liv’s Reviews > The Last Tale of the Flower Bride > Status Update

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.