The Hand and the Snake Pt. I

"'The years shall run like rabbits
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.'"

-W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening



In the beginning there was the creator. She was the almighty, a god with the body of a human and a hand for a head. One day she had descended from the High Plain of the gods to observe the forest creatures below. She stumbled upon a creek bed, sensing traces of blood as she ran her hand through the water. Down in the marshy source of the river, the body of a dismantled snake laid steady, streaming crimson and barely breathing. The creator, feeling sorry for the creature, touched the skin of the dirty, blackened snake, and fell in love. To see the snake in such condition made her feel ill and she wanted to save the snake despite swearing not to mettle in the affairs of earthly creatures. Yet she did the most forbidden act of all, and prevented the snake from dying.
The snake said he was grateful, but instead of truly thanking her, he tried to shed his skin and swallow her. However, his injuries were still left unhealed, and he tumbled, only able to halfway shed. The creator felt sorry, and promised that if the snake let her heal him in one week that he would be freed to go and that she would forgive him for his outburst. The snake agreed, but with intentions of swallowing her in the end.
The creator helped lift the snake to a hidden sanctuary, a watery fossil bed where the forest ceiling and sun reflected in the water and merged with the grass. The creator stripped the snake of his clothes and settled him in the water, whispering in his ear that if he continued to swim in the water every day from morning to evening that he would begin to regenerate. The snake dived into the water, and immediately he felt the liquid's effect. He felt eased, and as he swam he began to feel his skin start to shed. "If I swim around fast enough, I'll be able to finally be free and devour this woman, and I will absorb her power." But, when the snake emerged from the water, the creator was gone, and his skin was left only slightly shed. Greatly depressed, the snake nestled under the darkest, shadiest part of the forest abode, and for the first time felt a sense of longing as he began to fall asleep.
The next morning, the snake awoke to the sound of birds. Uncoiling, he felt his sense of longing had dissipated, but still lingered in the form of hunger pains and injuries from days before. With each cry of the song birds, his hunger grew, and so in order to silence the music that made him lurch, he decided to hunt the birds. A sparrow sat drinking in the pool of water, the same stream that he had swam in yesterday.  Slinking behind a bush, the snake prepared its strike. Minutes had gone by, and when he believed to have heard the sound of clinking flint, the snake assaulted the bird with full force. But, when he thought he had clenched down against the bird's soft feathers, he instead tasted what was to be associated with as bronze. Rising up, he discarded the armor from his jaws.
His gums burned, and as he wailed and flailed his injuries only pained him more. "What pain! What was it that I have pierced my venomous fangs upon?!" It was then, when his eyes watered and softened, that he saw her. The creator knelt to his side, and placed her human hands atop him. Again, the snake felt soothed, and looking up at the creator saw a mass of red-orange sparrows swarming overhead. It was then that he looked down at the hand of the creator that lay upon his chest. Just above her wrists he saw the puncture holes of fang marks.
The snake yet again felt pain for what he had done. The sparrow he had tried to attack was one of this woman's pets, and in order to save the bird from his grip that this woman had sacrificed herself for it. The snake felt an awful feeling rise up in him, but let it simmer cautiously behind a mask of somber shame. Apologizing, the snake stated that he would never eat a sparrow ever again, and slipped from her grip and into the water, hiding his face from the creator's eyes. As he left, the creator had no sense of what it was that had happened, and felt that she had done something entirely wrong.
When the snake emerged again from the water, he was greeted to the sound of birds once again. The creator had left, but in her place a ring of dry corn laid on the ground near the edge of where the snake had entered. Sparrows of the same reddish color marched and pecked this golden starch, and the snake could not help but stare at their ritualistic dance. His stomach growled, but just as he reached down to pick at a sparrow, he couldn't help but feel the same, swarming shame from that morning. Instead, he retreated into the shadows, beyond the ring of corn, and felt the same sort of longing once again.
The next day, the snake arose to the same sound of song birds. This time, he awoke slowly, still feeling pain but not as strong as before, and looked towards the pool of water. There, the creator sat still on the edge, feeding the sparrows that same golden corn he had seen from yesterday. Approaching quietly from the forest, the snake slipped into the space beside the creator, watching the sparrows pluck at his feet.
He sighed, trying to speak softly. "And yet you still live?" The snake heard no response from the creator, and a growing sense of frustration grew from within. "Why? Why did you decide to tempt me with the birds of the gods, to stray me away from their path in order to punish me? Was the shame from my bite not as punishable as swallowing one of their birds whole? Huh?"
It was then that the creator turned to him, but then looked towards the near hovering of a sparrow on her left shoulder. As she lifted her finger, the robe that covered her wrist inched down to reveal the nakedness of her arm. The puncture wounds from before gleamed brightly, as if the wound was still fresh. The snake clenched his jaw, about to lash out, but was then stopped by the creator.
Pointing to the wound on her wrist, the creator made sure that the snake watched. The bores in her wrist squirmed, but as they did the holes began to fill with new flesh. The blood that had leaked from the cut evaporated, and disappeared from her skin entirely. It was then that the wound glowed even brighter, and then died into the same color of her tanned skin. The injury had vanished.
"This was what I had tried to tell you," the creator said, "But you were so blinded by your own assumptions that I couldn't show you until today." The creator prodded the sparrow to fly off (which it did), and let her wrist drop to let the sleeve of her robe cover it.
The snake could not seem to comprehend. "You mean…you could have healed yourself between then and now?"
The creator looked towards the west, straight across the gleaming, sunning pool. "Such pain was immense-I hadn't felt something like it in quite some time-" She breathed in. "It was hard to keep it from not healing, but I felt I had to show you that I had such a power in order for you not to feel a deeper soreness for the rest of your life. You are relieved, aren't you?"  
"Yes."
The creator nodded her head, as if about to perform a little dance. "It is hard to kill someone like me. Truly, it is…"
The snake admired her. She had not a human head, nor beautiful, human black hair, or pointed human ears. But he had none of these things either, and if he could find her worth courting, could he possibly be worthy of courting, too?
"What's your name?"
The hand looked back to the water, and then lifted her hand of a head up to the horizon along the space of the forest. "You ought to start swimming soon. A week is enough time, but it is modest, so…"
The snake gripped his jaw once more, and looked out into the water. Delicately getting up, for his body still quaked with the pinpricks of detriment, he prepared himself to jump into the pool. He turned to look back at the creator, whose head was calmly relaxed, attracting the birds to perch on her main fingers.
"It's Naga," the snake called out. "That's my name, and it would be considered rude if you were not to tell me yours."
The creator nodded her head. "I will reveal my name to you in the evening."
"You promise?" asked the snake.
"Yes." The creator said.
With her word, the snake smiled inside, and dove into the pool. He absorbed its cooling effect, a sensation that seemed even more profound than the days before. Now the woman would reveal her name. She would be there in the evening when he would burst from the water, waiting with her birds in her long silk dress. He felt no harm would come to her because of her impenetrable glowing skin, so there laid no reason not for her not to be there.
When he did burst from the pool though, the snake could not find the creator. He grew tearful, and began to weep into the pool, slowly wading towards his umbra hideaway in order to cope with his sense of strange, longing aches. But as he grew closer, he began to see little flowers floating in the pool. He picked one up and let it rest in the palm of his hand. The petals were a stark ivory in the middle, but then flourished into a pink hue near the edge of his hand. It was then that he realized her name.
"Sanna…" The snake whispered. Holding the flower in his hand, he cupped it, and raced back into his hideaway behind the bushes. Making sure that the flower had not lost a single petal, or had shown and signs of wilting, the snake curled up into his deep, dark place. Yet the place seemed less dark than from before, and the flower that lay in his hand provided a light that fizzled out some of the darkness. It made him feel less of the longing pain, but at the same time made him feel worse, because of the water lily that reminded him so much of the woman he wanted. Thinking of her in the long, silk dress, he began to feel the numbness of sleep, whispering her name to the night noises. "San-na…San-na…Saaaaannaaa…"