At noon, they ate fried river fish out of banana leaves with their fingers. The guide ate with them. Laura had forgotten his name but could not bear to ask it now. Craig called for salt, and Laura flushed with shame.

Craig had asked her to marry him that morning, and she’d said yes.

“The jungle is always silent at midday,” the guide said, rolling a cigarette.

She didn’t want to marry Craig. Yet she couldn’t bear the thought of telling him no, the look on his face as she said it.

After lunch, they ascended Bukit Teresek. All around her bloomed the musky fungal smell of dying things: mushrooms in the dark, moss and earth, steam and rot, fat-petaled flowers splayed open in old, blackened logs. Life turning itself over. 

“Keep moving, or leeches will get into your shoes,” the guide said.

She sensed judgment everywhere—from the guide, Craig, the vine-choked trees.

Did you really come all this way just to look at us? the trees crowed. And you paid how much for the privilege?

“Careful of the vines. There are snakes.”

The guide’s frequent warnings were either sincere or performance theater for Westerners craving exoticism, it was impossible to tell which. He was almost gleeful when he warned them about the antivenoms—the ones he had on hand. The ones he didn’t.

“Walk backwards if you see a tiger,” the guide said.

They had been dating for eight months. She’d met Craig at a bowling alley in Taiwan.  People always exclaimed at bowling alley, so quaint, so cinematic, but no one lingered on the bowling alley being in Taiwan. The incuriosity of other people was a familiar irk, but then there was Craig, an exception to the rule. And yet, she could not love him.

The air was a hot, slick hand pressing down on her, compressing her. Craig stopped and stripped his shirt off, wringing the sweat out before stuffing it in his bag. The guide leant against a tree and lit another cigarette. Laura gazed at Craig, shirtless, abdomen glistening, arms strong and defined, more so now than when they’d met. She felt nothing, not a flicker of arousal. Craig hefted his backpack and began walking again—there was meant to be an elephant watering hole up ahead. The guide looked at her, eyes aglint and knowing. She turned away and retied her shoelaces. She could feel the guide moving beside her. He tossed his cigarette onto the earth and ground it with his boot.

“Elephants shouldn’t be far now,” he remarked. “You may see them before you hear them. They’re quiet walkers, silent when they want to be.” He smiled at her. “Good at sneaking.”

She had not seen any elephants, nor any other mammal. She’d found where life hid itself in this place while burning leeches off her ankles—six-limbed and writhing on the other side of a glossy fallen leaf. It clung to shadows, lurked in puddles, oozed from crevasses. Life was insectile, fungal, parasitic. It seldom announced itself.  

She would think about what to do tomorrow. She only knew she couldn’t bear to hurt Craig. She was a Midwesterner, bred to maintain sangfroid and ensure minimal surface tension at all times.

“Are you mad at me?” She could still hear her friends, her mother, herself, saying it to each other, that pathetic refrain. “Are you mad at me?”

They were so exquisitely calibrated, they could detect when a houseguest was secretly disappointed there was no skimmed milk. Family, lover, guest displeasure—all manifested as a pain in the stomach that only went away when one laid down. Stand back up again and there it was, waiting for you.

They caught up with Craig. The path here was narrow and strewn with obstacles. They walked single-file, Laura in the rear. Every so often, they had to grip a low-hanging tree branch for support as they navigated rocks, logs, other things. The trees were a primordial shade of green, pure and electric, hidden under a coiled mass of lianas like so many veiled brides. 

“The frogs are singing. It will rain soon.” the guide said.

The screeching call of a drongo pierced through the drone of cicadas, the mellow burps and rasping croaks of invisible lizards. As Laura’s ears grew sharper and more attuned to the forest, she began to pick up the sounds that were trying not to be heard. The crunch of leaves being stepped upon, the crunch of leaves being eaten. The sound of something wet and heavy being dragged on the forest floor.

She knew with a sudden clarity the truth about herself: she would do anything rather than tell him no. She would even marry him. 

She heard a hiss, disquietingly close. Then a flash, an apparition of black and white in the bush just by Craig, up ahead.

Craig.   

Now that supple black-and-white stick, rope, snake was on Craig’s arm. Now it was rearing back—

Craig screamed.  

The snake vanished. Craig fell heavily to his knees, then flat onto the earth. 

Laura didn’t move. She stared at Craig prone on the ground, the guide hurrying to his side.

The guide was kneeling beside Craig, rummaging through bottles in his bag.

“What color was it?” the guide asked, voice calm but fingers clumsy with fear.  

“I didn’t see it,” Craig said. His face was already ashen.   

Laura saw two puncture marks on Craig’s arm, each leaking a feeble trickle of blood.

“Laura, what color was it?” the guide asked. She was taken aback that he remembered her name, that he would use it only now. She said nothing.

“Laura,” Craig moaned, his voice weak. “Did you see it?”

Laura turned to the guide, to Craig.

“Yellow,” she said at last.

“It was yellow.”

* * *

Ⓒ Eleanor Lennox