The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(67)

Hallowed ground was not always a fixed, physical place. Some sacred spaces were indivisible, the taking of them an endless communion that ate of your flesh, drank of your blood, and its grisly alchemy fused itself to the very skin of your soul so that no matter where you were, you would never be without it.

Indigo and I were the Otherworld, and the Otherworld was us, and for as long as we lived, it would live too.

I had known the Otherworld would lay me bare, and it did. It plucked out every piece I’d hidden in that dark space, fanned them out like so many cards—the smell of asphalt, the edge of a college brochure, the roads spread out like veins carrying the pulse of vastness—and it asked me this:

If the Otherworld would always be there, then why must we disappear into it so soon?



The question burrowed new space inside me, and Indigo could smell it on my skin. In the weeks that followed, she turned dreamy. She looped wire around my shoulders, hung gossamer gowns from them as if we were sampling wings. In the mornings, she’d gather dew and hand it to me in little quartz glasses so I might be purified. She’d muse about all the things we would do with our power.

“When we’re in the Otherworld, maybe we can restore Tati’s sight,” she’d say. “Poor, silly Tottlepop.”

Two weeks before my birthday, I woke to a pressure on my chest.

“Wake up, Catskins,” whispered Indigo. “Look what happened.”

I rose up on my elbows, wincing at the pinch in my scalp. I lifted one hand, ran my palm down the dozens of braids that had been looped and knotted around the bars of Indigo’s headboard.

“Elf knots,” said Indigo, giggling. “They must have done it in the night. I told you to keep a bowl of cream and blood outside! But you must have forgotten. They’re so good about climbing around unnoticed. They must have knelt on your pillow, braiding every strand with their little brown fingers as punishment. Did you feel anything?”

“No,” I said.

But that was a lie.

I had felt Indigo braiding each strand, looping it around the metal bars of her headboard. I felt her gently brush the hair from my face, the weight of the bed shift as she rose to her knees and lowered herself slowly onto my body. I felt the scratch of her bare legs, prickled from her last shave even though she still hid her razor.

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” said Indigo lightly. “In a few weeks we’ll be one of them.”

I closed my eyes, imagining what that would look like. I saw our days melting together from the sunlit hours beneath the apple blossoms. Indigo braiding violets into my hair. The Otherworld slowly sipping away our mortal flaws until our bones were rendered to glass and our black hair resolved into shadows, our teeth grown animal-sharp, and our human lives turned to woodsmoke—a flimsy echo of a fire that had already died.



Indigo watched me from her bed as I dressed for my mother’s house.

“Ugh,” she said, flopping back into the pillows. “You must hate it.”

I dragged a brush down my long black hair. It hung to my waist now, and I’d begun to hate how it was always in my face, how I kept rolling over it in the night.

“Yeah,” I said, staring at my hair. “I hate it.”

The House of Dreams grew agitated when I left. The staircase lengthened; the halls darkened. It knew I was eager to leave.

“Shhh,” I soothed, rubbing its walls. They prickled beneath my palm.

I held my breath as I walked to the front door only to hear a sound behind me.

“You’ve got your eyes open now, don’t you, child,” said a voice.

I whirled around, but there was no one there. I looked up. Tati was leaning over the stair railing. I wasn’t used to seeing her awake this early. Her sedatives were powerful and often kept her in bed for days at a time.

Tati’s blind eyes were fixed in a direction where I wasn’t. Mrs. Revand had bound her hair in a polka-dotted silk scarf, and her nightgown was buttoned wrong, revealing the coarse, wrinkled brown of her chest and part of her breast. I didn’t answer as I reached for the front door and ran out into the early spring sunshine.

Tati was right. My eyes were open, and with every day, I grew more frustrated. My powers of invisibility had faltered. More and more, I stood in stark relief against the world. Even my shadow had thickened. I wanted to say that it was Tati’s fault. She’d told me to open my eyes, and maybe the more I beheld the world outside the House of Dreams, the more the world beheld me.

. . . and I liked it.

I thought maybe I could wait for the right answer to come, but my hand was forced.

That day, I went to my mother’s house. She was not sitting at the dining table with the car keys in her hand and a plate of snacks for us. Instead, she stood in the doorway, her shoulders narrowed, tugging at her hair. Her clothes hung off her.

“He’s coming back,” she said without looking up at me.

I was glad she didn’t say his name. The air between us was frail as glass, and we had taken such pains not to let it break. I couldn’t speak around it anymore:

“What do you want?”

My mother looked at me, bewildered. When was the last time someone had asked her this? She blinked a couple times, then swallowed hard.

“I want to sell the house. I want to”—my mother gathered herself—“I want to leave him. I can do it now. I know it. If you don’t want to see me again, I’ll understand . . . but if you want me, Azure . . .” She held my gaze: “If you want me, I can stay. We can . . . we can try again.”