Year of the Snake

Snake Bridegroom

21 Snake Bridegroom I was helpless when the soft hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up and prickle, and I became aware that I was not alone in my bedchamber. I could hear the shoji screen slide stealthily open and shut, the creak of the floorboards, an awful slithering coming closer, and closer, until terror spilled open like the explosion of a bright red peony in a hailstorm and I knew that death was near. And it was precisely at that moment that my lover came to me each night to tenderly ease away my fear with his cool light touch and the muscular coil and sinew of his embrace. He was willow-thin, so elegant in pale green robes of the most exquisite silk, 22 that smelled sweetly, as if from the scent of freshly crushed leaves. I could not see his face in the shadows, but he whispered strange and lovely things to me until my eyelids quivered, slid shut in sleep, and when I awoke in the morning, he was already gone. When my blood stopped flowing with the full moon, and in the baths my mother saw how my breasts and belly were beginning to swell, my parents called me in to them and asked me to reveal the name and family of my bridegroom. And when I shamefully admitted that he had no name, no face, my mother took me aside and told me that the next night I must insert a large embroidery needle attached to a spool of thread into the collar of my lover’s kimono. At first I said I couldn’t, but my mother 23 coaxed me, and soon desire to see the face and know the name of my secret bridegroom overpowered all of my guilt over using such a trick to find out his true nature. So I did exactly as my mother instructed me, and the next morning we followed the length of thread leading from my bedroom, tangling through the rice fields, and unspooling all the way up to a high mountain cave, where a dead snake lay, with jade-green scales and jewel-bright eyes, his throat cruelly pierced by the same silver embroidery needle I pinned into the collar of my lover’s robe the night before. I wept, as my mother dragged me away, and after that, my thoughts became jumbled and confused. I imagined that I could feel my womb twisting and writhing, full of serpents, until one day it was too much for me 24 to bear. I stabbed myself with a chopstick and set them free to slither out where my restless spirit could follow them through grass and trees, back up into the mountains, where smooth planes of rock become honeyed with the golden heat of sunlight by mid-morning— to bask and drench myself in this yellow sweetness, and dream again of love. ...