2013-04-14 - 11:33 a.m.
There was a snakeoil man and an actual snake, but the snake was a leviathan, huge, living in a canyon just outside of town. It was a beautiful creature, incredible shining silver-rainbow scales on its back, but it had a terrifying mouth. It would open up with almost no teeth, it had no eyes either, but the throat was a sort of inviting drapery of flesh.
The people loved the serpent and his older, cheerful balding slave. The scrapings from the mouth, the secretions between the scales, had healing powers, but once used seemed to infect the minds of those healed with a psychological disorder, a love for the beast, and an addiction to the ointment it gave off.
The first disappearance was sad, but no one connected it to the serpent, not yet. The second came soon after, and although a few murmured, so much of the town had partaken of the snakeoil that no one made the connection. One by one the people disappeared, and a few of us, who had not trusted the too-charming man from the beginning, hid away in a cave above the clouds, where we hoped the serpent couldn't find us.
We talked and plotted, and a few scared people came up to join our band. The thin air and sunlight (it had somehow been growing increasingly cloudy at the village, clouds that never seemed to burn away) seemed to clear our heads. We knew it was the serpent and his human slave eating our friends, our families, and we had to fight back.
Then along came a woman none of us had seen before. She was thin, ragged, terrified, her big brown eyes always darting to dark corners. She knew of the beast, it had gobbled up her town years ago, and she's been traveling around, trying to find it, trying to warn others of its terrible ways. She knew to follow the clouds, and that's how she'd found our village. But, unfortunately, she didn't know how to kill it.
I asked her if she had ever seen the thing's tail. She looked shocked, and admitted that she hadn't. So I devised a plan based on my theory: it wasn't a serpent, but a many-headed monster hidden deep within the earth. We would have to venture from our hideout in the sky into the earth, to find the body of the beast and destroy it.
I woke up then. I guess I'll never know if our plan succeeded.
