My father was decades older than my mother, and my mother was beautiful. One day when I was twelve, the girl who lived next door said that my mother married my father for nothing but his fortune, so I went home to ask them if it was true. My father laughed out loud, and told me a story.

He said he came from a village in the south. West of the village ran a river where all kinds of snakes flourished. East of the village stood a volcano that had not erupted for thousands of years. The last eruption had left behind a crater that for many years allowed no life to grow, till one day, a strange tree with crimson leaves emerged in the middle of the crater. The tree was so big that ten men holding each other's hands could not encircle it. A giant, green snake curled itself around the trunk a few times. The snake was the guardian of the tree.

The tree was the gate to a lonely forest, my father said. If you were brave enough to stand before the snake and it happened to like you—what it liked was never clear, though—it would let you into a forest, where any illness, except for the bite of a snake, could be healed. The snake would allow only one person into the forest at a time. The person would have to wait three days before she was healed and led back to the outside world, where three decades would have passed. Her friends and family would all have aged or even died by then, but despite this, the snake was not short of visitors. Most of the time, however, it would only throw an expressionless glance at the visitor, then sink back into its perpetual sleep.

In the village that lay between the river and the volcano lived a nineteen-year-old woman who wanted nothing more than to be with her husband for the rest of her life. But her life would not be a long one. Her lungs were failing, the doctor had told her. Despite all her husband's gold, she had only a few days to live. But she wouldn't go up the mountain to try the snake, for she loved her husband and would not have him wait so long for her. Yet just when she was content to die beside him, fate struck again.

The day after the doctor told her she would soon die, her husband coughed badly too. He would not see a doctor. He said to his wife that he knew in his heart it was she who had brought him death. He blamed her for his suffering, and said he did not deserve to die for a woman who was cursed by fate and despised by the gods. He said he would go to the snake.

It broke the woman's heart, but even so, she followed him to the tree. She wanted to be with him till the last second of his departure. When they stood before the giant snake, the woman a few steps behind the man, the snake turned its emerald eyes toward them. Each the size of a man's head, they stared hard at the husband. Then, the snake uncurled itself and revealed a patch of bark that seemed as smooth as silk. When the man touched it, it was as if the bark was made of air. As he drew back his hand, for a split second he saw a bright shade of green through the bark.

The man turned to the woman and said, "Now that I stand before the gate, I remember how I once loved you and how good you've always been to me. I'm sorry. I want to hold you again before I leave you."

Upon hearing this, the woman darted to the man and threw her arms around him. The man hurled her through the gate. She found herself in the most beautiful forest she'd ever seen, but all she felt was despair. She thought her husband would soon die.


***


Three days later, a small fairy came to her. Now cured, she was led out of the forest. The crater was almost the same as thirty years before, except for a cabin that stood a few steps away. A middle-aged man was sitting on the doorstep.

"You look as beautiful as ever," he said.

That night she learned his cough had been fake. Soon they had a baby, and that baby was me. 


.

Fei Sun is a graduate of the MFA program at Northwestern and has a story in the current issue of Five Points.





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