Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

The bulging roundness continued until it came to a point where what might be the tail end of the rope seemed to be embedded inside the bulbous portion. There was nothing on the rope that suggested weakness. The only change was one thick black vertical line, a marking of some kind, and the place where the two ends appeared to be attached.

Movement. The vertical black line was slowly growing thinner, finer, even as it drew closer toward Masako, who clung fiercely to the bark with all her claws.

It was an eye.

The black vertical stripe was its pupil.

Of a snake.

The largest snake in the world. Squeezed tightly around the Lady Pine, its tail clamped inside its jaws.

Masako screamed.

The snake tightened its noose; a wet cracking sound rang from below.

No! Masako screamed. She flung herself at the snake and began biting in a crazed frenzy. But the snake’s scales were not mortal. Masako’s teeth skittered and clattered against its skin, as if she were biting metal. And still she did not desist. She bit and screamed, bit and screamed, until her small ineffectual teeth splintered into fragments. Her muzzle red with blood, she spat out her teeth, despair filling her tiny fluttering heart.

She could not help the Lady.

They would both die.

Why should two die? When it could be one?

Masako shivered with exhaustion. Her mouth, her paws, a mess of broken teeth, ripped claws.

She moved. Crawled toward the rounded point of the snake’s snout and discerned its narrow nostrils. She scrambled up the slippery form to crouch enticingly close. Her shivering rodent life, her tripping vibrant heart. The scent of her rich blood, the pulsing warmth of her individual life. She twitched her tail so that his eyes had something seductive to trace as her scent began to seep into his time-dulled reptilian brain.

Come, take this life, Masako invited. Flicking her paws. Scraping her claws against the coarse bark.

The snake’s scales shrieked metallic as he loosed his hold from his tail and whipped his head around.

He clamped down with the hunger of a thousand years.

Bright red light roared behind Masako’s eyes.

She thought she heard a gasp far far below.

She could not feel the snake’s fangs as they began to plummet. They twisted through the cold night, like acrobats, like falling angels.

The air was screaming.

It came so fast she didn’t gasp.

She was surrounded in darkness.

Falling, falling.

Rain fell upon her face, icy cold, shocking. She opened her eyes, and her entire body seized with pain. She felt as though she had been crawling over a mountain of broken glass.

Copper taste in her mouth.

She could see. Forest. Wet and cold with morning. Her breath misting in front of her face. Blood on yellow fallen leaves. She ran her tongue over her teeth.

Several were missing. And her head ached. Like she had been punched and kicked. An aching fire in her fingers. She raised her hands and stared with confusion.

Not at the raw, bloody palms and lost fingernails.

But her hands.

They were like a stranger’s.

Creased and worn, filthy, bloody, and so human. No longer a rat. She shook her head. And frowned at the heaviness of her head, the weight and the surreal length of her matted locks.

Her wretched hair, covered in pine needles, twigs, and brambles, was long enough to reach the back of her calves.

Her thoughts churned so slowly. There must be a reason, she thought vaguely. The Lady. Had she failed her after all?

Masako raised her head.

She was in a forest. Early evening, a red cast to the glimmer of skies between the thick branches of trees, birds twittering and chirruping unseen, and somewhere a woodpecker’s staccato. The distant roar of traffic, commuters wending their way home. The dark silhouette of a torii against the backdrop of trees.

It was the gate at the Shinto shrine. The one she had gone to during a school trip in elementary school when they were studying leaves. She had friends, then. It had been such a pleasant excursion.

Something caught the corner of her eye.

A ragged piece of rope.

Lying on the moss at the base of a large worn pine tree with a curiously pinched middle.

Masako’s breath caught in her throat.

She stumbled toward the tree and gently traced her fingers over the indented bark, the place of its deformity. Small threads were caught within the tree’s fiber, as if it had tried to grow around the binding. It oozed with golden sap, but the rope had been somehow torn off. The tree was wounded, possibly mortally, but it was finally free.

It was one of the knotted ropes that Shinto priests tied around special trees. But this pine — it had somehow been forgotten a long, long time ago. Off the main pathways, away from the shrine, it had continued growing with no one to loosen the binding as she grew, no one to tend to her needs.

As Masako turned away, she let the rope fall to the moss bed. Plastic Hello Kitty slippers. There. She would have laughed if she had any strength remaining. She toed them on and began walking toward lights that were beginning to wink into existence as evening turned toward night.

She finally reached her neighborhood as the sun was beginning to rise. She had no recollection of the path she took. Only the numbed sense of relief when she saw the familiar streets.

Only—

Only. they were familiar. but there was a certain off -ness. Like how she would feel if someone had gone into her bedroom while she was away, and then she had returned to find that everything had been rearranged.

The houses were almost the same. The trees were almost the same.

I am half-dreaming, Masako thought. I am half-asleep.

She clattered through the metal gate of her house and opened the door with her key.

The house smelled familiar. Yet musty. A little dirty. How unlike her mother, Masako thought numbly as she toed off her house slippers.

Her legs wobbled so much she had to crawl up the stairs on her hands and knees. Her raw palms, which had dried out during the long walk home, broke open beneath the weight of her body. She left red bloody handprints on the pale wood floor, her dirty long hair trailing behind her. She crawled down the hallway and rose up, once, to her knees, to open her door. She crawled into her room, her den, her safe hollow. And locked the door.

Knocking.

Insistent.

Masako pulled her blanket over her pounding and aching head. Something prickled unpleasantly beneath her back. She reached down and retrieved a dried twig. She slid her hand out the side of her comforters and dropped the debris onto the floor.

“Masako-chan,” her mother’s voice called. It was toneless. Nothing inflected. It wasn’t a collage of emotions. But flat. As if she didn’t feel any longer.

Masako raised her head.

Her mother’s voice.

The same.

But different.

“Masako-chan,” her mother repeated. “Moriya-san from Community Health is here to see you.”

Moriya, Masako mouthed, painfully with her swollen mouth.

“Masako-san,” a female voice rang out, like a wind chime on a clear summer morning. “Please come out. I would like to see you to thank you.”

A choking sound.

Her mother wasn’t crying.

She was laughing.

“Thank her!” she exclaimed. “Thank her for what? You are madder than she is. Coming here for fifteen years, every Monday through Saturday. And she has never once opened the door. Never once acknowledged you. And you want to thank her!” She laughed and laughed, and it was the ugliest thing Masako had ever heard.