The boat humans won’t notice me like this-won’t try to kill me. I feel the tug the nearest gives to their beard as they anxiously put down their cards, the slight splash of the lizard dipping into the river down-stream, and the landing of the parrot in the tree branches far above.īut the fishers don’t know I crouch so still that the murky water blends with the brown and black patterns along my half-snake body. The vibrations of their voices tingle across the patterned ridges along my scaly scalp. Three of them sit on the boat’s main deck, huddled around a table. The boat humans smell of oil and gunpowder, of arrogance and cowardice and anger, and a touch of fear. Tightening my serpentine tail around the roots of the half-submerged tree, I lift my head a little farther out of the water. With one stone, the pain still stalks just behind me, waiting to strike. But one lonely stone can be easily lost, easily taken. The ignit beneath my fingers pulses into my scales, primed to soothe whatever skull-shattering nonsense my body decides to throw at me today. But the gamblers have a yellow and a pair of small reds as well. Blue for thunder, like two of those in the pot. From the shade of the nearby mangroves, I grip the blue ignit on my wire necklace of precious stones. Five small variants of the round stones lie in the gambler’s pot, their slight glow barely visible beneath the cartel boat’s canopy. THE THRUMMING POWER OF the ignits calls to me. Banishment isn’t a curse if it means escaping all of you.
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