The Serpent King: Chapters 21–31

And then a stab of nostalgia. The last time he had played the electric guitar in front of anyone was in front of his father, before his father decided not to hand him the snake. Before his father was arrested.

He had so much confidence and poise.

This changes things. I can use this. I can work with this. She began to formulate a plan.

“You’ve performed plenty of times in front of venomous creatures. You’ll be right at home.”

Still, in the intervening month or so between promising Lydia he’d do it and the show’s date, he’d had plenty of time to lose his nerve.

He felt carved from something beautiful and indestructible. Light. Air. He wondered how long he could ride the wave of that feeling before it crashed again onshore.

The leafless branches of the trees surrounding the prison were skeletal against the iron-hued December sky. They looked as barren and lifeless as Dill felt.

Dill’s father regarded him with cold skepticism. “College? Is that where you mean to learn true discipleship?”

Dill fought for composure. He assumed that he had a finite reserve of tears that he had already exhausted for the day. Wrong on that count too. He could feel a welling inside him that he couldn’t contain much longer.

You can never let down your guard. You can never stop being vigilant. You're never safe from yourself. Your own blood will poison you.

I should start saving up for a new laptop and writing classes. And I should get someone who knows writing to read it. Maybe Lydia will. But I better write fast before she leaves for college and gets too busy. Exuberant purpose filled him.

“That sounds awesome. A tiny bohemian artists’ colony right here in Forrestville.”

Lydia fought tears, frantic and despondent.

But on the floor of White County Hospital, he screamed in some anguished and alien language of bereavement.

“You’d have learned more about Jesus than about Travis in that eulogy,” Lydia said.
Travis and Dill’s preacher had given the eulogy, and it was long on the light and the life and the resurrection and short on actual details about Travis’s life.