The Birth of the Avant Garde

Snake was unlike any of the other party goers on this planet. Loose affinities with worm, that is true, but snake would not shove soil into his face and swallow in order to push it out his backside, to get from here to there. No. 

Snake, though legless, could climb trees, and had a particular affinity for climbing apple trees. Those, perhaps not so remarkable trees, but yet, being of only a certain height and no larger, they gave a decent enough vantage point of the general environs and yet, didn’t place snake at such a remove that snake would be totally flung into the belly of heaven. 

Owing to the fact snake’s eyes were on with sides of his head, when up the apple tree, he had a nice panorama view. During dawn, dusk and night, snake’s pupil appeared almost round, completely dilated.

He had many brothers and they were goers of the everywhere, but he was the arboreal snake: vision is best in arboreal snakes and he had an eye for fashion. Snake was proud of many things, chief among them, his ability to take off his shirt, cast it into the leaf litter; grow himself a whole new shirt.

The Woman Called Evening, she sees this Snakemanfellow this Newoutfitmaker, and she notices that he is dressed in a fashion as no other being she knows does dress.  He is legless and armless, and he reminds her of waters, and she watches at him in his knotted coil, the surface of his back, an assembly of a million small worlds, a  million small tiles on the floor of some miniscule palace turned inside out. He is a long road, this one. In the glint of his eye is something of the light of an endless oil lamp lighting up the dark. Long and lean and longer still is this Serpentmanfellow.

She looks at the serpent and the oil lamp flame in his eye and she thinks that he is not water,  he is slippery oil. and then, no, she thinks, he is incense smoke that could, curling up her arm, wind its way into her nose, and fill up her throat and lungs with something spectacular, that would addle her head. It is strong and powerful like the words of an oracle, but also like the worlds of an oracle,  she doesn’t not quite understand the meaning. She thinks that the exotic dancing quality of smoke, of this Serpentmanfellow could make her feel so good. So high. Also, that it might addict her. Might kill her.

She wonders why she thinks that.