[Historical setting + military marriage + interspecies romance + a capybara’s coming-of-age story]
“Reporting to the political commissar,” he said, “I’d like to submit a request to get married.”
The whole company thought their commander had gone mad: marrying a girl of unknown origins who never smiled and spent all day talking to water and animals. The wedding was simple, held in the company mess hall. Luosang wore a red sweater that Shen Shuzhou had asked someone to buy for her in the county town. She didn’t quite understand the ceremony. When people told her to bow, she bowed; when they told her to call them Mom and Dad, she softly addressed the portraits of Shen Shuzhou’s late parents.
That night, Shen Shuzhou gave her the only bed and slept on the floor. In the darkness, she suddenly spoke. “Shen Shuzhou.”
“Hmm?”
“What does it mean... to be married?”
He turned and saw her eyes open in the moonlight, the stars outside reflected in her amber irises.
“It means,” he paused, “that I’ll protect you from now on.”
She was silent for a long time, then said softly, “The water will protect you too.”
Shen Shuzhou always kept a strange scale in his military ID holder: pale gold, patterned with ripples, and cool to the touch.
It was a gift his wife brought back one time from what she called “visiting her parents’ home” (she meant Qinghai Lake). She said, “It’s the capybara clan’s betrothal gift.”
[When the youngest border company commander marries the oldest spirit of the river, and the red paper of a military marriage covers the taboo of marrying outside one’s kind, this is a story about protection and pacts, borders and integration, and how a marriage certificate binds the borderlands of two worlds.]
