The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(47)

“It looks good on you,” said Indigo approvingly. “It doesn’t look like that on me.”

I glanced into the tall, gilded mirror against her wall and understood what she meant. Although our faces had become similar in the way of a song and its echo, different hands had sculpted our bodies. The years had whittled and stretched Indigo. With me, they had smoothed and rounded. We could wear almost all the same clothes, but the ones we couldn’t were distinct.

Indigo moved behind me and reached for the zipper.

“I was thinking of what we need to collect next,” she said with a deliberate slowness, as if she had weighed each word on a scale. Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “I think we should have sex.”

My face felt suddenly hot when I looked at her. “What?”

“While we’re mortal, we should do what begets other mortals, don’t you think? It was your idea after all,” she said, her voice so casual I could almost mistake the barb beneath. “Maybe it’ll be a story we can tell everyone else in the Otherworld when we’re done here.”

“But with who?”

“With boys,” said Indigo with a faint distaste. “Or girls. Whichever you want.”

“I’m not sure I want to have sex.”

“Really?” asked Indigo, zipping up the dress. “I thought you liked kissing.”

“Kissing is different.”

Indigo sighed. “No, it isn’t. It’s just more parts touching. Don’t worry, I have a plan.”

She dusted something invisible from the sleeves before resting her chin on my shoulder. With her hair dripping onto the wood and her bra and panties sheered by the water, she looked like a newly hatched nymph, the love child of an autumn breeze and a rushing stream. Whatever panic had bubbled into my chest melted away, replaced with a truth I’d never doubted: I would always be safe with Indigo.

“I trust you,” I said.

Indigo grinned. “Good. Now go do your quest and come back quickly.”



I should never have come home in that dress.

When I opened the door, I saw Jupiter sitting on the couch, one hand on his distended belly. The glare of the television turned him fluorescent. Usually, my mother would be in the kitchen or sitting beside him. I didn’t see her anywhere.

“I see the princess has decided to grace us with her presence—” he started to say before he looked at me. Really looked at me. “Where’d you get a dress like that?”

“Indigo lent it to me,” I said quickly. “Is Mom home?”

“Had to make a last-minute grocery run.” His voice was oddly flat. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“No thanks,” I said.

I was breathing too fast. I reached for my magic, the veil I could normally draw up and over me, but Jupiter’s focus held me in place.

“I have to change,” I said.

Jupiter stretched his fingers. “Looks like you might need help with the zipper.”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“It’s no problem, princess, come here,” he said, standing from the couch.

The air smelled like metal. I couldn’t hear the television. Don’t look at me. I tried, again, to summon the old power born from an even older sacrifice. But Jupiter’s attention was too thick, and I couldn’t slip away. He came closer—six steps, now four, now two. I wanted the air to disassemble me. I wanted to run. My feet held fast to the ground.

Behind me, the key jangled in the lock. The door creaked. I couldn’t see her, but I felt the air gather around the shape of my mother entering the house. Without speaking to either of them, I escaped as fast as I could to my bedroom.

That night, my mother made me stay home. She left her bedroom door open and all night I heard them grunting like beasts until I slipped out the window. This was all I knew of sex, the reminder that the body was meat and stink, and even the divine debased themselves in this. Gods became bulls and swans and wolves, and in this way, they rutted.



Fortunately, before Indigo thought we should try sex for ourselves, she said we needed to understand what it meant to lose control. Like the ancient Greeks in their frantic Bacchic rites. I didn’t like the idea, but she was insistent.

“If we don’t feel it, then what if we end up in exile again?” said Indigo. “Aren’t you bored of these bodies?”

We went to the bar room that nobody used and took down the carved crystal decanters full of honey-colored liquid and packed up the slender, velvet-wrapped carafes of Madeira and sherry Manzanilla, and carted all of it to the Otherworld.

“Do we toast to anything?” I asked.

“We can toast to the gods?” Indigo said, pensively swirling her glass the way people did in movies. “I guess . . . that way they know we’re ready to see them? All the old rites talk about getting to the point where your soul wants to loosen from your bones, and you’re this . . . walking threshold of madness and divinity. That’s the only way you can behold the gods.”

We drank.

I didn’t mind the taste at first. It was a burnt sweetness on the tongue, syrupy too. It was cold outside, and I liked how the drink warmed me.

Indigo poured more. She poured so much the stars spun overhead. I could hear the selkies in the stream laughing at how ridiculous we looked when we danced. We had dressed ourselves from older times so we might look familiar to the old gods. Indigo wove apple blossoms in our hair and tied bedsheets around our bodies. They untied and fell off as the night went on, taking our humanness with them.