Your tongue deadens at Ibu’s decision. All you know about the man–the cowboy they call him—is that he is an actor. Has been one longer than the twelve years you’ve seasoned beneath blue sky. You first heard about him while playing engklek outside with the other girls. One foot balanced on a square scratched into packed dirt, the other craned behind you. As you leapt away from gossip between mothers, you pictured the man they spoke of. Tall outlaw, an empire under his sandals, though his hands shriveled dry of money, land. His family: half-blooded revolutionaries who angered their king in the land of windmills. A lineage doomed to lost riches. And yet, he was still the reckless froth bubbling between old women’s lips. A man who doesn’t need to rebrick his honor from the rubble. Bapak has shown you how men do not need to build. Their kingdoms are erected by the lips of women around them. And in this world that turns like a struck cheek, it’s why the most broken of men are gods. Now, Ibu confirms the cowboy is your wreckage to mold. Nduwé bojo sing bisa njaga kowe itu penting. Washing rice neither of you will eat, she shows you protection is no different than captivity. You bolt after the day blackens. Only sentinels of teak are left to guard your wilderness. If only your goosed hair could flutter like a million and one beetle wings. You sleep on the jungle’s matted fur, but even she would not have you as a bride. You aren’t yours to give. When Bapak finds you, a sizzling whip lashes against violet like a blanched scar. You return as a wife veiled in bramble. During your brief, childish rebellion, the village performed a ceremony. Bapak and Ibu held your dress up like a shucked husk. The cowboy stood beside it. Without being seen or touched, he claimed you. You are not iron, spine, and flesh. You are not beating with music. You are just waiting to be worn.

He says he won’t wear you until the moon draws first blood. In the mornings, he allows you to chase your friends through mist, stirring whirlpools of pigeons. Their waste, parasols of streaked, white sunflowers on neighboring roofs. Your knees remind him of boterkoek. If he warns you not to scrape them, it makes your friends laugh. You hate them. The girls who don’t believe they will one day be asked to stop playing with you. When the moon begins its slow feast, that is the first sign of dying. A girl will eventually be sipped bloodless into limestone. This scares you. How Gusti will hear your fear–a cricket lost somewhere in a hut. You thrash your body and throw your voice. Nothing stops him from thinking you’re his wife. Every night, Ibu walks from her house to his. She sees you to sleep. You grip her bun while a black mare hooves over your chest. Tenders it. When she leaves, a witch swings upside down by the jendela. Gown cherried like your last milk tooth. He does something to you that you don’t understand. Come morning, no one explains the stranger whose body you wake in.

No one explains the stranger whose body you wake in. Your husband’s crime dilates in you like a pupil cupped. Ibu hopes it is the first boy in her family. You’ve stopped hoping it would abandon you. When Ibu’s milk failed to rise, you suckled Mbok’s breast. Now you suckle her proverbs. Wong tua iku kudu iso kaya banyu. Water, yielding, slipping through. Drowning you in a landscape you didn’t shape. Carves volcanoes all the same. Days smear in apricot bile. From their fallen kingdom, his family sends a one-horse carriage. There is a healer who can make your tiny body obey its waxing colonizer. At first light, husband, wife, and unborn child sit across from each other, tossing through verdant blur like dried rice thrown. Burnt earth, heartless and unfamiliar, under pinched sapphire vein. Sapa sing sampeyan nesoni? You follow his eyes to the empty space pressed against your shoulder. One of his magic tricks is contouring floating dust into specters. You don’t need to explain who you angered, or how you know you won’t give him a son. He trails the cobra winding your neck like a clock without the destination of time.