Dark and Deepest Red(73)

Thank you for blessing something you would be judged for allowing.

Thank you for leaving your home and making another, twice, for me.

Bibio Dorenia nods in a way that makes Lala imagine she understands. She weaves a chaplet of meadow roses into Lala’s hair, the scent of nectar drifting down over her like the lightest snow.

Geruscha ties a cluster of wild lilies together with rosemary.

“For memory and fidelity,” Geruscha says, her voice bright as the stars. Lala accepts all Geruscha’s bubbling superstitions, including this morning, when she insisted Lala swallow a rose hip for lifelong happiness.

Geruscha finishes the knot and offers Lala the bouquet.

“Wait,” her bibio says before Geruscha can hand the bouquet to Lala.

Her bibio adds a few sprigs of wood betony and angelica, the purple and bluish flowers that so many thought would ward off witches.

With that sickle moon of a smile, her bibio gives the bouquet back.

The older women scatter mint and marjoram to be trod underfoot throughout the night. In with the baskets of flower petals are bits of bright paper, a gift of the manor lord.

Each time Lala turns her head, the wild roses release a little more of their perfume. It is thick and sweet in the air by the time she faces Alifair, who looks glow-eyed in a way that could be love or could be the other men getting drink into him for his nerves.

In his best shirt and tunic, he looks more man than boy. There are no oak leaves in his hair. Dust does not frost his forehead. Locks of his hair, still wet from the river, fall before his eyes.

They stand by the light of an applewood fire, another gift from the lord of the land. Josse, the declared priest (declared by Bibio Dorenia), calls them man and wife, and the cheer and stamp of the gathered brings the smell of mint into the air. It is so strong Lala feels bewitched by it.

“You look like the fairies my mother told me about in stories,” Alifair whispers, so skillfully no one notices him speaking to her.

Her eyes flash to his.

It is the first time he has offered anything about his growing up, about the family he has lost, without her asking.

She holds this piece of him, freely given, close, like a locket tucked between her breasts. It makes a flush rise in her face. She wonders if it is visible beneath the way Bibio Dorenia has rouged her cheeks and lips with her tincture of safflower.

The women help in tying red cloth to join their wrists, a symbol of Alifair becoming her husband.

She kisses him, brazen as a star moving from its place in the spheres. It is only in the soft touch of his hand under her chin, holding her in their kiss, that she realizes he has wanted this as much as she has. It is only at the taste of his mouth, the bite of the rosemary and mint he holds between his back teeth, that, for this moment, she forgets all that has come before.

She forgets there is any brighter color in the world than his mouth on hers.





Rosella


I found my father hunched over a pair of butterscotch-gold shoes, finishing a seam.

I wondered how long it would be before he made another pair of red ones.

My mother would pull out a jar of beads that looked like garnets tomorrow; she had always been the same kind of defiant as my abuela.

But my father was a little more careful. My mother would have been the one to let the forest cats and the dandelion fluff stay forever, and he would have been the one to remind her they had to let them go.

He would make shoes as blue as the five-petaled periwinkles spreading alongside our house every spring. And ones as ember bright as the marigolds drying along our windowsills. He would make pairs the same blue-touched green as wet sage.

But maybe not red, not until he knew for sure that the breath of this fall had left Briar Meadow.

I sat next to my father and threaded a needle I knew he couldn’t see without his strongest reading glasses.

He didn’t look up, so at first I wondered if he’d seen me.

Then he handed me a pair of gold drawstrings, giving me the task of guiding them through the casings.

The faint pleating at the corners of his eyes was better than a smile.

In my hands, my Oliva hands, these drawstrings felt like cords of light.

My parents probably worried when I left the house later that night. But they didn’t stop me.

Piper and Sylvie were already at the reservoir, watching the sky (Aubrey and Graham were likely kissing behind some tree, but I couldn’t see them). Emil’s friends were debating something, as usual, gesturing with their hands as though shaping models from the air in front of them. But I didn’t see him with them.

I walked carefully, nebula bursts of bruising crossing my ankles and heels. I folded my arms against the cold and watched the sky over the reservoir.

The glimmer looked like a layer of sheer, sequined fabric over the moon. It was fading as slowly as a glow bracelet dimming, but we always swore we could see it, the slight dulling of that light an hour at a time.

When the wind took a swirl of leaves, I couldn’t help wondering if it was sweeping away the last pieces of my red shoes.

The heat of someone else next to me was my first indication that Emil was there.

I almost asked about his arm, the taped-on gauze showing at the edge of his sleeve.

Then I found his eyes in the dark.

Even with as little light as the moon and the glimmer gave us, something about him looked sharper, more awake. More resolved, like an old photo that had finished developing in solution.