.
