The Last Tale of the Flower Bride(72)

I moved closer, my eyes slowly adjusting to the glare of my flashlight refracted through the glass. When I blinked, I thought I had glimpsed something gray and mottled. Its shape was vague, rounded, like an unfortunate rabbit had gotten trapped inside.

The wind lifted the corner of the tarp, pulling it back like a smile reveals teeth. My flashlight roamed over the inside of the box. Only, it was not a glass box. It was a casket.

And inside it lay a body.





Chapter Thirty-One

Azure




When Indigo and I were young, we dreamt about transforming into other animals. We tried on pairs of wings, threw spotted pelts over our bodies, held our breath underwater for as long as we could. We stayed in the water until the pads of our fingers crinkled, as if they were on the verge of peeling back and revealing new, opaline extremities. We knew we could manage it, but in the end, we decided against it. We didn’t know for certain whether our human thoughts would remain in animal form, and we didn’t want to risk getting trapped.

It was a mercy, I thought, that maybe those maidens never truly knew what was happening when they were altered. That if they must be cursed or robbed or raped, then at least they didn’t have to remember everything. Maybe that’s why the swan maiden’s midnight lament sounded so sweet. It didn’t hold the memory of loss, but the knowledge of the memory’s absence. Maybe that’s why the selkies breached gray waters, always swimming close to the ruddy-cheeked fishermen before darting away and staring at them from the rocks. They didn’t remember what it was like to be a clumsy, fragile-skinned girl lying still beneath a panting stranger. All that remained was the animal instinct: Don’t get caught.

When I opened my eyes, I was not in my room. I was not in my bed. I was not in my skin.

I pushed myself up on my elbows and a musty fur pelt slipped off my bare shoulders. It was the silvery mink Indigo had been wearing when she came over. The same one, I dimly remembered, that she once insisted on giving to me.

So you can really be like Catskins, she’d said.

Cool air grazed my skin.

I wasn’t wearing clothes.

My heartbeat was animal quick. I wondered if this was how the enchanted maidens felt when they looked down to see a pile of feathers at their feet or seal skin pooling around their ankles. Did their mouths taste of fish roe from their last meal? Did their bodies feel like mine felt right then, as if it had been conquered by a land that had not bothered to learn its native language?

My senses were slow to return. The edges of my mind blurred, and it took me a full minute to realize I was lying in my mother and Jupiter’s bed. The sheets were rumpled where yesterday they had been made. A smell of sweat and ammonia hung in the air, and my stomach heaved. Ten feet away, the door was ajar, and on the hallway floor, I could see three shadows.

“—didn’t do anything,” said a voice.

The voice was smoky and wheedling. It belonged to Jupiter. Next to it, a great heaving and sobbing, the efforts of someone trying to be turned inside out by the force of her cries. I knew that cry. It was my mother. Then, clear and silver, came a different voice:

“It’s been going on for almost a year. I tried to get her to stop, but you know how stubborn she is,” said Indigo. “I was worried last night when she didn’t show up at my house . . . and that’s when I found them.”

“Honey, that’s not true. Nothing happened—”

I touched my thigh, the instep of my foot, the veins of my wrist. My body was mute. I was in the dark.

Later, Indigo would assure me that nothing happened. She would fill in the missing details with clinical recitation: the sedatives in my Champagne took effect, my clothes were stripped, the bed was mussed, my limbs were arranged in the fur coat. Jupiter had come home in the early hours, and when I did not answer his calls, he stood by the bed and watched me.

“He only touched himself,” said Indigo sweetly, as if this would make me feel safer now that I knew. “Not you. I would never let anything happen to you, Azure. I told you I’d keep you safe, and I have.”

Indigo knew this for certain because she had stayed behind the door the whole time, a Polaroid camera in her hand. She knew my mother’s jealousy and thought the pictures would prove to her that I was not worth the effort of changing her life. But the photos turned out to be unnecessary.

My mother had never needed evidence.

“Honey, wait—” said Jupiter.

I cried out for her to wait, too, but my mother had been right about us. We were cursed and we were trapped. She by the nightmare of love. And I by the reality of it.

My memories of that night were a black puddle, flexible in their horror for they had nothing to cling to—and this was the real curse of transforming. Not the body you were returned to, but the memories you were stripped of, the new caverns in your thoughts shaped by nights that had been thieved from your life.

A few days later, Indigo would offer to show the pictures to me, thinking that seeing them would cure my silence. I threw them into the fire without looking, hoped that burning them would give me back the memories I’d lost. But whoever or whatever watched me—dark-eyed gods or horned faeries, silent stars or simply the wind—didn’t accept my sacrifice. When Indigo saw what I’d done, she chided me.

You should’ve looked.



The last time I saw my mother she was sitting inside Jupiter’s scuffed, gray sedan applying lipstick. For the last hour, I had been standing, near-hidden, behind the scraggly pines that grew opposite the road. I’d watched him drag their suitcases, throw them into the broken trunk that needed rope to stay shut. I’d watched him turn off the lights, take in the mail and the newspaper, whistling the whole time. I’d watched him slide into the front seat before he patted his shirt pocket, mumbled something to my mother, and loped back into the house.