Face-Slapping15 min read
My Belly of Snakes and the Snake-Immortal's Bargain
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They said I had snakes in my belly like a bad story told to scare children.
"You heard about Aurora?" two women passed by the alley, their voices high and thin.
"What about Aurora?" I pretended not to listen.
"She slept in the snake room after her period and—" one whispered with relish. "They found tiny snakes in her stomach."
"Ridiculous," the other scoffed, but their steps left me cold anyway.
I come from Pan-Snake Town, a place named for the coils of rock and the animals we raise. "We" is a broad word in a town where three out of five families make a living from snakes. My life smelled of wet earth, shed skins, and mouse-blood. My father, Davis Liu, used to say money keeps a life. The rest of the family—Patricia Stevens, my stepmother, and Sophie Valdez, her daughter—said other things.
That night my father called while I was locking the snake room. "Don't come home," he said. "Stay in the snake room. Your stepmother and Sophie come back tonight."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I said so." His voice was flat. "I'll send you some money. Stay there."
He hung up. The transfer pinged. Three hundred dollars and a formal push away.
I slept under the click and hiss of coils. The town's superstitions have teeth. Two women I passed had taught me a ritual: three sticks of incense, three drops of blood on them, shoes one inside out. I mocked it and then I did it, because fear is a small, persistent thing.
"I hope the incense works," I told myself as I placed the third stick.
At midnight something cold slid across my scalp. I woke to a nest of small, thin snakes tangled in my hair like some awful crown. I pulled and something gave—like hair, like roots. Blood. The snakes twitched on the floor and then a shadow slammed the door open.
He walked like a man but the lower half of him was long, scaled, and lit by a green gleam.
"Who lives here?" he said, and his voice was strange, like gravel and riverwater.
I fell to my knees. "Please, I am Aurora Bartlett," I croaked.
He laughed, and the laugh had too many teeth. "Your father has debt," he said. "Your family made bargains. I will collect."
He left a paper that was not paper but a shed skin, and on it were three demands: a red bridal veil, blood wine, and the incense used to summon horse gods. "Three days," he said, and he was gone like wind.
At dawn I ran to my father's house anyway and showed him the snake skin.
"You fell for that?" he hissed. "You let a snake charm you?"
"I didn't—" I started.
"Shut up." Patricia's eyes, practiced at cruelty, made his anger sharper. He grabbed the skin, turned his face to stone, and said something I never expected.
"Kneel."
"Papa?" I whispered.
He spat my name like a curse. "You were always a nuisance. You broke me. You cost me chances. This is payment."
Patricia smiled the way a blade is polished. Sophie watched like a cat watching its prey.
"Give her," Dad said to the shadowless air as if apologizing to a judge.
I woke in the middle of a ceremony. The snakes were arranged like an altar. The man—Yves Sherman, as they later called him—took my hands and poured a cup of blood wine down my throat.
"Your father owes more than money," Yves said. "Your debt will be paid in blood and childbearing. You will be my out-masheng, my vessel for the rites."
"No!" I screamed. They bound my hands, shoved a red veil over my head, and forced me to bow.
They pledged me as if marriage were a piece of debt. The words burned like ice on my tongue: "Couples join; world gods witness."
I lost a piece of myself that night. My father accepted the bargain and looked at me as if I were a ledger balanced. Patricia smiled and Sophie clapped like she won something.
"I will never forgive you." I heard myself vow, though who it was whispered to I could not say.
Yves took me to another house—cold and shadowed. "This is yours now," he told me. "You will be my out-masheng. You will carry what we need."
Time blurred. I learned to be quiet while coils watched me. I learned to cradle aching and claim it as service.
One morning an old woman with teary eyes came and knelt. "My grandson—he cuts himself," she begged. "He is not a man anymore. Please."
"You're not the one to kneel here," Yves told me with that flat cruelty. "You're carrying my seed. Do not waste his cries."
I took the snake-hook in my fingers and, under Yves's voice inside my skull, performed as I was told.
"Tell me his name," I said.
"Creed Ward," she sniffed. "My grandson is Creed."
I hadn't seen him since school. Creed had been mean to girls and had the swagger of boys who believe they are owed. That night, under Yves, I was not myself. I watched with the ghost-vision that came with being ridden; I saw a red dress and a woman with smoke in her throat. The oracle's words were exact and brutal: "Subdue at midnight and the debt will close."
At midnight Creed convulsed, and an apparition took what it wanted. We left the house with the old woman weeping. I learned more about death's ledger: debts settled with more debts are never clean.
"You are becoming useful," Yves said once, like a flick of a tongue. There was something like praise and like a threat braided together.
I had rare relief when my grandmother, Francesca Dalton, found me. She arrived like a plain little bird, wrapped in homespun and worry.
"Aurora," she breathed when she saw me. "You've been through a storm."
"Grandmother," I sighed. "They gave me away."
"You are not given away. You are needed," she said, pressing a silver bracelet on my wrist. "Don't take this off. Promise me you'll come if you can."
I was not allowed to hold hope, but I carried that bracelet like a talisman. It would thrum against my skin later, when choices needed a beat.
The weeks passed in a ragged pattern. Yves made me do his work. I rode with him—felt his will—helped the needy and punished the wicked. I learned the names of spirits: the Hunger-Dead, the White-Clay Ghosts, a small demon called the Yellow Rat that chewed lives for its own winter stores.
We hunted the Yellow Rat together for a town called Jing. The rat had been living in a village councilman's body—Kellan Nakajima—and every night the young and spry grew rotten. Yves tore the rat from the man, tore the old man's cunning out. I watched the white bead of the rat's old power, the shell of some small dragon's pearl, surface in Yves's palm.
He handed it to me raw. "Eat this for the child to be strong," Yves said.
I put it in my mouth. It melted like milk and then formed itself warm at my womb. The small ball—what he called a jagged name, the "flood-pear"—settled.
"They're taking the pearl," I protested later to Yves. "You didn't ask."
"Why would I ask?" Yves snapped. "You carry what I need. Be grateful you are spared what others are given."
My life became a sequence of offerings. I learned to walk between village grief and petty sins. Some people were only villagers; some were monsters.
One day a woman from another town appeared at the temple with a child wrapped in rags. Her name—she called herself—was Elena Contreras. "Please," she said. "My daughter is acting like a thing. They come at night and take her voice."
"You must have angered someone," Yves said, and then, softer: "Lead me."
We went. The daughter sat on the ground with an old black cat that breathed wrong. "My girl," the mother whispered.
Yves looked at the child and said, "This is the fox's work."
Foxes are greedy and clever, one of the old classes. We found Calvin Tariq waiting on the hill with a silver smile. He bowed too easily.
"Aurora," he said. "You look well."
"Don't," I told him.
He smirked. "It was only business." His fingers were quick and his offers were practiced. He wanted a girl's duel to gain more territory into the living.
Yves stood and laughed like a bell breaking. "You are bold."
Calvin's fox sisters arrived soon after, in a flock of perfumes and sharp claws. They pried at the edges of the temple like hungry girls at a pie.
I hated him. I hated the way he pretended at courtesy and the way his eyes measured. I learned to despise every thin smile that tried to bargain a soul.
But not all encounters were monsters. Sometimes, the dead were only tired.
I do not say all this while mindless. I was me. I loved my grandmother. I kept the bracelet on. I wept when I could and I screamed when I couldn't.
Then came the night that changed everything.
Sophie Valdez and Patricia Stevens arranged a celebration in the town square: a wedding for Sophie to a man from the county—a little fortune, a ribbon, a show of family success. I wasn't invited. Of course not. The town buzzed. I watched from the edge like a shadow.
"Tonight's the night," Sophie said, slipping a new dress over herself.
"Good," Patricia said. "Let Aurora watch if she wants. She'll be fine."
"Don't be cruel," Francesca warned when she came in the square.
"Keep to your corner," Patricia hissed. "You and your stories."
I remained a corner. I had no jewel, no fit to parade. I kept my silver bracelet hidden under my sleeve and my mouth shut. I wanted nothing of their wealth if it meant I had to breathe the same air they had stained.
That night the town streamed into the square. A screen! They called it modern, but it was a box of light. When the festivities hit their mark, someone—someone I never saw—tugged a cord and the screen flickered.
"It starts," a man whispered.
"What is that?" Sophie murmured.
And then the screen flooded with messages and images that belonged behind closed doors. A voice recorded on a phone, a man's voice. My father's voice saying, "I'll send her away, it's cheaper than raising her."
Another clip. My father's face next to Patricia's. "Sell the snake room," he said into the grainy video. "I'll make sure she disappears."
I felt the world thin like paper. The square smelled of smoke, popcorn, sweat, then a new thing—oil and bile. The screen played an obvious and smaller replay: my father bargaining with a man about me, arranging a sum, and then a smaller image—Sophie laughing with some county boy about my fear.
"It isn't true," Patricia said aloud, though the screen said otherwise. She walked like a woman made of glass and the glass trembled.
"Turn it off," Davis Liu barked. He was still the same man who had sold a daughter and spoke like a hollow drum. His voice cracked.
"Where did this come from?" someone shouted.
The screen kept streaming. It chuckled with a second revelation: the snake-skin bill, the incense, the bets—everything that had been done in secret. It showed the shed skin Yves had left, and, like a merciless mirror, it showed the ceremony in the snake room with my veil being torn and my father's hands offering me like price.
The crowd froze like reeds. Phones came out. The square became a thing that recorded the dishonor of the family.
"Do you deny it?" a woman called from the back. Her nails clicked on the railing. "Do you deny selling your daughter to a snake?"
Davis's face drained. "I—" he tried. "We did what we had to do. It was for survival."
"You sold her body," someone else shouted. "You made her into payment!"
"Shut up!" Davis roared.
Patricia's smile dissolved. She trembled like a dog. Sophie clutched at her dress as if clothes could stitch a soul.
Then the crowd turned. It is a dangerous thing when a town decides to judge. Phones returned to pockets and then came out again—this time for evidence. Bystanders recorded Patricia's face as she begged, "Please, don't—"
"Beg?" I heard myself say. My voice carved the air. "You begged me to leave. You folded me like a worthless scrap and sold me."
They turned. I walked into the light.
"You did this," I said. "You made the bargain. You watched while they bound a veil over my face. You pushed me into his hands."
"No!" Patricia swore.
"Yes!" Sophie cried. "She needed to be taught—"
I laughed then, small and sharp. "Taught to be sold? Taught to be bargain?"
The crowd's rhythm changed into judgment. "Make them pay!" a voice cried. "Make them answer!"
"You're the worst of them!" a neighbor spat. "You used your own blood to buy their good life!"
Someone from the front lifted a phone to the crowd and played another file. It was the voice of the man who had brokered my sale—my father on tape, shadowed by Patricia. The whole town heard the laughter, the casual trade of a daughter's body. There was a silence like a weight dropped in a well.
Patricia knelt first. Her knees hit the stone like a gavel.
"Please," she begged to the air and everyone. "Please."
"Beg me in public," I said. "Beg me in front of those who watched you sell me."
She began to babble apologies. She reached for my feet. She had perfected the mask of cruelty. Now her face melted. Tears carved clean lines through mascara.
Sophie tried to hide behind her new husband. "It was my dream," she moaned. "I would have married anyway."
You could hear the crowd calculating. People are hungry for righting. They had fed me with stares for years. They had spoken of sympathy like a coin. Now they had the coin's flip: guilt.
"Stop!" Davis tried to interpose. He reached for me like a man trying to fix a shattered vase. He was nothing but a greedy child's hand clasping at air.
A woman in the front, a vendor of hot noodles I had known for years, stepped up with a bowl and splashed it at Patricia's face.
"Eat your water," she said. "Eat what you made me spilt on my own floor!"
"You're shameless," another man cried and drew a ring from his pocket. The ring clipped a silver chain onto my father's jacket like a collar. "We will not let you go."
Phones recorded it all. People surrounded them and made them repeat their confessions, word by word, until the recorded words matched the videos they'd shown.
"Repeat it," someone ordered. The crowd was not kind. They had suffered their own humiliations and found in this a mirror and a release.
Patricia's voice broke into a farcical blend of pleading and pleading for mercy. "I am sorry, please forgive us, we didn't mean—"
"Beg like you begged the man who bought me!" I said.
She begged until her throat bled sound and the crowd's phone lights flashed like small suns.
Davis then crumpled. He fell to his knees, his suit dirty like a man dragged through his own market dealings. "Please," he finally said, his voice too small to fill the square. "I didn't know it would—"
"Sound familiar?" I asked, and the people laughed—not kindly.
A group of men went to Patricia's house and brought back the box of the incense, the red veil, the empty bottle where blood had been poured, and the money receipt.
"Public confession," someone read aloud. "We asked you to sign and you did."
I watched Patricia's face go from hot red to grey. She raked her fingers through her hair like an animal scratching at its own skin. "Don't film me, please," she begged. "Please—"
"No," said a steady voice. It was Francesca Dalton, my grandmother, stepping forward with her own slow, grave kindness. "Let it be seen. Let the town know who feeds snakes with sisters' bones."
The square made no sound but for phones and shallow breaths. People filmed, cried, and took pictures. Some clapped, miserly and raucous. Others wiped their eyes. A little child made a smeared heart in the dust and then tossed it away.
Davis reached for me, knuckles pleading. "Aurora—"
"Look at them," I said loudly, pointing. "They traded me like livestock. They watched me be turned into a bargain and they think their hands are clean. I was a child. You were supposed to protect me."
"Please," he whimpered. "I had nothing. I had a debt. I thought—"
"You thought?" I echoed. "You thought it right to make me pay?"
He could not answer.
Then the worst part—the public stripping of their pretenses—began. The town demanded restitution. Not just money: humiliation.
"Tell the truth in front of everyone," the vendor said. "Tell them what you did and where you sent her money."
They made Patricia and Davis stand on a low platform. Phones and eyes recorded them. A villager walked the square, narrating the known facts like an announcer at a market. The man who had bought Sophie was called. He arrived in a flurry of expense and said in a low, trembling voice, "I didn't know." Others recognized the lie. They wanted the truth.
Patricia's expression changed from pleading to denial to the frantic denial of someone who realizes their defenses no longer hold.
"I didn't force her!" she squealed at one point, and the camera captured the catch in her throat. "I didn't—"
"Then why did you tell the broker to be discreet?" a neighbor shouted.
"Why did you tell him to make sure no one knew?" another demanded.
Their denial fought like a moth. The town would not let them re-bury the deed in silence.
"Aurora," Francesca said to me softly, "speak."
I could have spoken nine thousand small cruelties. I could have called names of neighbors who turned away, traders who had looked knowingly at my father's household like they were making an appointment. I could have said every small, precise thing that had been done with hands and not with regret.
So I spoke only one truth meant to break them: "You sold me a promise. You sold me ashes. And if you want to be saved, you will kneel and beg for my forgiveness."
Patricia's knees hit the ground and the square watched the sound like a bell. Sophie cried and covered her face. Davis's shoulders fell and his voice pleaded in the way only those without courage can.
"Sophie," I turned to the girl who once played make-believe princess with me in the alley. "Look at me. Did you ever think my bed of snakes would become your banquet?"
She looked up and there was no answer but a salt track down her cheek. She had been a child, and then a bargain, and then a part of their greed.
The crowd responded. A woman from the back began to chant a simple phrase: "Confess. Confess. Confess." Others joined like an old hymn.
By the time the confession ended it had become ritual. They were made to kneel, to apologize into the record of phones, to list every injury they had done with the same bluntness a butcher uses to list cuts. They pleaded and begged while the crowd decided whether they were to be shunned, to be forgiven, or to be remade.
They were humiliated. They were exposed. They were broken in the way people break when their masks are peeled in public.
When the crowd finally dispersed, some clapped with satisfaction. Others walked away with tears. The videos trended.
Patricia rose last, spent and raw. She looked at me like a beggar at the altar.
"Please," she whispered. "Take what's left. Take whatever you want. I'll—"
"Leave," I said.
And when she left, the sound of her heels on the stone in the empty square sounded like the last line of a story. The town had done what it wanted—punished those who had made me less than human.
I felt no triumph. I felt only a cold emptiness and a tremor in my belly where the bead Yves had given still learned to settle.
That night Yves came and did not punish them more. He watched the recordings with a small detached interest.
"You enjoyed that," he said.
"No," I answered. "It had to be seen."
"Your father's debt is unpaid," he said. "But you have made an impression."
I slept on a cot that night with the bracelet safe under my sleeve and the small white bead like a pulse against my skin.
Months moved with a slow steadiness. I did tasks for Yves: bringing comfort to a mother, carrying truth to a wronged child, going where the living and the dead argued in alleyways of grief.
I learned that the world was not black and white. Some monsters were greedy men; some were broken husbands; some were animals turned by hunger and kindness into pale villains.
One winter a man named Ike Fitzpatrick—an expensive-looking county manager—arrived with a painting that moved and a sickness in his home. "My wife," he whispered in a posh voice, "she turned inside her skin. Please, help."
The painting was a palace of swirling smoke. I touched it and felt a sharp memory of a girl in a county bed—Sophie? No, another girl, someone bought in a different deal. Ike had a guilty hand. I closed my eyes while Yves went about carving the problem into a shape and sending it away with a huff. People like Ike—who made fortunes from other people's silence—were common as stones.
I grew into stubbornness. I kept the bracelet near always. Francesca came and went. Calvin offered stupid little gifts in the manner of foxes wanting to be closer. He wanted me like a trophy. I laughed.
"I will not belong to you either," I told him once. "I belong to my fever now and the child inside me."
"You are stubborn," he said. "That is cute."
He flirted with the edges of danger. He would pay in sweets and then ask for favors. He thought the world a market. But the world had laws; Yves had teeth.
One spring a name returned to haunt me—Davis Liu.
"Why do you care for them?" I asked Yves one night when he cleaned my wound, his tail flicking.
"They were once prices," Yves said. "The town needed to see."
"But my father—"
"He will carry new shame. That is his lot." Yves's voice had a strange tiredness. "You have been given a choice. You carry a life. That requires you to decide what to do with it."
"Save me," I wanted to say.
"Survive and decide," Yves said instead.
I decided. I would not end like the worms in someone's pocket. I would not be a story told to frighten.
The snake inside me moved like a cautious sun. I fed it on the days I could. The white bead in my mouth had not vanished. It grew small threads of heat into the place where child and snake would meet.
Then one summer, the town made me an offer I could not refuse, or rather, it made me an offer it thought I would refuse. A public clearing for the dead and the living, called the Mid-Names Day. I was asked to preside. The town expected spectacle.
"You will go," Yves told me the night before. "They will look for me, but I will not be seen. You must be seen."
I stood in the square and I spoke. I told them of debts and bargains and how the hungry find mouths to feed. I spoke not to humiliate but to remind. I did not ask for pity. I asked for care.
Afterwards, as the lanterns blew out and the moon lined our roofs like soft coins, I pressed the silver bracelet against my skin and felt the bead hum once.
"You can rest for a while," Francesca whispered, voice thin but forever steady.
I closed my eyes and imagined the snake inside me curling, no longer an accusation but a guardian.
"You are my making," Yves said that night. "Not my slave."
"Are you different?" I asked.
He only watched the little pale bead turn like a moon.
I did not know the answer. I only knew I would keep the bracelet, and when the day came that the bead warmed into a child's breath and the town's stones held another small heartbeat, I would take the child into my arms and teach it the one lesson I had learned—how to survive so you may someday choose.
On the day I left this portion of the story, I tied the bracelet above my wrist and whispered: "I will not be sold again."
The silver slid warm against my skin, and the small milky flood-pearl—Yves's jagged little gift—throbbed like a secret. The town watched, and some forgave, and some did not. I walked back to the snake room and fed the mice and the coils and the small new snake we had rescued.
I folded the veil into a corner drawer and, for the first time, kept it there without the tremor of fear.
"One day," I told Francesca, and the moon heard, "I'll undo what they've done."
She smiled, touched the bracelet on my wrist, and said, "Then do it. Your hands are steady now."
The silver kissed my skin. The bead against it—also round, also stubborn—was a promise of one small life.
I put the bead in my palm and winded the bracelet over it like a cradle.
"I will keep my child," I told the night, and the bead answered with a warm pulse, like an inner, secret heartbeat.
The End
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