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June 2018 Second Place: Serpent of Venice by Ella Syverson

Updated: Nov 24, 2018

Serpent of Venice

By Ella Syverson

The wizened tour guide propels the gondola with ease, each stroke of the long oar causing a gentle ripple through the clouded waters.

“There’s a myth,” he tells the tourists. “An urban legend, if you will. It says a great beast lives beneath Venice. Serpentine, they say, with scales like a snake, eyes like a cat, and jaws like a Nile crocodile. It haunts the canals silent as death itself, feeding on fish and those unlucky enough to fall from their boat.”

The tourists listen avidly, hanging on the gondolier’s every word. He chuckles softly to himself. “Only a tale, though. Only a tale.” He continues his tour, now telling the history of a cathedral they pass.

As the sun sets and the tourists retire to their hotels, the gondolier sets off, away from the city center. He ties his boat to a dock adjoining the butcher’s shop. He enters, and returns lugging a heavy bundle in a canvas sack. The old man grunts as he heaves it into the gondola, and pushes off from the dock.

Now he returns to the heart of the city. He retraces the route of his tour through the oldest canals, and comes to stop before the cathedral. He begins to whistle, a lilting, melancholy tune. As he whistles, he unties his canvas parsel. He leans over the edge of the gondola and smiles. He reaches out a wrinkled hand to stroke the long, reptilian snout that has emerged from the black water. Slitted yellow eyes blink back at him from beneath the surface.

Greetings observed, the gondolier takes the goat carcass from its canvas wrappings and launches it into the canal. With one snap of its crocodilian jaws, the serpent has swallowed the goat and disappeared once again into the canal’s dark embrace.


---Ella Syverson is a high school student in rural Wisconsin, where she attends a project based charter school that allows her to pursue her creative passions. She has been published previously in Youngzine, 101 Words, and Silver Pen's Youth Imagination.



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