A TALE

 

I am to be your bride, she says, the beautiful woman with hair that shines like the moon.

He is an honest boy, a son of the countryside. He tills in the paddy field day and night, hands calloused with the scars of his labor. And when she takes his broken hands in hers, how can he know, the young man, that he’d glimpsed her beauty once before? That where there is a girl at nightfall was once a crane he’d saved at midday?

He sees her skin, fresh with youth, and her eyes, large and gray. He sees the cloth she drapes over his arms, weaved in secret in the silence of the night. He sees the sum it gives him. A high sum, for a son of the countryside.

He didn’t see the feathers. He didn’t see her pluck them from her back, one by one, and weave them into the garment. He didn’t see the flesh in his arms when he traded it for gold at the marketplace.

He never heard her cries.