The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(7)

At night, there were an endless number of games for us to play. Sometimes she was Theseus fleeing the labyrinth, and I was the savaging Minotaur trying to sink my teeth into her. Occasionally, I was Endymion and she was Selene, the moon goddess draped in silver who crawled onto my lap and fit me inside her.

One night, Indigo lay beside me in bed. I lifted her hand, watching the light catch on the white crescent scar on her palm. My fingers skimmed up her arm and the hollow between her collarbones to the curve of her cheek.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Memorizing you.”

She smiled. “For what purpose?”

In case you disappear, I wanted to say. But I didn’t dare. When I looked at Indigo then, her eyes were soft and wet, and for a single moment I knew the very texture of her soul.

“I wish I could win your hand like in the stories,” I said. “I’d fetch you the feather from the tail of a firebird. I’d fit the ocean in a walnut shell. Or find you Cinderella’s glass slippers.”

Indigo laughed. “What would I do with glass slippers?”

“Dance in them, of course.”



Sometimes, fairy tales are little more than a litany detailing acts of devotion. Sisters knit shirts of stinging thistles for brothers turned to swans. Wives wear out iron shoes. Princes scale mountains of glass. I supposed it was a matter of will. What would you do to be happy? To be loved?

Our first wedding anniversary happened to coincide with the opening of a new property near Wistman’s Wood in Devon, England. Beneath a chandelier of antlers and before a small, bejeweled crowd, I presented my wife with a pair of handblown glass slippers from an artisan I had found in Nakano City. To the laughter and delight of the crowd, she insisted on wearing them.

I will never forget how she sparkled—her dress the color of bruises, a collar of amethysts at her throat. When the musicians in their fox masks struck up the first slow waltz, we danced on a platform disguised as a large, gilded nest.

Indigo’s smile never wavered. Her composure never slipped. She nodded at the crowd, and they poured in from the fringes of the ballroom to join us. After that first dance, I led her to one of the golden tables that circled the room.

It was only when she sat and the hem of her dress lifted that I noticed the blood pooling in her glass slippers, the fine crack along one side.

Indigo removed the shoes carefully. Two of her toes were blue. Later, we would discover they were broken. Later, I would cradle her ankles and tell her I loved her and insist on carrying her up the stairs and all throughout the house.

I had always found the rejected stepsisters of Cinderella far more captivating than the story’s namesake, and now I knew why. When the shoe did not fit, they cut off their toes, sliced off their heels, squeezed their feet into glass, and lowered their skirts to cover the pain. Perhaps, in the end, the prince made the wrong choice. Such devotion is hard to come by, after all.

Look how I will carve myself to fit into your life. Who will not do less?

In Indigo’s blue toes and ruined skin, I saw a love letter. Gruesome, yes, but for all that it became in the end, it must be said that it was always true.



I tried not to be curious about my wife’s past, though I sometimes felt I could detect its shape in her silences.

I’d watch her pause before the photographs tucked into the far edge of the study she rarely entered. The pictures showed her childhood home, Domus Somnia. The House of Dreams. It was a sprawling estate on an island off the coast of Washington. Now it was occupied by her aunt, a woman with whom Indigo communicated through a network of caretakers, assistants, and solicitors, and nothing more.

I didn’t ask her the reason for their estrangement or about the House of Dreams. I sensed this was a line that was not to be crossed. Besides, I knew how these stories went. There was always a hapless youth or milk-skinned maiden who makes a promise they cannot keep and invites pain into the only happiness they have ever known.

How ungrateful, how foolish, one might say. But they do not know us. They know neither the contours of our hearts nor the cold hands that shaped them.

We are the ones accustomed to making our beds in fireplaces, to bending our will to sharp-toothed stepsiblings, to standing alone in the woods with nothing but a trail of rapidly vanishing crumbs to guide our way home. Pain is inexplicably vital to us. It pins us to the very fabric of our lives, that which joy and comfort and warmth have made alien and foreign. Pain speaks to us in a voice that carries the hallowed certainty of hymns:

I know exactly what you deserve, and I shall give it to you.





Chapter Four

The Bridegroom




By the end of our third year of marriage, I understood that the secret to everlasting love was fear. Fear tethered love in place. Without the terror that came from imagining a life without your beloved, there was no urgency in loving them.

I tried to love Indigo as she wished.

I learned not to question the glazed, haunted expression that snuck into her eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking. Once, she walked out of a movie theater without an explanation. The film had seemed innocent enough—a tale of two sisters—though the specifics escape me now. Another time, I found her sobbing in the garden over a dead bird. I told her we could go into town and buy her a pair of birds if she was so unsettled. She only stared at me in confusion.