Free Scale-Bright by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

"I've missed you so much. Your skin, your mouth."
    "But not my conversation or company?" Houyi navigates the width and curvature of her wife's spine. They've mapped and measured each other so well, every knot of bone and tendon, every indentation and ridge, the width of waist and thighs. Houyi cannot remember a time when this knowledge, this awareness of Chang'e, was not embedded in her deep as marrow in bone. "This must be the modern sensibility I've heard so much about."
    "Oh, shush, you haven't even taken me to dinner or bought me beautiful things." Chang'e wriggles when Houyi's hand traces up her calf, stops at the back of her knee. "Take all of this off. Don't leave a stitch."
    She obliges, undoing hooks and buttons with fingers long made nimble from fletching. This time they pace themselves, and when they finally part to lie loose-limbed and sweat-glistening it is as if—for all she's told Julienne otherwise—they are new brides. Intoxicated, delighted, every care pushed aside.
    Houyi does not say that the year she's wrung out of Xihe will soon be up and that there might not be another after it.
     
    2.3
     
    Houyi listens to the push of water against water, the passage of pelicans and hornbills, and watches a parrot peck at a pomegranate. A white mynah flits by and settles on her shoulder. Animals often do that, drawn to her stillness, in blithe disregard of what she does.
    It is so lulled that it remains perching on her after a blue-white feather, the quill sharp as any arrowhead, strikes where she sat. By then she has stepped behind the lanky boy who smells of pomade and leather. She seizes his hair and, pulling it back, opens his throat.
    The mynah darts into the canopies. Houyi catches the body as it crumples; they are obscured from mortal sight and security cameras, but the blood may stain. She holds him over the water as he turns from boy to bird the size of a hound. His pinions are indigo, his belly ivory.
    "Why did you kill him?"
    "He believed he'd win unrivaled glory by attacking me." She wipes the blade on the feathers; later she will have to properly clean it. "Do serpents not kill?"
    "Only for food. He couldn't cast out his spirit in time—he died, in truth and finality, with his flesh. As they say, you have no mercy." The snake crosses her arms. She remains under palm shade, keeping a distance they both know is more cosmetic than useful. "It's not even that you kill in anger."
    "I rarely do that."
    "That makes it worse."
    "He did," Houyi says as she wills the knife away, "stalk my niece. To devour, as far as I could make out. Certainly not to make friends."
    The sound the viper makes is too specific, a hiss too protracted, to come from human tongue or larynx. "He did, did he? Give me his carcass. I'll eat his innards; that way he'll never reincarnate."
    "A moment ago you were criticizing my lack of mercy."
    "Julienne—" Olivia hunches into her thin sundress. "How is she?"
    When Chang'e found her, Julienne had worn herself out crying. An anxiety attack, she explained, one that would pass—as though it was nothing, as though she was not on the verge of breaking. "We'll talk about that. First tell me what you did to her. Be precise."
    "Are you looking to dismember me?"
    "Not yet."
    "I gave her the same brew any mortal must take who enters and exits banbuduo. Yes, I added something to make her forget me from the moment we met—her recall would've been inconsistent otherwise. I've kept the monk away from her, as I promised you. What more do you want?"
    "Julienne's been upset these last few months over what she can't remember." Houyi lets go of the bird that was a boy, now that its throat has run dry. The corpse starts to dissipate.
    The snake glances down, for the first time showing shame. "I didn't mean to hurt her."
    "That's ever the refrain with your kind. Whatever your intent was, it'll buy you no clemency. Undoing this damage might."
    "You've the lunar rabbit. The best apothecary heaven has to