'Til The Snake Eats The Sun

It happens that, each year, when the whalers and the tradesmen return from their year of work, a local festival is held in the freshly harvested cornfields of my hometown. The town relaxes after straining to hold itself together for three seasons. My mother sells her flowers in a little stall on the edge of the festival thoroughfare. There is food and wine and indulgence, and there is music so loving and rapturous, it makes one forget their anger for the world.

That year I met the Gas Drake wandering actors. From town to town they travelled, enacting mythologies from those far-eastern kingdoms. They were fools, the lot of them, except one. Seemingly, she was actually from a far-eastern kingdom, though she would not name it to me. She ate heartily but drank very little, and kept her cards close to her sea-glass jewellery when we played bluff.

Men of the city are lecherous and inconsiderate around exotic women. They hold them up to the light, trying to bring colour back to their dull lives. Now I felt what it might have been like to have a male spirit animating me. No, men were not hexed with such a longing that I had to know her, to be with her, to understand how our minds were alike and opposite. 

I took her out to my favourite place, a place where, long ago, a threshold must have stood between the material and the faerie, or so was my pet theory. The edge of my mother’s poppy field, now overgrown with giant flowers, surrounding an ancient well. I told her to be careful not to disturb the flowers, as their pollen was potently hypnotic. Teasing me, she shook one at my head, but I blocked my nose in time.

I showed her my carvings, bears and birds I had whittled out of branches and old axe handles. She told me it was a men’s passion. I laughed. She asked me if I had ever been in love. I said that I had loved, and been with men, but never at the same time. She laughed.

Then she picked a stone from the ground and held it over the old, mossy well. She told me that our love would last until the stone hit the water. She dropped it. I heard no sound.

We were together for all of five days before the Gas Drake troupe packed up and left. She didn’t say goodbye - only to meet her in Kana one day, when the flowers die, and that we will know each other, and love each other until the snake eats the sun.

My mother and my poppies have withered. I have packed my things and am setting off on foot for Kana, as I cannot afford a horse thanks to your habits. I know you would say it’s an impossible journey, but as you know I have a man’s spirit. Jacob, you are a good man, but I have never loved you. I know you will find another woman, or your death in the coming storms, either way your shame will be over quickly. I shall never return.