I thought if I could just convince the rest of the island that you weren’t as wonderful as everyone thought, then that would finally make us equal.
That’s why I told all those boys that you were a white snake.
We’d grown up hearing stories about magical white snakes—beautiful women who were actually powerful serpent demons in disguise, who used their hundreds of years of magical training to assume human forms and trick foolish men into falling desperately in love with them. On the mainland, white snake stories are love stories. Their new husbands inevitably discover their true form, but pledge their everlasting love regardless. Love triumphs over original nature. The white snakes are not predators; they just want to know the touch of human love.
But on our island, white snake stories are about deception. The wily white snake seduces and manipulates. She blinds everyone to her true nature—poisonous, foul, and disgusting. When the priests discover what she is, they drug her drink to make her lose her human glamour, and then they lop off her head.
This, I told the boys, was the source of your beauty. Why your skin shone white instead of coconut brown. Why you always wore such a mysterious, enticing smile. Why you could predict, days beforehand, when rain was going to come; why you could tell us that Auntie Yeo’s eldest son had been injured climbing trees hours before anyone discovered him.
“I’ve seen her return to her true form,” I told them. “She can’t maintain her human disguise all the time. It’s exhausting; she has to rest. When she thinks no one is looking, she takes off all her clothes and shrinks into a slimy little coil.” I weaved my fingers through the air for effect. “That’s how she sleeps.”
Of course I had never seen any such thing. But the words tasted nasty and delicious on my tongue. They let me speak the truth, through metaphor, about how much I envied and detested your gifts that could not possibly be natural, because if they were unnatural like myth implied, then that meant they were not gifts at all but demonic trickery.
I didn’t think the boys would actually believe me.
I didn’t think they would go so far.
The boys were rowdy creatures we’d known since infancy. We’d grown up together. We’d played and fished and climbed together. We’d gone swimming naked in the ocean together without so much as a blush, because back then our bodies were just sexless, neutral shapes. The boys were loud and energetic; perhaps too easily excitable, too quick to break out into fistfights, but they had never once harmed us. They were good boys.
I thought they might laugh at my story.
I thought they might jeer and tease you the next time they saw you. At the very least, I thought they might stop adoring you.
Please believe me, sister. I never thought they would hurt you.
“Is it time already?” you ask.
The crowds have grown quiet. Expectant.
I look up at the darkening sky. The sun bleeds crimson through pink clouds, but it hasn’t yet started to skim the horizon.
“We have a few minutes still,” I say.
“Good,” you say. You stand with your eyes closed. I don’t know what you’re thinking about, and I don’t ask. I reach tentatively for your shoulder, then draw my hand back, uncertain. I want to comfort you—this is my duty, the entire reason Baba and Mama sent me here with you—but I don’t know how. I have no idea what I could possibly say to make this easier. And I can’t comfort you through gestures; I can’t be the strong big sister pulling you into my chest. I’ve long relinquished all claim to that position.
“I’m not scared.” You answer my question for me. You don’t sound scared. You sound so unearthly calm. You smile up at me and squeeze my hand. “I’m just remembering.”
On our island, there live deadly snakes, thin as an index finger and long as an adult’s forearm. They hide in used firepits and bushes at the edge of the forest. They are rare but deadly. A single bite makes their victims swell grotesquely, each limb puffed up like an overripe red and green mottled mango. We’re taught as little children how to recognize their vibrant patterning like alarm bells—rich red and yellow with black stripes. When our parents find their nests, they clear them out using two remedies—smoke, to choke them out into the open where we stand waiting with shovels to chop off their heads, and sharp white vinegar to pour in circles on the ground, which sears their bellies when they try to slither away.
I wasn’t there when the boys attacked you. That is the single, thin veneer of deniability that I’ve hid behind. I didn’t know they were coming. I didn’t tell them to do it.
And I still don’t know precisely what happened. None of us do. You wouldn’t tell us anything when you came home smelling acrid and sour with your clothes torn, burned and singed just like your hair. Your pale skin was crisscrossed with a hundred tiny inflamed lacerations. Tear tracks carved through the soot on your face, but you’d long stopped crying. You wouldn’t speak at all. Baba begged you a thousand times to tell him who’d done this to you, but you kept your trembling, wide-eyed silence.
Only I knew. Smoke and vinegar. We all knew that was how you killed snakes. The boys’ logic was so plainly clear.
But I said nothing. I was afraid if I betrayed the boys, then they might betray me.
That night the priest visited our home for the last time. By then Mama had wiped the soot from your face and wrapped you in a silk robe to conceal your still-bleeding scars. But the priests didn’t seem to notice. They’d come regarding a different matter.
They said the oracle bones had spoken. Your year had come.
“What does that mean?” our mother asked.
The head priest looked her very calmly in the eyes and said, “It means the Dragon is lonely.”
And then our mother screamed.
At last the sun is about to set. Its dying, burnished glow twinkles in the shallow waves around our ankles like molten gold.
Our parents aren’t here with you. Mama would have come in your stead if they had let her. Baba would have torn the priests apart with his bare hands for you, if he’d thought that would make a modicum of difference. But this they cannot watch. After you told the priests you would go willingly as a volunteer, there was nothing more they could do. They couldn’t have locked you up; they would never do that to you. They respected your choice. They said their good-byes on the island. But they didn’t want you to be alone in these last moments, so they sent me.
Why had they so quickly assumed I would be better able to bear it? Was it because they knew, or suspected, that I didn’t love you as much?
I don’t know what to say. I have been swallowing my grief all day; I’ve wanted to maintain the illusion as long as I could that we were just here for the festival. But now the moment has come, and my words congeal in my throat like dry rice balls.
You don’t wait for me to find my voice. The light is fading fast now, and you need to go quickly, while you might still bring a little light to arm you. You take two steps toward the grotto, then glance back over your shoulder. “You’ve been a good sister. The very best.”
Then you smile, and I want to weep.
“I’m sorry.” It’s not enough. It’s not what you deserve. But I’ll never be able to give you what you deserve. It’s too late for that. “Meimei, I’m . . .”