“It was so neat. It shimmered like nothing I’d ever seen before. And, well, I’m a mermaid. I know all about shimmer.”
To that, Finn shot her a smile so warm that she felt like she could bask in it.
“So I took the pearl and offered it to Monty. The second he swallowed it, he started talking. And he has never stopped. He’s hardly slowed to take a breath,” she added with a little laugh.
“And you weren’t so lonely anymore.”
“Exactly,” she agreed.
Until now, she thought. Though having both Arden and Selene helped fill the space left by her hobnobbing pelican.
She glanced down the street, seeing a magnificent centaur in a vibrant green dashiki adjusting one of the sound boards just before music started to play.
“Oh, it’s starting!” Iris cheered, bouncing up and down as the first float started to move into the street.
It wasn’t the dryad one.
It appeared at first like a rolling garden—lush and vibrant. Roses, poppies, daisies, and lavender tumbled over its curved surface in a dazzling explosion of color. The petals swayed in some unfelt breeze.
Then—just as the float started to slide past them—the flowers appeared to shiver.
A collective gasp rippled through the onlookers—Iris included—as hundreds of tiny petals floated up into the air.
They weren’t plants after all.
They were flower sprites.
Their petal-wings fluttered in the air, fast and shimmering like dragonflies.
Iris’s head angled up, her lips parted, eyes wide, her heart thudding. The shimmer of wings echoed something deep and wordless inside her. It felt ancient—older than her frustration with Finn or the obligations to the surface world. This was joy in its purest form. She wanted to bottle it, to drink it like sunlight through sea glass.
They lowered back down to the float, everyone moving in perfect choreography until they formed a sign out of their soft, vibrant bodies.
First, we pollinate.
Then, we party.
The onlookers erupted into cheers and whistles as music blasted from speakers built into the float, and the sprites indeed started to party.
“I think that was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Iris declared when the float moved on.
“I agree,” Finn said, making her turn to find him watching her.
But before she could let herself analyze that, there was a chorus of voices, drawing her attention back to the street where hundreds of small red-hat-clad gnomes marched.
Each marched in a perfectly timed formation, wielding sparkly tools like hammers, garden spades, and rakes.
Just when Iris was starting to think that was all they would do, they stopped in the middle of the street and broke into a dance, using their tools the way a color guard troupe would use flags, as they broke into some sort of song—only, there were no words.
“What is that?” Iris asked, not even glancing at Finn because she didn’t want to miss a second of the display.
“Beatboxing,” Finn supplied.
As the gnomes walked away, Iris spotted the dryad float moving down the street, the bright green leaves waving in the wind, their limbs swaying.
Then, so slowly that it almost seemed as if your eyes were playing tricks on you, they emerged from their trees—adults and children alike—and broke into a song about protecting the woodlands. It was so beautiful that Iris found herself blinking tears from her eyes.
Another garden float was next, this one lined in rows of dirt, with vegetables sticking out of the tilled rows.
