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They hadn’t noticed us for the first time at the party because we were beautiful. They noticed us because we scared them. Their eyes tried to chisel us into pieces they could hold in their hand—brown eyes, dark hair, sullen mouths. When they smiled, they imagined us between their teeth, how we’d taste as they chewed on that glittering rind until all that was mysterious about us gave way to ordinary marrow.

Perhaps I had been given a chance to prove I would rescue my bride from whatever enchantment held her captive from me.

“I exhaled, she caught my hand, and we transformed. I could not tell you where that magic came from, whether it was some unseen element insinuating itself into our atoms or if I served as mirror and moon to Indigo’s incandescence. All I knew was that together we were lustrous.”

absolutely delightful on audiobook

The classroom seemed defined for once, all its edges articulated—the chalkboard decorated in crimped, painted cardboard, the square arrangement of sixteen blue plastic chairs, the sun-warmed smell of chalk mixed with my classmates’ sweat and hair products. And underneath it all: the sour, unripened scent of youth.

“I have closed my eyes to be with Indigo. I have chosen not to care about the waking world.
Now, waiting in the hall for Indigo to take us away from this place, I looked at my palm and noted the small scar, puckered
and colorless on the heel of my hand, a reminder of that night. In this, too, I saw a warning:

Even an illusion can wound.

Perhaps more so than anything.

In her parted lips, I glimpsed something that—in my own unpracticed, sloppy awe—struck me as holy. For a moment, I saw a window and not my wife. When I walked to her, it was like peering straight into something primordial and desperate, where the inscrutable space between stars had once birthed myths and gods, built palaces of story and scripture in which human doubts found a place to rest their weary brows.

She greeted me shyly, eyes warm, a marigold perched in the curve of her neck.

Indigo had never looked more beautiful to me than she did in that moment. It wasn’t her features—though they had always been lovely—it was the way she molded the atmosphere of the room. She looked like the nostalgia that settles in your ribs at the end of a story you have never read, yet nevertheless know.

I could only nod. She’d begun to smell different, too, a tang of salt to her skin. Even her sweat smelled fruited, like she was ripening beneath the moonlight.

Sometimes, I can’t believe you’re real,” I said.

Indigo smiled. “Who said that I am?”

“But when I blinked, I saw Hippolyta’s glowing teeth as she laughed: You say she loves you, but what is she anyway?

What was Indigo? She was my bride, and she was my love, but there was something of the inhuman that clung to her. A grace and indifference that struck me as alluring one moment and alien the next.”

a place so steeped in wonder that if we were to plant a sonnet in the shade of
the oak, we might return the next day to find it had become a tree that grew poem-plums and all who ate of it would speak
sweetly.

“I’m not worried.”
But I was.
I pictured my mother as she had once been—burning and bright—before she began to collapse. My mother had given me little of herself. Not her mouth or her height or her laugh, and I was terrified that of all the things she hadn’t passed down it would be this slow unrecognizableness that I inherited, like a vicious disease that would eat me from the inside out.

I thought we were invisible, but as I would find out, Time was not the only thing that watched us.

Why had magic curled about our feet?

Who were we?

“Tears are bits of your soul,” said Indigo, her face inches from mine. “We can’t risk letting them hit the ground.”

I lifted my hand to wipe them away as Indigo leaned forward: “What a waste.” Her tongue was hot and smooth as it darted out, tracing the curve of my cheekbone. She smacked her lips as she pulled back.”

yes!

“You can picture it, can’t you? The moment when time caught up to us, the slant of light in which the familiar turned strange.
I studied our faces side by side and felt a lack of myself as the first touch of frost crept into our eternal summer.
I never used to notice time passing, but my indifference was one-sided.”

She smiled, and I wondered how many times she had thought what she’d just spoken aloud.

“In my memories, Indigo and Azure are always happy. Always dancing.”

When it was finished, she took my
face in her hands.


“There,” she said. “It is done.”

I closed my eyes.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

Each sacrificed strand translated to a piece of armor. It was invisible, yes, but I felt it shimmer all around me.

The water flexed, muscular as a great tail beneath the sunlight. I thought
of Melusine bathing in the dark, anchored to her wild body in the hopes that her husband might let her have this one privacy,
might even break the spell.

If only he remembered not to look.

hell yeah we’ve finally started this ✨🫶🏻☝🏻🤸🏻‍♀️

“How by tomorrow these roses would be overblown and no good, but today they were at a perfect size for bouquets. They move quickly in their death: they are beautiful, they are lush, then they are no use at all, emitting a ripeness that forces other flowers to bloom faster if they’re left standing around too long.”