A Snake Falls to Earth

Oli the cottonmouth, now 15, is the last of eight siblings to leave his mother’s cottage. His mother gives him a pack of supplies and a handmade blanket before chasing him away. Oli doesn’t want to leave, but his mother has been lenient by letting him stay this long to begin with.

Oli decides to visit the dammed town downstream from his childhood home. Along the way, he encounters a fork in the road that wasn’t there before. Guessing wrongly, Oli turns away from the dammed town and enters the hostile world of Robin-kept Forest.

Oli finds a clearing to sleep in during his first night and wakes to somebody stepping on his tail. Instinctively, he bites the foot, which belongs to Bruhn, an alligator person. She chases him off, forcing him to leave his belongings behind. Oli sneaks back later to retrieve his things, only for a robin person to misidentify him as a thief and wake up Bruhn. Oli escapes with his pack but could not get his mother’s blanket before Bruhn woke up. Oli flees deeper into Robin-kept Forest.

Nina and her family live in an apartment above the family bookstore, which her father runs. Her mother spends most of her time abroad on a research vessel serving as an interpreter. Nina resents her mother’s absence.

Nina is making a family tree for a class project and feels conflicted over including information about Rosita. She knows she’ll be called a liar if she writes down Rosita’s actual age. Her father suggests she omit the truth—that way, she won’t need to lie. Rosita used to tell Nina stories about the joined worlds and the existence of spirits alongside people, and one of the few phrases Nina has managed to translate from her final historia is “animal people.” Knowing that animal people have extrordinarily long lifespans, Nina wonders aloud if the family is descended from them. Her father doubts this.

Prompted by the family tree assignment to revisit Rosita’s mysteries, Nina digs through her old journals for clues. Nina recalls a story about Rosita falling into a well outside her home because she supposedly saw a girl in the well turn into a fish. She picks out a fresh journal and resolves to crack the mysteries surrounding Rosita.

After escaping Bruhn, Oli is stalked at night by a monster. The monster detects vibrations in the ground to find prey, so Oli flees up a tree in his true cottonmouth form. While waiting in the tree for the monster to give up, Oli recalls visiting the dammed town with his siblings and meeting an elder cottonmouth person. Animal people continue to grow and age forever, provided their species on Earth continues to thrive. While in the tree, Oli sees a path in the distance.

Oli descends the tree in the morning and looks for the path. This path turns out to be the path to anywhere-you-please: It cannot be found intentionally but reveals itself mysteriously to individuals. While walking the path, Oli dreams of finding a home. The path deposits him by a vast lake. Shortly after arriving, Oli meets Ami, a toad person. Though Ami doesn’t speak aloud, Oli (like all animal people) can divine some information telepathically, and the two have a friendly interaction.

Nina is weathering a storm at her grandmother’s house. It was Rosita who purchased Grandma’s land and home, but the Lipan Apache were its traditional stewards before colonialism and Indigenous genocide. Suburbs popped up on the edges of Grandma’s land but have since been abandoned. Nina and her family struggle with a city government looking to take Grandma’s land for any slight violation, such as not having a wall around her property.

Nina talks to her grandmother about animal people and learns about the Odd Jobs Man. This man appeared on the property one spring day, covered head to toe with thick clothing. After helping Rosita and Grandma with chores around the property, he promised to have some friends of his patronize the family bookstore. These mysterious figures visited the family bookstore on a regular basis and bought large quantities of books, helping the store stay afloat. Grandma is open to the possibility that these visitors were animal people, and Nina remarks that she thinks they still come to the bookstore.

Risk and Reign are coyote people who live in a valley near Oli’s “bottomless” lake. The sisters visit the lake with the intention of contacting the monsters that live at the bottom of the lake; since these monsters are older than the Earth, Risk and Reign believe they will have all sorts of secret knowledge. They hope to speak to the monsters using world-shaping, which is magic that only residents of the Reflecting World can perform; it often relates to the kind of animal the animal person is. The coyote sisters can use world-shaping suitable for tricksters, such as trapping sounds in objects. The two plan to trap a message in a bottle and drop it down to the lake monsters.

The sisters meet Oli and convince him to let them use the raft he has made. Oli agrees but joins them in order to make sure his raft stays safe. While on the raft, Oli remembers his great-grandmother telling him the story of the bison people, who were driven to near extinction when colonizers on Earth began killing bison to cut off a key food supply for Indigenous Americans.

Still on the lake, Oli and the sisters run into a catfish cultist: a catfish person who believes themself a “[guardian] of the finned and whiskered” and acts like a god of the lake (64). Accordingly, these cultists become violent with anybody who breaks their unspoken rules.

Given the catfish’s warning, Oli is reluctant to take the sisters further out on the lake. Risk and Reign understand, but they tell him they’ll show him how to send a message regardless; it might reach the monsters, and if it doesn’t, he’ll at least know how it’s done. Oli asks the lake monsters if his siblings are okay. When the catfish cultist sees the group throw the bottle in the lake, he becomes enraged and attacks the trio. Oli turns into his true form and bites the catfish on his eyeball, injecting venom and sending the attacker fleeing. The trio returns to land, the harrowing experience having cemented their friendship.

Nina suspects Rosita really did see a fish person in the well and is determined to measure the well’s depth. Nina has a long text message exchange with her mother about climate anxiety and the storms that frequently hit her grandmother’s house.

While making her way to the well, Nina meets a new neighbor, Paul. Paul is tense, confrontational, and unaware that he is on Grandma’s land. He appears to be searching for something with a compass. Paul leaves, and Nina continues to the well. Her 80 feet of marked rope do not hit a bottom, confirming her suspicion that a fish—or a whole school of fish people—may be down there.

On her way back to the house, Nina finds an injured kitten that is dying. She takes it back to her grandmother and father. By the time they reach a veterinarian, the cat is perfectly healthy. Nina’s grandmother has the ability to heal animals and people who are dying, though none of them (Grandma included) know this. Nina keeps the cat and names him Tightrope.

While Oli is eating dinner, a hawk comes to visit and says they are a friend of Ami’s named Brightest. They want to show Ami and Oli something interesting they’ve found not far off into the woods. Oli wants to finish dinner but agrees to go. While the group travels to the interesting object Brightest promised, Brightest disappears for several minutes but then returns.

Brightest shows Oli and Ami an enormous oak tree. The tree has old, rusted chain-link fencing that has grown into its bark around the trunk. Brightest asks Oli various philosophical questions about the nature of self and where it begins and ends; they then fly off. As Oli and Ami prepare to leave, Brightest returns and asks how they found the tree. Confused, Oli says Brightest showed it to them. Brightest then explains that they were trapped since disappearing on the journey out; the “Brightest” Oli and Ami talked to at the tree must have been Mockingbird, who can mimic other people’s forms and regularly torments Brightest. Oli returns to find Mockingbird has eaten half of his dinner.

Nina uses the St0ryte11er app to create private vlog diary entries in which she talks through things with herself. Watching her image on screen leads her to think about the upcoming school year and getting a free hair cut from Jess. Nina feels an attachment to Jess since they are the only other asexual person Nina knows at her school.

Nina talks about her suspicions that animal people still visit Earth and even buy books from her father. She has watched them come through the store’s alley entrance at night dressed in odd attire that entirely covers their identifiable features. Recently, one of them tripped and fell, and the two mystery book buyers fled after making such a loud noise. The one who tripped left behind a pair of strange sunglasses that don’t fit human ears, which Nina showed to her father earlier that day. Although she intended to show the sunglasses on camera, Nina hesitates at the last minute, afraid someone else might see the video and jeopardize the animal people. She stops recording and deletes the video.

Nina’s father comes to her room to tell her he’s visiting Grandma; Paul has complained about her trees overhanging his property, so Nina’s father is going to trim the branches to help Grandma avoid a fine. During the conversation with her father, Nina accidentally knocks open the box that contained the sunglasses; since the sunglasses are from the Reflecting World, they have now vanished.