On the front cover, there was a photo of an eel. It was quite long, with green splotches freckling its mostly purple skin. The caption read “Eel found in bathtub by 107 year old man.” Normally I don’t look at “rags” like the National Tattler and the Weekly World Investigator. This photo, for some reason though, caught my eye, grasped at my attention. I picked up the paper, while waiting in the longish line in my local supermarket.

The cover photo, on closer inspection, sure looked real - a purple eel with green splotches. What really caught my attention though, seemed really out of place. There was a “Juvenile Times” magazine on the bathroom floor, not far from the decapitated eel. I wondered if the old man, scared witless by the eel, first reached for the magazine to shoo or scare it away before deciding to grab the machete which just happened to be near the bathtub. The more I looked, the more wrong the scene seemed to be, yet still, I was compelled to find the story on page eighteen.

Imagine my surprise when I saw my own photo on page eighteen! Just under another angle of the eel on the tile floor, bathtub in the background.