Something strange trailed the little snake drifting in the ocean slick.
All around her lay more water than any creature could ever want, and still, deep inside her, a thirst was building that the whole ocean could not touch.
She could not drink the sea. Not one mouthful of it. Salt water would only make the thirst worse, so she had learned, the way her whole kind had always learned, to want something the ocean rarely gave.
Rain.
She rode the surface where two currents met and left a long, calm stripe of drifting weed and foam stretching to the edge of sight. No other snake alive stretched across more of the world's oceans than her kind did, yet out here, alone in the slick, the whole wide reach of that record meant nothing without a raincloud.
Fish gathered under the floating weed too, small and silver, sheltering from the open water, and she waited among them with her paddle-shaped tail keeping her steady without a single fin.
Black above. Yellow below. From beneath, she was hard to see against the bright sky. From above, she vanished into the dark water. Her strike, when it came, carried enough venom to still the fastest of them, quick and quiet, over before the fish even felt afraid.
She had never needed legs for any of this, and it was fortunate, because legs would have done her no good at all. On land she could only twist and struggle, clumsy as a fish out of water, because in a real sense that was exactly what she was.
The sea was the only home she would ever have.
She was born there, alive and swimming from her first breath, with no egg ever laid on any beach. She would raise her own young there too, out past sight of any shore. And when her skin grew tight and old, she would even shed it there, tying her long body into a slow, patient knot and sliding free of the old skin one coil at a time, the only barber she would ever need.
For days the sky stayed hard and blue, and no rain came.
She hunted between the drifting weeds, patient as ever, and the small fish here more than kept her fed. It was only the thirst that hunting could never solve.
She had gone this way before. Weeks of it. Once, nearly a whole season of it, riding out the dry stretch on nothing but patience and the little water already carried inside her.
Then, far off, the sky went the color of a bruise.
The wind changed first, and the smell of it changed too, and she drifted lower in the water, waiting.
Rain came down in long grey ropes, and where it struck the sea it did not vanish into the salt beneath it right away. It lay there a moment first, a thin, sweet skin of fresh water resting on top of the old salt water, too light to sink, too new to mix.
She lifted her head into it and drank.
It would not last. In an hour, maybe two, the wind and the waves would fold that thin layer back into the endless salt below it, gone as if it had never fallen. She knew that. She drank anyway, quickly, while the sky still had something left to give.
Then the rain passed on, and the slick went calm and blue again, and the whole ocean returned to being simply enormous, simply hers, simply not enough to drink.
She did not mind. She had never known any other kind of thirst, or any other kind of home.
Far above, a bank of grey cloud was already building over the horizon.
Somewhere out past the edge of everything a sailor could see, a small striped snake watched it come, patient, and thirsty, and completely at home on a sea she would never leave.