I was chosen because I did not resist.

That is how power recognises what it can use.

Hands, careful to express no guilt, washed my body, anointed me with vermilion.

Elsewhere many other brides sat and waited, unresisting,

while the older women smoothed their hair, adjusted their dresses.

“It will bring happiness,” they said.

“It will bring rain.”

They tied me to him with a red thread.

He was larger.

Diffident at first.

Then, with certainty, he croaked in the dry heat.

The knot, purposeful, tight, said: stay.

The priests looked up, as if this marriage might tear open the sky.

Elsewhere the words were spoken as they always are, about duty, harmony, balance.

About how a woman joins a man’s life.

About, how she completes him, how through her patience and obedience the household will flourish.

About how subservience is the natural order of the world.

Days passed.  The sky stayed silent.

At dawn they came with a knife.

They called it a divorce.

They cut the thread.

The vermilion was roughly wiped from my brow.

As if undoing me might undo the drought.

As if my body had carried the wrong meaning.

“It is her nature,” someone said.

Drought, like fear dries the throat.

They said the word divorce as if it were punishment.

As if separation were something they were doing to me, not something that might save me.

They dropped me back into the pond, water barely covering my back.

The weight of the accusation pressed me into the mud.

Elsewhere, many of the other brides was sent back to her parents’ home.

Temporarily, they said.

To reflect.

To be corrected.

Quietly.

Efficiently.

Later, clouds gathered weakly on the horizon.

Not enough.

Never enough.

The people argued about the next ritual,

the next pairing,

the next body that might persuade the sky.

But they will never mention my name.

Frogs are linked with rain and fertility, notably India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia and Laos/. In South Africa, the Vhenda consider them to be integral parts of sacred waterbodies and cave paintings by the Khoi-San suggest that the Xenopus species were once considered a symbol of fertility.  In some cultures, frog marriage is practised as a means of calling the rains – and a divorce may follow if the rains fail to arrive.