Limitless Evolution As a Snake

The knife drops.

I coil. Every muscle I have fires at once, and I twist around the blade like water around a stone in a river, and the edge kisses my scales and slides not deep, not clean, but enough that something hot and wet opens along my flank.

This golem is going to flail me like a fish or an eel. Because that’s what I feel like I am now.

I hit the ground sideways, and I’m moving before I’ve decided to move, slithering in a direction that might be toward safety and might be toward a dead end, and I don’t care which as long as it’s away from here.

Behind me, stone grinds. Two sets of heavy, deliberate footsteps. They’re following. Of course they’re following. I’m bleeding, and I’m slow, and I’m leaving a trail a child could follow, and they’re made of rock and spite, and they don’t get tired.

I round a corner, and there’s a grate in the wall for maintenance access, rusted at the hinges, barely wide enough for a rat. For me, it’s a doorway. I throw myself at it, and my snout catches the gap, and I push through with everything I have left, and the grate groans open just wide enough.

The golems reach the corner.

I’m halfway through. My midsection is through, my tail is dragging, and Fat Head’s hand closes around the last few inches of my tail. His fingers are cold and impossibly strong, and they squeeze, and something in my tail crunches.

I scream. Or I would, if I had the lungs for it. What comes out is a sound like steam escaping a pipe, thin and desperate and entirely inadequate.

His grip tightens.

Then loosens.

Not because he’s letting go. Because something hits him. Something from above, a chunk of concrete, maybe, or a pipe torn loose from the wall, catches him square in the temple with a sound like a bell being struck. He staggers. His hand opens.

The corner is maybe three slithers away. Maybe four. The brick wall ahead of me keeps doing this thing where it breathes in and out.

Oh, I think that’s me, not the wall.

Old mate, hello, I need you, old mate? Old mate, please... Old mate, where are you?

Nothing not even, a joke its all just radio silence. Not a flicker, not a notification, not the usual dry crack about my life choices. Just the wet sound of my own blood painting a trail behind me like a kid dragging a paintbrush along a sidewalk.

Come on, you lazy cunt, I’m dying here, I’m literally dying, this is not the time for your lunch break, fuck, I think I lost some of my tail.

Yeah, I’m definitely dying that much I can confirm. The world is doing the wobbly thing, and my tail is doing the not-attached thing, and there’s a warm puddle gathering under me that I’m pretty sure is mine. Fine, fine fine fuck it. I’m bringing these two chunky rock bastards down with me.

I’ve got the double blood venom resets. I think. I had two when I got stabbed, or before it, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure, unless I used one already, unless I’m hallucinating, unless the concept of having and using and knowing has been a lie my whole life and I’m just a tiny snake in a drainpipe who’s never known anything and never will and has always been scared and alone and followed the rules because following the rules is what you do when you’re small and soft and the world is made of teeth.

Fuck the rules.

I turn around and it takes about a year. My body moves like it’s underwater, like the blood loss has turned the air thick, and every inch of the rotation costs me something I don’t have but I get there. I get my head pointed the right way, and there he is, Fat Head himself, already reaching for me again, those thick stone fingers opening like a grabber claw at an arcade.

I reach my fangs toward him hell i don’t aim and i don’t calculate. I just open my mouth and let the venom go.

Blood Venom the blood-goes-bye-bye one. I have that yeah i definitely have that, i’m almost certain I have that.

I bite down on what I assume is flesh between his rocky, concrete hand and arm. There’s a seam there, a crack in the stone where something softer lives underneath, and my fangs sink in and the venom floods.

My vision goes pink. Then green. Neon green, like the signs above a ramen shop, like the lights in a bar where nobody knows your name.

That’s probably bad. That’s probably the kind of thing that means you’re about to meet whatever god runs this particular sewer. Or it’s the golem’s skin. I’m going to convince myself that it’s the golem’s skin. I’m a snake of faith now. I believe in the neon.

Old mate. Old mate, where the fuck are you? I kinda need you right now. I need a notification, a ding, a thumbs-up emoji, anything. I need someone to tell me I’m doing well. I need someone to tell me I’m not alone in a pipe with two rock monsters and a bleeding tail and a head full of pink-green static.

Nothing. The silence is louder than the construction noises.

The construction noises.

There are construction noises going off in the back of my head. Like someone’s running a jackhammer behind my eyes. That’s normal, right? That’s a normal thing that happens to snakes. I’ll ask the next eel I meet at a sushi train.

God, I hope I live. I miss Sushi Train. I miss conveyor belts and soy sauce and the little wooden boats with the salmon nigiri. I miss being a person who could hold chopsticks.

Fat Head’s body starts to crumble.

It’s a sound like gravel being poured down a chute, like a building being demolished in slow motion. The stone cracks along seams I didn’t know were there, and something dark and wet leaks out from the fractures, and then the wetness just... stops.

Turns to air. Poof. The cracks widen. His arm goes first, the one I bit, crumbling inward like a sandcastle at high tide, and the rest of him follows in a cascade of dust and small rocks that patter against the pipe floor like rain.