That, Dorothy guesses, was about that.

Still, the Viper-King seems to her like continental drift, like global warming, like the slow, inexorable crawl of time. For Dorothy, not believing in it is being an atheist in a time when the gods descended from the heavens with their hands out.

* * *

In the early hours of the morning, Dorothy sits on the RV’s first step, watching the dusty road slide slowly under her dangling feet. The sun, just up, but already too hot in the sky, is an open hand across the tops of her knees. Her neck’s prickling under the gust of the air conditioner. Dorothy doesn’t think anything can smell hot like farmland, manure and dry stalks and the oppressive stink of your own sweat. Her jean shorts have edged up too high, and her butt is plastered to the floor, itching.

They’re winding along the roads that run around the farms. Elaine sits inside, on their slatted table, swaying back and forth with her nose pressed to the crack where the window is leveraged open. Her shoulder blades glitter over the lip of her top, sharp enough that her skin is almost translucent around them.

Dorothy feels brittle at the edges, like her fingers might snap off if she tries to bend them. She is still sandy-eyed, and aching from sleeping on the exposed springs of Elaine’s guest bed.

They stop at every field and walk a grid across the ground, search for trails or scraps of snakeskin. Dorothy scuffs her flip-flops. The sun has bleached the possibility from the world.

What was real in Elaine’s house, with that immense fragment of skin glowing and glancing beneath her kitchen lamps, is not real in the flat, bracketed realm of a cornfield. Dorothy has always believed in the Viper-King the way that other people believe in ghosts, or angels, or God; she might, in a properly combative mood, tell a stranger how real it was, but she’d be damn surprised, all the same, to find it on a Kansas farm. She is thinking of doing her math homework tonight, itching and covered in dirt. She is wondering about dinner, the almost-expired tomato soup that she’s going to cook over the hot plate.

Then Dad’s shotgun cracks the sky open.

When the Viper-King bursts up from the corn, Dorothy drops to her knees, an instinctive reaction, duck-and-cover. She presses her hands against the back of her head, forces her face down into the dirt. She is thinking, in a blind panic: Don’t make me look. I don’t want to see.

Above her, the King of the Vipers hisses and spits. Dad’s gun hammers apart the air.

The corn curves protectively over Dorothy’s head. She wonders if she could hide this way forever, on her stomach against the dust, her body a hillock in the field.

What are you afraid of? the corn demands of her.

Didn’t she already see the snake break the horizon? Hasn’t she already met the dazzling, black eyes of her father’s grail? Seen that it’s real, that it breathes, that every cramped and sweating second of her life has been spent on this moment? And seen that the argument could be made that it was a worthwhile exchange? Dorothy rolls onto her back, and sees the silhouette that the Viper-King cuts in the sky.