The Red Jasmine Romance

The Red Jasmine Romance

1.

Seng Nu could have taken any fruit from this tree, but the most difficult one to reach would taste the sweetest. She outstretched her arms to keep balance as she walked along the branch, rocking and bouncing her body to match the wind that was flying and knotting itself around the trunks and branches of the upper canopy. Down on the ground, a squirrel imagined he saw the upper levels of the apple tree on fire. It was just Seng Nu’s hair, long and unnaturally red, billowing out behind her.

Last summer she had swum against the river from the curve to the old bridge and in the cold season just passed she had scrambled to the summit the eastern mountain in two days. She liked to set herself these tasks. All by herself and always by herself.

“I found you on a peapod, sitting on a vine”. That was what Lum Naw had always told her.

Today, the challenge she had set herself was to pluck this apple. This particular one was on a branch so high that it poked above the forest canopy, as if it was craning to see further than all its brother and sister apples. Seng Nu looked down as she creeped along the branch. The ground seemed as far away as the horizon, but she had no fear of heights. She stretched an arm up but she could only graze the apple with her fingers.

HROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONN!!!!

The distraction snatched her body’s concentration away from the tree and she lost her balance, wobbling…