The Serpent in the Sky
A young man learns that an ability he discounted and dismissed offers more opportunity than he ever imagined.
The slow time in January is a great time to write. I signed up for two short story competitions and submitted entries a few weeks apart. The first story is back and ready to share! This was my submission for this year’s NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. Readers may recall that participants are assigned elements that must be included, and my draw was:
GENRE: Fantasy
SUBJECT: Artificial
CHARACTER: A joiner
WORD COUNT: 2,000
Last year’s first round entry was a surprise winner, and while I certainly didn’t expect to top my group again this year, I was disappointed in my results this time. I am very happy with this story but it just didn’t land with the judges in the way I hoped. My feedback was supportive and helpful and I agree with the main constructive criticism: I tried to fit too much into this tight format. The word count was a little lower than last year’s first round and my entry feels more like an intro to a book than a standalone short story.
As usual, Ray and I were in this one together, and his entry is a evocative sci-fi noir set in a future Cleveland I would not want to visit. Definitely check it out!
I hope you enjoy this, and stay tuned for my next one in a few weeks!
The first time it happened for Sam was a complete accident. He’d been in a small boat by himself out on the water. The day was clear and the sun was low, approaching the tops of the pine trees rimming the lake. Sam had spent the afternoon fishing with nets and a harpoon on loan from a neighbor. He’d toss a net over the side and lay back, listening to distant bird calls, watching clouds meander across the sky.
Other boys his age were typically engaged in some sort of physical competition. Wrestling, hunting, even dancing; always needing to come out on top, winning the attention of some young maiden. At 14, Sam hadn’t yet fully mastered the new extremities of his tall, thin body. He liked to dance and he saw no point in fighting (though he was rarely bested in any verbal contest). His energy in a group was infectious, and he was happiest joking, singing, or otherwise entertaining with friends.
Having decided to return to shore, he sat up and started to haul in his net. He met resistance, and when he stood to yank harder, he lost his balance and tumbled into the cool water.
Panic quickly subsided as he resurfaced and reached for the boat. He pushed hair the color of mead out of his eyes and spotted an oar and the harpoon floating away. He let go of the gunwale and paddled over. Grabbing both with his left hand, he used his right to swim back. He lifted the items into the boat, and after climbing aboard, was shocked to see the two pieces joined as one lying across the hull.
Shit, he thought. Shit because his neighbor would be irate about losing his harpoon, shit because he’d have to fashion a new oar for the boat, and shit because, well, joining things was the stupidest magical ability one could possess.
Such abilities were uncommon. Nobody else in his family used magic; they lived and worked and got by like most people had always done.
A few folks in the village had some useful magic abilities. They were lucky to have a healer: Mr. Minks could mend wounds and expel foul humors, though it sometimes cost him a great deal. A young woman named Adeline had the power to push and pull with her mind and had trained up to be a fearsome warrior. This power gave her a key advantage in any fight as she could, for example, send daggers anywhere at will. It proved quite handy around town, too. Just the other day Sam had seen her pull a pint of ale across the pub to the table where she was ensconced with a gaggle of young soldiers vying for her attention.
Back in the boat, Sam studied the harpoon-oar. He thrust it down and used the one good oar in a tiresome left/right manner to head in. The harpoon-oar would be of no use; it was now too bulky with the weight distributed unevenly. Maybe his neighbor would be able to save it by sawing off the oar part.
*****
Sam wasn’t excited about his newfound ability, but his parents insisted that he learn to master it. “You’ll surpass me as a carpenter in no time,” his dad had said. “Just imagine the furniture or tools you could craft!” That was a classic role for a joiner to fill. They often found themselves in some kind of construction job, joining this stone with that beam or some mundane grownup thing like that.
Sam wouldn’t be happy with such a job and longed to pursue creative endeavors with others. It was thus insufferable for him to apprentice with a furniture joiner at Blackbrook, the larger town nearby that had grown around a small fortress.
Mr. Pinkerton loved nothing more than sitting in his favorite chair outside the entrance to his shop, smoking his pipe and chatting with the denizens of the town. Sam was quick to pick up his basic instruction on how to join two pieces of wood in perfect symmetry, but after Mr. Pinkerton had shown him enough to take on the brunt of his workload, he left Sam to do everything while he idled outside.
One afternoon, Sam sat facing the river that gave Blackbrook its name, basking in his quiet freedom. An apple and a banana sat in the grass next to him. Sam loved fruit and would pilfer a piece whenever he could. He had tried joining food together before, usually with disastrous results, but the occasional discovery like “grapples” validated his experimentation.
He absent-mindedly wondered what an apple-banana would taste like. He watched a woman row up to a nearby jetty, wishing he had more time to fish and daydream like he used to. His gaze returned to his fruit and he reached for the apple, but was surprised to see a fat, orange banana there, like a squash. He looked around; he hadn’t touched the fruit—had Mr. Pinkerton snuck up and played a trick on him? He reached for the hybrid but his hand passed through it. The apple and banana snapped back to their previous positions a few inches apart.
Sam picked them up, confused. Was he imagining things? Feeling the weight of each in his hands, he wordlessly combined their essences.
Mr. Pinkerton had taught Sam that you couldn’t join just anything. You couldn’t join living things, you had to be touching each item, and you had to focus on a common attribute that linked the two. Physical similarities were the easiest to mentally grasp, but more creative thinkers like Sam could find other qualities that worked, like when he fashioned a wide-brimmed hat out of a wooden shield and a canvas tarp because each “protected something.”
Now he held a real squash-like thing that looked exactly like the mirage from a moment before. He probed the peel and decided it was edible. He took a bite…and promptly spat it out. The texture was all wrong. Disappointed at having reduced his inventory of two tasty treats to zero, he tossed it into the water for the fish to try.
*****
Sam stayed in a room above the shop, sleeping on a cot underneath a window that looked away from the keep at the center of town, over the rudimentary town walls, into the forest. Staring out the window in this liminal state, his mind loosened its hold on things concrete and wondered at the stars and the vastness of the world.
He would prop himself up to watch revelers wind their way home from the pub. As candles were snuffed the light from the moon took over, and more than once Sam was certain he saw his parents in the crowd, but it was always a trick. He missed home.
Sam recalled a story his mother had told him about how the moon retreated to the sea at the end of the world each morning, illuminating an underwater kingdom ruled by a fierce serpent. “But he is a fair protector,” she told him, recalling the time he stirred up a storm to sink pirates that had plundered some peaceful, seaside village.
Something dimly lit and above the trees caught Sam’s eye. He focused in to see a vast serpent in shades of gray and dark aquamarine, soaring toward the town. Unable to speak, a note of terror rose up in his throat, but the creature vanished. Sam had difficulty sleeping the rest of the night.
*****
The surprise attack came in darkness a few weeks later. Raiders from the Dry Lands were known to strike now and then, but rarely this far inland.
Sam awoke to shouts and saw a group of soldiers scrambling through the streets from where they had been sheltered in the keep. He was horrified to see thatched roofs on fire as invaders streamed through the gate. He panicked and ran downstairs, thinking to flee to the safety of the keep. He held no illusions of picking up a weapon to join the fight. He had no armor, no skill, and no idea what to do.
He stumbled past Mr. Pinkerton’s favorite porch chair, turning to retreat uphill to the keep. The moon peeked out from behind the squat tower, catching in Sam’s mind.
Wait.
Fighting the compulsion to run, Sam paused. The moonlight and the terror inside pinged like an echo from that night he saw the serpent in the sky. Linked through the weeks like two wheels turning on a long axle, he mirrored that state from before. That night he had been deeply engrossed in his memory of the story, imagining the fierce but fair guardian that his mother loved to tell him about. He now realized how the serpent that night had been composed of the same colors as the moonlight, sky, and forest: cool, shadowy, and silent, with bright, silvery light glinting off its scales.
Understanding washed over Sam. The false apple and banana joined like a squash, times he was sure he saw his family members among the evening revelers, too-real visions of boats on the water or sheep in the fields…the light, all around him, touching him and everyone at nearly the same time, was the key to an infinite number of illusions. The light, having the same essence at its core whether violet or green, pale or bright, could be pulled apart, multiplied, and joined in whatever ways Sam could imagine.
Still petrified, Sam slowed his breathing. He pictured that dreadful beast from the underwater kingdom raining terror on the unjust, and it rose up into the sky behind him, as if it had been hiding behind the keep.
The first Blackbrook soldiers to arrive at the gate were clashing courageously, but they were losing this fight. A smattering of reinforcements approached, but the invaders controlled the gate and their entire band was coming through.
That is, until they saw the serpent. “Arreche!!” one called in their foreign tongue. They stopped, looking to the sky where their leader was pointing. The guards turned too, and every man and woman in the area froze in terror.
The head of the wingless serpent rose higher and higher, its gaze fixed on the barbarians. Those outside the walls could see it now, too, as it revealed gruesome fangs under a malevolent stare. Its head bore a formidable crown of spikes, glistening in the moonlight as if it had just raised up out of the water.
“He’s with us!!” Sam bellowed at the top of his lungs. No longer afraid of the serpent, but afraid for his townsfolk, Sam worried it wouldn’t be enough.
He had another idea. Moments later, an artificial army burst out of the keep and poured downhill. Anyone looking closely would notice that the soldiers all looked alike: a shadowy, pale imitation of Adeline.
“Push them back! Get loud!” he ordered, and a new phase of battle began. Confidence swelled in the guards just as fear swelled in the invaders. A communal battle cry arose from the Blackbrookians. Having met more resistance than they had ever imagined, the Dry Land barbarians turned and fled.
*****
Sam’s apprenticeship was complete. Mr. Pinkerton looked downtrodden as Sam came downstairs with his pack in hand. “I am sad to see you go, son” he said, knowing that he’d have to return to the work that he had been delegating to Sam. “But I’ll forever be grateful for how you saved my shop.”
Sam, a local hero, no longer worried about trudging through menial work. His illusions improved rapidly. In the aftermath of the attack, he retold the story over and over, playing it out in light on tabletops or the ground–wherever he found a small stage and an eager audience. Narrating and voicing his characters (for he couldn’t join sound waves, at least, not yet), he knew that joining people through storytelling was the ultimate expression of his gift, and he was so excited to share it.