Dorothy has never dreamed the colors of the Viper-King. The inside of its mouth is pink, bodily, more fearsome than if it had been red. Animals in fairy tales have red maws, like shed blood. Wolves that eat up children, and dragons that rise from caverns, these things are red all the way down. They hardly have organs, or stomachs, or throats. Real animals have these things, have intestines and kidneys and fat. Real animals have mouths of infected pink.

When the Viper moves, its body, like a coiled muscle, shimmers the colors of desert sand.

Its eyes remind Dorothy of photos of a solar eclipse, the way that the sun flares out dangerously around the hole the moon eats in the sky. Dorothy could put her hands into the center of those eyes. They flit over the corn, over Dorothy’s father and the long arm of his shotgun. There is intelligence in those eyes, and an almost lordly wisdom. If they had approached it more politely, Dorothy thinks, it might have sat up and told them riddles before having them for lunch.

When the King of the Vipers falls, the very earth shakes.

Dorothy runs toward it. The strap of her left shoe breaks, and she leaves it behind her in the field. The Viper’s body is like a felled redwood. Dad has the sole of his boot on its triangular head. Elaine is sitting on crushed corn, biting into the heel of her palm. Dorothy kneels by the corpse, and wonders if it will be ringed inside, like a tree, lined with the strata of centuries of life.

* * *

Their butcher knife has been at the bottom of a drawer for thirteen years. Dad has to plant it deep in the Viper’s belly and pull it toward him with both hands, so that it looks only a slip away from slicing him up the middle, splitting him in half like Rumpelstiltskin.

He makes a cross section at the snake’s stomach, and Dorothy and Elaine wear unwieldy rubber gloves to help pull back the flaps of skin. Dorothy hikes the top of her shirt up over her nose.

They don’t need much fat, but the process of cutting it is arduous. The wet back-and-forth of the knife and the mythic stink. Dorothy brings out their folding breakfast-in-bed tray so that Dad has somewhere to plunk the meat. Then, between the three of them, they carry the cut back to the RV, resting it on their shoulders like pallbearers.

They try to set the little table down gently, once they’re inside, but it slips in their hands anyway and blood spills onto the carpet. That might not ever come out. Dorothy sits, cross-legged, on the table, while Dad saws the fat away from the rest, bit by bit. The fat goes into a pan, the discarded pieces of meat drop into their mop bucket. The whole room stinks like raw insides.

Dorothy is charged with monitoring the melting fat on their hot plate, while Dad and Elaine go out into the cornfield to decide what to do with the Viper’s body. She can hear them debating, as she watches the top of the pan mist over, whether to drag it back to Elaine’s farm whole or cut it into chunks. Dad keeps laughing, a barking sound that rasps against the metal doorframe.