The cluster of ships were within Mars’ wake when they witnessed the serpent unwrap itself from around the Earth. Gliding between planet and moon, it slung its head to face the fleet, its eyes shining like small suns.
Aboard a hundred vessels armed for conquest, soldiers and strategists roared in alarm. The invaders had braved the dark quiet between stars to find this world. Earth had been chosen for its simple societies and lush world. Easy to win. Easy to hold. But the gigantic creature that was uncoiling itself was an unknown. Their robotic scouts, sent over decades before to monitor every pulse of the planet, had alerted them of no such thing. The analysts, under the shouts of their commanders, wrestled to reconcile what their eyes saw against what their data had promised.
With eyes not born of the soil of Earth, the invaders saw the serpent slink from its sleep and pass through the expanse of space to where the fleet stood. If anything was alien, this was alien. Hundreds of worlds had fallen to them. They had conquered a forgotten number of planets, from infant world with barbaric scavengers burrowing across their surfaces to civilizations exploring their planetary neighbors to empires with system-wide defenses. Yet, there had been nothing like this. A world guarded by a spirit. A world whose soul wrapped around itself in wait.
Named Jormungandr by the shivering, teeth-chattering berserkers, the serpent had nursed on the blood and milk of trickster gods. The dead grew it. It fed until it looked at planets and planetoids as peers. Invisible to the eyes of those born under its guard, it was still seen by the dreamers and inward-looking visionaries of the varied civilizations to skitter across Earth’s surface. The pyramid-makers knew it and named it Ouroboros, the tail-devouring snake. The philosophers and the gnostics carved its image into stone. The forgotten son held its image up in the desert and healed his people.
Its scales glittered green and red, the galaxy’s stars dancing disturbed through its skulking form. The serpent drifted ever outwards. Even if their sensors could not discern it, they still feared it. Ouroboros’ dancing bright eyes first opened in the dawn state of Earth. Its eyes blazed with every hope and dread of humanity. The serpent set its gaze on the largest of the ships.
From the deck of that capitol ship, his own heart racing in fear, the commander directed his squadrons apart to circle the creature. And the serpent waited. And pulsed. A spirit of a world, of an entire species, brushed against the cold minds of the invaders, minds of metal and engines, minds that had explored nebulae but never imagined the soul.
Maybe it was out of that spark of fear, maybe out of restlessness, but one of the ships, far from the capitol ship, launched its volley of concussive cannons.
The beast swung its head around. It struck swiftly, snapping far and slicing through the squadrons. Every ship responded with their entire salvos. But it was useless. The serpent was every where at once and at once, it was every serpent. At once an anaconda, thick and consuming. And to another ship, the cobra, furled back and striking with precision to cripple and then, to kill. To another ship, it was the python, clutching and choking until the ironed vessel split in two, spilling its crew like blood into space. The serpent launched itself against those arrayed around it.
As the bodies of millions of would-be conquerors floated into the empty, Ouroboros returned to its orbit, taking its tail up again between its fangs, slowly closing its continent-sized eyelids to sleep. It rested, circling the globe, waiting for the next threat to come from the stars.
And its future? As its humans reach into space, will it grow with them? As humanity colonizes its neighbors, will the serpent twist around the system, basking in the light of the Sun? As we move through this galaxy, will the serpent grow, will the soul of Earth travel with us?
Or will it still rest, spinning slowly, around a forgotten planet? Will it wait for us to remember our soul? To remember our serpent soul?
IN THE WATER, UNDERNEATH
Damien Angelica Walters
Holland Island is a low island in the Chesapeake Bay. It's basically a glorified mud pie, made of silt and clay instead of rock. The island was named for one of its first European residents, Daniel Holland, who settled there in the 1600's. There was a fishing boom in the late 1800's, and Holland Island became a busy place. Over 360 people lived on Holland Island in the early 1900's. By 1920, erosion was already taking a major toll on the island. Most of those islanders moved on, taking everything with them, even their houses. One house, which was built in 1888, remained through the years, as the sea came up closer and closer to its threshold.
Why are the Chesapeake Islands sinking? One reason is basic geology. The islands were created by Ice Age glaciers, which pushed up bulges of land. Over thousands of year, those bulges have been settling. Another reason is climate change. Ocean levels are rising, which means the death of small islands. Holland Island hasn't just sunk—it has eroded, because it's made of unstable materials.
The house became an obsession for Stephen White, a retired minister. He formed a non-profit organization to try to save the house and spent thousands of dollars of his own on the project. He tried to save it with rocks, with sandbags, with timbers, and by sinking a barge offshore to use as a seawall. The wind and waves destroyed them or ignored them. White fought the sea for fifteen years, but in 2010 the sea won. The house collapsed and now is completely underwater.
What remains of the island is marshy and during high tide the island completely disappears. During low tide, it's a useful resting spot for seabirds. For Stephen White, it's a reminder of failure. Along with the house, Holland Island was home to a graveyard. White was deeply moved by the message on a young girl's grave. "It said, 'Forget me not, is all I ask'," White said. "And I didn't. I still haven't."
***
Touching the silt of my shore, he whispers, You are mine.
He wants me to believe that I have always belonged to him, but once I was my own. Holland Island, I say to myself. I say it to remember, I say it so I don’t forget I had a history, had people who made of me their home. They loved, slept, dreamt, fished, lived.
And they left me because of him.
It would be easier for me to give in, to forget the laughter of children, to forget the warmth of footprints, the slide of a boat returning to my coast, but I can’t forget the way the empty houses fell one by one. When the last finally tumbled to the ground, the boards creaking and crying out against the destruction, I did what I could. I opened myself, made a womb of silt and clay, and pulled it in. A desperate hiding place. I cradled it with lies: everything would be all right, they would come back, they would take care of us.
But there is no they anymore. There is only him.
He tongued open my center, slipped inside, swallowed the wood, the mortar, the walls. Slowly, so slowly, as if I wouldn’t notice, but I heard him taking his meal, the sound like mirthless laughter, like cruelty.
Alone now, I think madness would be preferable. Then I could give of myself freely, not knowing or caring what I was losing.
I’ve beseeched the moon, begging her for respite against his tides, but she answers with nothing but the pale of her light. A silent betrayal, yet I should not be surprised, for she was ever his willing accomplice.
You are mine, he says, as he crashes against me. You have always been mine.
I know, I hope, he believes he loves me, believes he is returning me to his embrace, but it hurts. He’s biting into my soul, gnawing my self into shreds. I struggle to hold what’s left, but he is relentless and hungry, always hungry.
He devours me bit by bit. Undoing. Unmaking. With gentle susurrations and rage’s force. For a long time, I told myself he was remaking me into another shape. I don’t believe it anymore, for if he is taking my pieces to make another whole, that new creation is insensate and holds nothing of me inside.
Mine.
Once he was life and health, not diminution and gluttony; once he listened to the shape of my shore. I try to remember that he did not ask to pla
y this part, only accepted his role. But when he has reduced me so, it’s hard to believe such a thing is or was ever true.
I hate him.
By day I have the company of birds—terns, herons, pelicans—but every year, they are fewer in number. They chatter and squabble amongst themselves but ignore me when I speak to them. They care naught of my plight and will notice my passing as but a small annoyance and when I’m gone, they will seek a new place to roost. Still, their presence is a small comfort and better than solitude.
When I’m gone, will anyone search for me? Will anyone remember?
He brushes against me, retreats, brushes again. Teasing and taunting beneath the heat of a sun that brings no solace.
My lover, my enemy.
Should I hate the fishermen for abandoning me, for taking their boats, their children, and their wives away to land strong enough to withstand his brutality? They called him the Bay, the Chesapeake—they call him that still—but he cared little for their names.
When they first realized what he was capable of, what power he held, they tried to keep him back with walls of stone. He laughed at their efforts. Was he angry because they hooked his fish, dredged his oysters? He welcomed them once. I know he did. Is his nature so capricious? I’ve asked him time and time again, but he refuses to answer.
One afternoon, he caught a child unaware. I tried to hold her feet within me, to anchor her in place, but I wasn’t strong enough to keep her safe. He pulled her into his depths too fast for anyone to do anything but scream.
They loved him, they respected him, and he repaid them by destroying their homes and their children.
No, I cannot blame them. The memory of their touch is the only thing that gives me the will to fight.
For fight I do. I will not release my name, for that is what he wants. He wants me to forget who I am, to become only a footnote in his existence, and I will not.
I will not.
Am I a fool to think my name something worth remembering, something worth holding onto? To want to stay here instead of surrendering and becoming merely something that was?
But I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’m not strong enough. I’m afraid one day there won’t be enough of me left, and then, will my ghost join that of the little girl he took? Will he even allow a ghost of me to remain?
I think not.
He is far larger than I ever was, and far stronger. His strength is brute, callous; my heart is fragile and filled with too much fear. He demands submission, and I yield because I have no choice.
Always mine.
The birds fear him too and take to the sky as he creeps closer. Would that I had wings for escape, would that I had a place to hide. I gather my will. Hold myself together—each bit of clay holding my heartbeat, each grain of silt, my breath.
He comes.
Inch by inch, he takes me. Turns the warmth of my memories to helpless cold. Is this what the little girl felt when she knew she’d never break his surface? This inescapable futility? How long, how hard, did she fight?
He covers me completely, his touch deceptively soft.
Mine, he says as he bites and bites and bites.
Liar, I say. I belong to me.
As always, he laughs. I’m trapped until morning comes to pull him away and he knows it. Not even the glue of bird guano can hold me together against his onslaught. I’m drowning beneath the madness of his embrace, but I fight to hold on. I fight as hard as I can. I say my name as he tears another piece of me free. I say it so I won’t forget, but every night, it gets harder and harder to remember.
So when I taste his salt, I choke it down; if this I must bear, then I will hold a small part of him captive and take it with me into the waiting dark.
SCAB LANDS
Wendy N. Wagner
The title of Wendy Wagner's story, "Scab Lands" holds multiple meanings. The family in the story bears many generations of emotional wounds that they struggle to conceal. The family is scarred by the legacy of WWII, and the family is shaped by the struggle of surviving in the Scablands of Eastern Washington.
Columbia Basin's "channeled scabland" was created during a series of ice age floods in which ice and water scoured the ground and washed topsoil as far south as the Willamette Valley in Oregon. During one such flood, water was released at a flow greater than ten times the combined flows of all the rivers on earth today. The flood would have moved anywhere from thirty to eighty miles an hour in a wave of water and debris from three hundred to a thousand feet high. The channeled scablands are the result of series of distinct cataclysms, unlike other badlands that are the product of slow but unrelenting erosion. The scablands are largely barren, but bits and pieces of the scablands themselves and much of the surrounding area is suitable for farming.
In 1943 the scablands became a pivotal site in the man-made cataclysms of WWII. The government needed a site close to water and far from towns and roads where plutonium for atomic bombs could be processed. Local farmers and ranchers were forced off their land, as were the Native American tribes who had fished and hunted in the area for centuries. An artificial town sprang up, filled with workers who knew that they were working on something for the war, but who did not know what, specifically, they were working on. In 1945, Hanford Construction Camp was the third largest city in Washington State. Plutonium production continued through the Cold War, ending in 1987. Through the years, radiation was released into the Columbia River, into the air, and into the food chain. It is now the site of the largest cleanup effort in the United States.
The government believed that any harm that came from the construction of atomic weapons could be hidden away, but the toxic wastes of that project continue to escape into the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink.
***
I came to work on the fences: so I tell my father. Life is hard out here; I often make the three-hour drive from Seattle to help with these kinds of repairs. I stuff my pockets with scissors and a skein of red yarn to mark the places that need patched, and set out to walk the farm's borders with the old man.
Our boots shush through the thin grasses as we move along the squared edge of our land. I find myself leading the way, the reverse of all our childhood hunting and fishing trips: the short girl who had always trudged behind her long-legged brothers and father, worried about dropping her tackle, her rifle, her pole. Now I have to wait for him and his big white dog to catch up. I unroll a length of yarn and re-roll it around my hand, the wool violently crimson against my skin, and wonder how I am going to explain that Alan, his oldest son, my favorite brother, the expert marksman, bull rider, and decorated veteran, killed himself a week ago. Or rather, I wonder how I'm going to explain all that without telling my father that I think it's his fault.
I have tried to find the right things to say, tried to find a way to tell just the facts of my brother's death without digging into the past, but my insides seem filled with a kind of barbed wire that tangles words and holds them tight. I cram the yarn back into my coat pocket and stare out at the gray land, stretching out in low hills like swells on a sorrowing sea. My family's land, going back generations.
But I am the first dirt witch in my family, far as I know—the land responds to my presence. It sends a whisper of wind into my ear and touches my heart with a finger of warmth, the same temperature as a summer-baked hunk of basalt. I'm not imagining it. Back in Seattle, I'm a landscape architect. I can grow things no one else can, because I can feel what the soil and the plants need. That's why I come back here—not for my father. The land, though, is a part of me.
I have to blink away sudden tears. If I didn't care so damn much about my connection to these dusty two hundred acres of channeled scabland, I could be back in my apartment instead of out here with my father. I'm tired of driving across the state just to be half-ignored or snapped at. Dad's not as bad as he was when I was a kid, but I can't love him. I can't even like him.
The ground shive
rs beneath my feet. My father doesn't seem to notice, but his dog runs up and licks my hand. When I was a girl, the land would sometimes throw me into the air with the exuberance of finally being heard. My brothers couldn't understand why I was so clumsy. They would laugh at me for talking to people they couldn't see and for hearing things they couldn't hear. By the time I was six or seven, I gave up explaining. If it hadn't been for my grandmother, I would have thought I was crazy. People in her family, she had explained, sometimes had gifts. She herself could work magic in the kitchen. Her cakes never failed to rise, and her biscuits were so flaky other women in town sometimes paid her to bake them a batch when their relatives came from out of town.
I don't understand how a soft-hearted woman like my grandmother had a son like my father. I can't even tell him that his bigotry killed his son.
The dirt twitches and gives a sharp buck. I stumble, but catch myself on a boulder. The stone is prickly with dry lichen. The smell of sagebrush is suddenly overpowering.
Then I am gone.
Or rather the winter view is gone. Down where the old farmhouse with the worn-out vinyl siding ought to be is its white-shingled twin. The air smells crisper, tangier, and while the hills are still gray, there are undertones of late autumn brown. I blink hard. I can see my father walking past me, but only faintly. It is as if a thin fog separates us. I put out my hand, but I don't touch my father or his dog. I feel someone else.
I know who it is immediately, even as my hand passes through her shoulder and I hear her inner voice. “Grandma?” I whisper. The fog flickers, and for a second I am back on the ridge with my father. The land's voice, its inhuman whisper of a wind, blows hard in my ear. Whatever is happening, the land wants me to see this. To hear this. It's not the first time it's shared a memory with me, but this feels more powerful than its messages when I was a child. My father vanishes again.
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