The gap was too wide.
Kelana hung at the very tip of a high branch, deep in the green heart of a Southeast Asian rainforest, and stared across a sunny clearing at the next tree.
That tree was full of geckos.
Geckos were breakfast. And breakfast had moved.
"You could walk," offered a hornbill from the branch above. "Down this trunk. Across the ground. Up the other side. It would only take all morning."
Kelana kept measuring the gap with her round little eyes.
"Or stay here," the hornbill said kindly. "The sky belongs to wings."
Kelana thought about that.
She was a paradise flying snake, about a meter of green and black with little flower-bright spots down her back. She had climbed this tree straight up the bark, gripping with the ridged scales of her belly. Climbing was her everyday magic.
But she remembered something better.
Once, on a windy day, she had watched a leaf let go of its branch. The leaf was flat and wide, and it sailed. It rocked and glided and landed in the next tree, easy as a whisper.
Round things fall, thought Kelana. Flat things sail.
She slid backward off the tip of the branch until she hung in the shape of the letter J. She swung once. Twice.
Then she jumped.
Up and out she sprang, away from the tree, into bright open air. And in that one moment, Kelana changed shape.
She spread her ribs wide, wider, widest, until her round body flattened into a ribbon nearly twice as wide as before. All at once, the air was holding her up.
She swam.
Truly swam, in big S-shaped waves, head steering, body rippling, the whole snake working together like one long wing. The clearing slid away beneath her. She tilted, curved smoothly around a hanging vine, and poured herself into the leaves of the gecko tree, soft as a dropped scarf.
Somewhere above her, a gecko gulped.
The hornbill flapped across the clearing and landed with a thump. "That," he puffed, "was flying."
"Gliding," said Kelana, who liked to be exact. "Flying is for wings. I use everything else."
If you ever walk beneath a rainforest in Malaysia, Singapore, or Indonesia, look up now and then. You may see a ribbon swimming across the sky, and you will know exactly who it is.
The sky keeps a place for wings.
And it saves a little room for the brave.