I didn’t recognize the voice in my head. It was like a child’s, high-pitched and breathy.The sound of it a finger of frost dragging down my neck.
“Yes,” I said, though I did not know to whom I was speaking. “Yes, it is enough.”
I knew the exact moment when I had decided that what my bride offered was enough. Indigo and I were in Paris, basking in those first, fresh months of knowing each other. It was too early in spring to be beautiful, and the city looked dull and groggy, an aging woman robbed of the winter season’s diamonds.
One evening, we took aperitifs on her terrace. On the small wrought-iron table lay a plate of cheese, marbled slices of meat, and an odd glass terrarium nearly a foot high and full of smoke.
“I have a surprise for you,” said Indigo, removing the glass.
Smoke unraveled in the air, revealing a tiered golden platter. Scattered across its three levels were tiny gold-skinned plums.
“Faerie fruit?” offered Indigo.
A feeble bit of sunlight broke through the gray clouds, illuminating her face. The wind tugged petulantly at her hair as she lifted her hand. For a moment, I thought she would push her palm against the air and the stitches of the world would rip and take us somewhere far away. I thought I heard my brother’s voice on the wind:
Come with me.Come find me.
How? I thought.
But the answer was staring at me. Indigo sat in one of the little iron chairs and reached for a plum. Gold foil glittered her lips, and I smelled the marzipan paste that had molded the fruits.
“Well?” she asked. “Don’t you want a bite?”
“They’re not real.”
I sounded like a wounded child. Indigo only laughed. “How do you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“True faerie fruit is the taste of the threshold,” said Indigo, parroting the words of my own research papers back to me. “The alchemical properties of which might transmute all that we are. It can allow us to move through spaces humans were not meant to occupy. It can give us powers. It can let us see through glamour. Who is to say what it truly looks like?”
Indigo held out the fruit. I understood then that she was not offering a doorway of escape but a means by which to live.
“Faerie fruit is exceptionally dangerous,” I said. “It is beautiful to behold, but they say death laces its ambrosial flavor.”
The ripe fullness of Indigo’s mouth was now the gold of apagan god. I loved how she sat with her long legs folded beneath her, an artful carelessness to her limbs as if she only briefly inhabited this form.
“Sounds far too treacherous for me,” I said, bending to run my thumb along her bottom lip.
“Don’t worry,” said Indigo, smiling. “If you’re good, I’ll keep you safe.”
“Promise?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Now, close your eyes.”
I did as I was told, and she placed the plum between my teeth. It tasted like gold and honey with an echo of iron and salt. It was the taste of a threshold crossed; a bargain struck. In all that time, I have kept my eyes closed and Indigo has kept me safe.
I knew that Hippolyta’s words were merely words, and yet they conjured an image all the same. As I slouched against her door and caught my breath, I thought of the maiden in the robber bridegroom tale, of the way she must have gasped when the dead girl’s little finger landed in her lap, how she must have counted all the times she had kissed her betrothed’s mouth and thought of the sweetness of his breath, while on the other side of the oven, he sucked marrow from a girl’s femur.
Later, I would recognize this as the moment when the House of Dreams struck. This was the nature of clever places. I thought there was no knowledge the House could tempt me with to convince me to do its bidding. I was wrong.
One moment, I was staring at my feet. The next, I heard that same childish voice sigh.
You lie. It is not enough.
Abruptly, I was thrust into an image that held the shape and weight of memory.
I saw my mother as she looked when I was seven years old.She was too strong-jawed for beauty, and yet she had the most delicate, doe-wide green eyes. We’re standing in the kitchen and someone tugs my hand. It is my brother, chubby and jam-stained, squirming and laughing as I twirl him on the spot. In my mother’s hand is a cigarette. We freeze at the sound of my father’s heavy footsteps in the garage. My mother grins and taps her ashes into the sink.
