The Viper-King hails from Scandinavia. At least, Dad’s pretty sure. They found a story about it in a Scandinavian myth book, in a college library in California. Dad was scared to steal the whole book, so he’d taken his shaving razor out of his pack and they’d worked apart the safety stuff with the little screwdriver from Dorothy’s glasses repair kit. Dorothy knelt on the dusty linoleum floor and dragged the razor over the pages. They’re a little ragged at the edges, but she didn’t do a bad job.
The myth was brief, less than two pages, about a farmer who happened upon the Viper-King in his field and did battle with it. In the end, the farmer was killed by his servant, for the privilege of the Viper’s fat. Those myths had a concise lack of morality to them that Dorothy found interesting, that she liked. Nothing happened for any reason.
Anyone who eats the fat of a Viper-King gains its wisdom. Its wisdom is a whole world of wisdom, is the inside and back and underside of everything. But it works only for the first person who eats it, only for one.
* * *
Fate, in the fourteenth year of Dorothy’s life, has finally extended its hand to her father again. The singularity of the quest does not bother him, Dorothy knows. It would bother him if he were not singular, not chosen.
Fate has extended her hand and fate has led them to a rip-off print and copy shop in Chicago, Illinois, so that Dad can print out his latest lead and honor it with a spot on the corkboard.
The only parking spot big enough for the RV is half a mile away. Dorothy’s flip-flops are starting to break, a hole wearing in the plastic bottom of the left one, so she can feel the hot roughness of the pavement under the ball of her foot with every step. She’ll be glad to see this pair go. Dad picked them up last summer, when they bought their latest round of new clothes with the last bit of his pay from a construction job. The straps are cheap plastic and give her blisters. When she feels them wearing open she pauses to pry her shoes off her feet, looping the straps over her fingers. She drags them along the chain-link fence by the path, listening to the clank-clank, until Dad twists around and snaps, “Shoes.”
Dorothy balances the left one on her finger. “It’s going.”
“Damn.” Dad takes the flip-flop out of her hand, and bends it, stretches the weakening purple plastic until it turns white. “Put ’em back on for now.”
“They hurt.”
“I’ll buy you new ones soon.”
The print shop is lit and tiled in gray. Dad cradles their laptop against his chest while they wait in line, and Dorothy watches sweat puddle between the shoulder blades of the man in front of them.
At every counter they pass, Dad tips the screen back to study Fate’s open palm in his AOL inbox. A photograph of a mosaicked fragment of shed snakeskin, laid for scale over the spectral arm of a woman. At the picture’s edges, where the skin doesn’t swallow everything, there are slivers of vivid color: yellowish dirt, the warm brown crease of the woman’s elbow. The measurement from that crease to the tips of her fingers is the width of the skin. The length extends beyond the photo. And it is a fragment, tattered at its ghostly edges.