My name is Quynh, and I would like it on the record that I was right about the rice cooker.
~~~•••~~~
Here is what I remember about the fall, in order of importance.
1. My father disappeared into a hole in the air on the back of a golden fish. (Not dealing with this. It's in a drawer. The drawer is full.)
2. The corridor was made of unfinished myths, and the floating pages were in my handwriting. And Minh's.
3. My brother's best friend's little brother grabbed my wrist.
Number 3 should have been number 1. I screamed at him in Ancient Greek, the only language in which I can be articulate while falling. Translation: "You absolute disaster, you have torn a hole in a hole." He nodded like he understood.
~~~•••~~~
I came to on a stool in the middle of a riot.
Two women were pulling my hair into something I can only call architecture. A girl barreled in with a tray of honey cakes and got shouted at for it. Somewhere beyond the wall a goat was losing an argument. A very old woman in the corner was predicting omens for anyone who would hold still, and nobody would.
I remembered everything. The corridor, the notebook, the fish. But remembering something and believing it are different departments, and the second one has humiliated me before.
So: hypotheses. A concussion. A shared hallucination, except my subconscious does not have this budget. Or the notebook had done something.
I wanted the third one, which is exactly why I cross-examined it first.
The bronze mirror was warm. The saffron on the veil was the correct saffron. There was a thumbprint in the pottery glaze, a real person's, and I looked at it for an unreasonable amount of time. I asked the attendants what year it was, in my best Attic. They stared. I tried Vietnamese. They answered at once.
A Greek wedding in Vietnamese. That was either a very specific fever, or two kids at a kitchen table choosing the one language their mother could hear. Something big moved behind that thought, and I sat on it. One data point. I have built presentations on one data point and watched a professor take them apart with a pen cap.
And a bride in white narrows it to forty myths, which meant I needed a name. So I did what any sensible woman does: I stared into the mirror with a blank face.
"Bridal fog," the oldest woman announced, with the satisfaction of someone diagnosing a goat. "She's forgotten her own name."
They found this wonderful. Apparently brides forget everything on the wedding morning, and the custom is to quiz them to see if they're still in there. So when I said, in a very small voice, "Remind me, whose wedding is this?", it was exactly the right question.
"Eurydice's!" three of them sang. "To Orpheus! Say it, say it, how does it sound?"
My heart did something rude. I told it to shut up. Names are cheap, and a name is a coincidence until something else agrees with it.
~~~•••~~~
The courtyard was worse. A wreath-seller was fighting a dog for a sausage. Children were being herded away from the altar by a grandmother with a ladle. A reed player was tuning the auloi, which everyone kept calling "the pipes," and somebody should be fired.
And every garland was roses.
"Those are wrong," I muttered, because I am a person who corrects things under her breath. "Wedding wreaths are myrtle. Aphrodite's plant. It's literally the only thing they're FOR."
I turned away to look for Quan. When I turned back, every garland was myrtle.
Not swapped, not replaced. The wreath-seller was handing them out with the same dull expression as before, and when I asked, a servant told me they had “always” been myrtle and I must be dizzy.
I did not mean to do that. I want that on the record. I have never meant to do anything that actually worked.
I stood very still with my hands folded and decided to touch nothing else. Then I remembered who else had been writing in my notebook, and my stomach did a small, interesting drop. I put that in the drawer too. (The drawer is not holding.)
Quan was at the far end of the courtyard like a statue made specifically to be loved. The tunic fit. His hair was windswept on purpose, which should be impossible. Something odd happened behind my ribs, and I diagnosed it as "the shock of seeing a friend dressed as a Praxiteles." Diagnosis: pending.
"Quan. Do you remember the corridor, the notebook, anything?"
"…You look really good."
"That's not an answer."
I rolled my eyes, my neck went warm, and I blamed the sun. The sun is Apollo's. Sorry, Apollo.
Then a boy lit the torches by the altar, and they hissed. They smoked. One wouldn't catch at all, and a man beside it wiped his eyes and laughed like it was nothing.
Ovid. Hymen's torch at the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice, spitting smoke and stinging eyes, and nobody understanding the omen until it was too late. I had made myself a rule: believe nothing until I saw that torch.
I nearly applauded. The dread arrived half a second after the thrill, which is the order it always arrives in with me.
We were in the tragedy of Orpheus. And trust me, I have never been a fan of Greek love stories, especially the one where the girl dies before the story even gets going. The only reason it made it into my notebook was the Underworld.
I gave Quan the short version: we had just fallen into a myth in real time, he was now a legendary musician (what he did with that information was his problem), and I'd give him the full download later.
My plan:
• Avoid the meadow. In every version, a snake bites Eurydice after the wedding, in a meadow, while she runs from Aristaeus the beekeeper, who is a creep and about whom I will take no questions.
• Slip away from the feast to the side garden colonnade. Meadow equals death. Colonnade equals columns.
• Stay cool.
Bullet three was the only one I failed.
"Don't do anything enthusiastic," I said.
"I would never."
He was already being enthusiastic. I could hear it humming behind his face.
~~~•••~~~
I was surveying the entire courtyard during the ceremony. Exit: three. Guards: one, bored. I counted columns past his shoulder.
When I lifted my veil for the anakalypteria, the real unveiling, the one every scholar argues about, the whole courtyard sighed, and for four seconds I forgot to be afraid. Two aunties ambushed me with a gold arm-ring and a bundle of dried herbs, and said "fertility" like women who had never been told no. I tucked the herbs into my sash.
Then the priest invited the groom to speak, and Quan did Husband Mode. It was formula, but good. "That dress doesn't hold a candle": it's oil lamps, Quan, but fine. The debate bit was accurate, except the footnote argument lasted four days, not three.
Then his voice went soft.
"She carries more pressure than she ever admits out loud."
"Even when she thinks she has to hold the entire story by herself."
Here is what nobody tells you about being heard: it doesn't feel warm. It feels like walking into a glass door. I had never told him. Not Minh, not anyone. My father has said the opposite in fourteen different ways.
So I made my face go blank and counted columns. I saw him glance back, saw him think the jokes had landed wrong. For the record, my silence was a compliment. I was too busy being heard to function.
"Will you take this man as your husband, and stay by his side?"
"Yes."
I said it the way I sign for a package. Any other way, my voice would have done something. “Stay by his side.” I picked it up like a hot pan and put it down fast.
Somewhere in the dancing, an aunt "fixed" my sash. I didn't notice. Remember that.
Then the couple's dance. Quan said, low, "I practiced for high-school prom three nights in a row. Just follow." I almost laughed. My hand was on his arm. I don't know when it got there. It stayed.
"Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” The crowd rang.
Well, that escalated fast.
I did the math: refuse, make a scene, draw eyes, get the plan noticed. And what kind of happily marriage couple refuses to kiss in their wedding? The logic held for the length of the sentence and not one second longer.
"Just do it," I told him.
He leaned in with that stupid, terrified face, and for one second the part of my brain that tracks exits went silent.
That was when I heard it.
A tiny dry hiss under the pipes, like someone peeling tape off a box. Then something hit my ankle, quick and hot, two needles and a squeeze. My brain filed it under ‘thorn.’ Then under ‘wasp.’ By the time I looked down it was already a third thing: a copper-colored viper pouring out of my split herb bundle, completely unhurried, like a man arriving fashionably late to his own murder.
Heat climbed my calf. My tongue went strange and thick. The music got far away and very polite.
Why?
Not the snake. I know the snake. Why is it here? The bite is in the meadow. After the feast. With Aristaeus. In Virgil she's running, in Ovid she's walking with the naiads, in Apollodorus she's chased. Every single source agrees on grass. There is no grass. There is flagstone.
Why?
My legs were leaving. My weight tipped into Quan's shoulder. Why is it the wedding? Why the courtyard? Why the one spot I marked safe?
Why, why, why, WHY—
And a drawer I hadn't known existed slid open in my head.
Minh in the kitchen table. Two a.m. A purple pen held and spun between two fingers.
“Y’know what would be more fun? Instead of dying in some random meadow, we send the snake DURING the wedding.”
“Why?”
"Think about it, Quynh. Joy, joy, joy, and then BAM. The bite. Audience whiplash. Extra dramatic effects."
"That violates the tradition."
"Tradition is a rumor."
I laughed. I remember laughing. I was proud of him. I wrote it in the margin, in purple, in my own handwriting: Bite → wedding (MINH).
The next morning my father called, and by eight the whole exchange had been wiped from my head, replaced by a single sentence: "And what exactly do you plan to do with that stupid story, Quynh?"
So, for the official record, the cause of death: a footnote. My brother's. With my initials next to it.
My first thought was MINH. My second was a Greek word I will not translate. My third was Quan's face, because he was holding me up, crumpled like a puppy who had just lost his favorite shoe, and he looked so ridiculous I wanted to burst out laughing. Except I had no breath for it.
What I had was a full sentence. I had time to compose it, and I was proud of it. It went:
‘The ritual is in chapter three, the underworld has rules, and whatever you do, don't read my margins.’
Three words of it made it out.
"Ritual… underworld… don't…"
The last thing I did in the myth I had waited my whole life to see was lose an argument with my own handwriting.
He caught me. Of course he did. Enthusiastically.
