The Serpent Crouches in the Heart of the Unravelling

The Serpent curls around the engine core when you enter. 

That’s not how it starts—you remember, as much as memory can be reliable so close to the heart of the unravelling, the moment linear time and Newtonian physics go tits up for good: Deck 3, Hydroponics, 78% spatial-temporal degradation. Security officer Tahl looking directly at the tree-shaped thing despite your repeated warnings and his skin spiralling off like a peeled tangerine, a body suspended mid-air in zero gravity with its fleshy parts blooming from its spinal column. A delicate structure. Strange. Beautiful, in a way.

You told him. 

You told him. 

“They never listen,” you say, and the detailed hallucination of Helen clutching the handhold beside you nods solemnly in understanding. 

The fabric of space-time doesn’t quite recover after that.

The Serpent is a young, hungry thing. You pull yourself down the elevator shaft toward the belly of the liveship Fortunate Orbit when it happens—it takes a beat, a sideways lurch, a wrongness. A fissure. The Serpent hums its song, and lights fracture around the periphery of your vision into a technicolour hum. Time turns upside down with a sickening crunch. You swallow around the inside of your body, and then— 

[you’re wiping the remains of officer Tahl off your jumpsuit, you’re yelling at Manager Juno, you’re shutting your locker for the last time before your reassignment, you’re kissing Helen goodbye the morning after and she smiles into it, her nose against your nose a soft pressure, months ago, now, an age,]

Stop it, you think. Your mouth doesn’t move. Witchcraft is less about what you say, anyway, and when you relocate your body enough to finally see, you find yourself hovering in front of the hatch to the engine chamber, space-grade metal burst open like overripe fruit. Ribboning wires and titanium alloy curl around you as you pass through. 

The Serpent watches.

The Serpent waits.

The Serpent curls around the engine core when you traverse, its fat, many-toothed body nothing like any snake you’ve ever seen, and you’re grateful for an absent second that officer Tahl finished dying hours ago: his death would have been worse if he was here and looking at the thing itself instead of around it. Unspeakably so.

[He should have listened,] the Serpent offers. 

“They never do,” you say. Your nose is bleeding again. “Have you been returned before, or am I going to have to go over the specifics?” 

[That’s very sweet,] the Serpent says with a perversion of fondness that crawls into you like your body is a nest, a shelter. 

You brace yourself. Your scanning spell begins emitting a high-pitched shrieking noise. Spatial degradation 93%, it says, as the Serpent opens—an eye or a thousand, a black-hole gut, a mouth—and all the bones in your body are unmade. 

Time lurches again. You’re sitting 

[on your mother’s balcony, watching the crowd underneath you ripple and churn like an ocean. on Sister Ludovika’s sofa before she grins toothlessly and sends you into your first unravelling. in the café by the window overlooking the desert as the proximity notification from the dating app goes off and you look up to see—] 

Helen. Helen. Helen. Helen in the café. Helen in your kitchen. Helen in your bed. Helen a month ago, hand clenched around her duffel's fraying strap.

Her face in your memory is vivid, even greyish and tired in the half-light ten minutes before the artificial sunrise of Habitat 7. “Just some space, Fee, for a little while,” she says, mouth curling into a final sort of frown.

Another eye, open. 

“You do know you’re cursed, right?” you ask—a sickening turn of memory, a coolness as the Serpent sorts through time in the fleshy bits of your mind—and you’re back in your apartment with the woman you picked up online blinking up at you, shirt half-unbuttoned and hair spilling onto your pillow. You need to do laundry. You need to get the Serpent to stop picking memories for you. 

“I’m sorry?” Helen asks, and the curse is a dark, pulsing, oil spill-shimmer inside her ribcage. 

You break it. You always do.

You need to stop thinking about—

[Ah,] says the Serpent, [how shocking.] 

You splinter back into reality with a wet inhale. The Fortunate Orbit pulls itself around you in pieces. 

[You’ve always had a weakness for the messy, sad ones,] the Serpent adds, contemplative. Its form shifts in nauseating heaves as mass and matter rearrange themselves in front of you until it takes the shape of—the wrong shape, dark skin and dark eyes and braids and hands but all messed up, a mockery of a woman that lives in the corners of your body. Used to. It makes you—something, it turns you into something, the image.

[Can you be a little angrier? It’s almost enough, now...] 

And you feel it pull you. Spatial degradation, says a spell half-disintegrated, but the number is blurry. Unimportant. 

“Nah,” you say. It’s a good enough approximation even if your mouth and your teeth and your vocal cords are occupying different corners of the room as the Serpent pulses and seethes, its body—her body—stretching to end you. Unbirth you. 

“This is going to hurt,” you add, then allow yourself to lose all remaining form as you cast. 

Witchcraft is a matter of depth, not complexity. What is it you need? A piece of string. A tub of bones. A pair of pliers. Everything else is a thought-game. 

The spiralling explosion of the Serpent’s rage is like nails on a chalkboard: horrid, unavoidable, satisfying. It kicks you in the frontal lobe one last time before you shove its remaining bits through an opening you make in the unravelling. Its face, made wrong, smiles at you with an upside-down mouth and Helen’s accusing eyes, warm, terrible. 

[I’ll be seeing you, bone-eater,] it says, soft like a caress, the last twinge of a persistent headache beneath your skull. [I hope she never calls you. I hope—]

You plaster a curse onto the eight-fingered hand that holds onto your form still until it sizzles, spasms, and lets go. 

"Okay," you say, then lick your thumb and fuse the opening between space and unspace shut.  

†

She’s walking away from your apartment door when you stumble into the building. You’re sweating in the humid, pulsing heat that sits on the rings of Habitat 7. 

Spinning up the unravelling took forever. You’re desperate for dinner and a nap. You’re desperate for a shower, truly, but Helen is here—here in this mildew-choked house, your house, dipped in shadow enough that her expression is blurred, incomprehensible. 

The image of a creature stuffing itself into her memory-shell sits in your mouth, still undigested.

“Hey,” Helen says. She shuffles her feet.  “I was just passing by, and I thought—”

And that—isn’t that just it? Helen, thinking. Too much, not enough, about the wrong kinds of things, all the time. 

Helen. Here. Again. 

“I have noodles," you say, and lift the takeout bag. 

You wonder if she’ll notice that you still buy her favourite order without thinking, every time. 

© 2022 Fruzsina Pittner

About the Author
Fruzsina Pittner is a designer, illustrator and writer in the process of acquiring a PhD in literature and video games. She is a serial committer of yarn crimes, has a fondness for hills that are really good and round, and has been known to enjoy sticking her hands into dirt. She tweets at @rynezion.