To Gut a Snake

My world has been cleaved in two, a knife wedged in the wood between my before, and my after – the two halves spinning recklessly close to an edge, ready to drop.

In the before, everything made sense – my entire life straight lines leading me here: into the lair of a snake.

I was gifted a magicked knife from the Queen herself, the blade soldered, tamped, and sharpened into a gleaming point, laden with the drippings of magic – all with the sole purpose to hunt and kill the last great demon that threatened the known world.

I imagined how it would be to gut the snake with an enchanted blade.

I’d keep the sparking steel at a low angle near my side, whisper for it to keep its currents quiet, sucking in the black through bared teeth. I’d slice the snake’s body in its sleep, unzip its skin lengthwise, gut it deep before it could lift a horned tail, flick open a yellow-slitted eye. I’d let the stink of its dark magic ooze in great black pools at my feet, and watch the darkness loosen its grip on the scaled body, gust with a giant gulp, sending the creature back into the creviced gullet of the earth.

I’d watch well past the end, beyond the returning hour, when gods and demons alike checked the lists of names at their respective gates, sent back those unaccounted for. There had been too many mishaps with the dead becoming undead.

But that was all before. Before I was pulled into the world by the very snake I am to kill. Saved by the very snake I am to kill, after nearly dying in the desert on my quest to flush it out.

The snake found me on my knees, hand outstretched.

And this is the after; the world that makes no sense. Because the snake is here now, in the form of a girl, hardly younger than myself, healing my body and watching me from the gray ocean of her eyes. She is a storm about to hit, but the kind that I pray for around the feverish flutter in my gut, the kind that leaves behind gardens, forests, whole worlds in its wake.

I am certain there is some mistake.

She can’t be the snake.

But the steel of the knife hums in my boot, nicking my ankle, sensing the blood it has been made for mere inches from the hungry belly of its blade.

The blade is enchanted to cut through mirage, illusion, even the charm of a snake. I have been trained never to trust my senses – only the blade. There are shapeshifters, dreamwalkers, and many malevolent beasts who retract their fangs and simply crook a finger to entice their prey. The blade alone is to be trusted – it’s all I’ve ever been trained to know.

The girl leans forward, pressing a cool cloth to my forehead, and it would be simple, really, to reach down, plunge that knife up into her heart.

I watch her, trying to find the yellow flash of a snake in her eye.

But there is nothing, only the gray of dawn.

This world, her world, holds no linear lines. It is multi-dimensional in ways I can’t comprehend, wild and terrifying. I am losing all sense of my path that was meant to run straight – I’m risen up, lost in the night sky of her freckles and it’s taking everything not to reach up to trace them into constellations.

The knife is furious, cognizant that it’s losing ground, that I’m taken in by fantasy. It screams in my blood to wake up, like a kettle left too long on the heat, so shrill I am certain the girl also hears. And maybe she does, but she doesn’t back away. She terrifies me – not because she’s made me doubt the blade, but that she makes me want to doubt the blade.

Even though I know the blade is not wrong. It was forged for one purpose: to flush out and kill a snake. The magic never lies. Only monsters lie.

She is a talented liar, so poised, calm – no restless energy that I normally detect in the bent. Masked monsters have tells – stilted movements, unnatural gaits – never fully reconciled to their hands, their claws.

I feel another nick against my ankle. Harder.

I bite down on my tongue, taste the copper of blood.

The girl’s brow is knit as she scans my body, trying to find the source of my agony.

There was a time, in the before, when the knife was a comfort at my side, calming my panicked breath as I contemplated the gravity of my quest, a beacon of light that stayed the hooks and claws in the unsettling dead of night.

But now I hardly recognize the knife as it pulsates with frantic bloodlust, clammy and wrong, a snake of its own kind. I shudder, the cold slithering shape of this snake winding up my windpipe, squeezing.

My breathing comes out in short gasps as my hands shake.

Kill her. Kill her. Kill her, the metal hisses.

“Where does it hurt?” The girl interrupts, her voice shaking in time with my hands.

She hovers a hand down my arm, hesitates at my wrist where she grazes my heartbeat.

I rip my arm away from the charged static of hers.

Something in me snaps.

In one fluid motion I reach down, plunge the knife into her gut.

The girl inhales sharply, looks down at the knife, at me.

Her gray eyes hold the secret, the final puzzle piece snapping into place – the nonsensical new world righting itself.

I look down in horror as the blade feasts upon the girl hungrily, cruelly, then gutters back into useless steel – its life ending on a hissed sigh, its bidding done.

The girl remains a girl, slumped forward, dying in tandem with the knife.

There is no snake within her, no monster crawling out to claim her form.

My world drops.

I flash back to the world – the nonsensical before – where a Queen told me I’d be hunting a snake, that the magic was for a snake. A world in which I obediently kneeled while the Queen brandished a glittering magicked knife in my face to keep me from looking at the yellow-slitted gleam in her eye.