The Last Tale of the Flower Bride

by Roshani Chokshi

I have always been intrigued by these not-quite women, whether they were sirens or mermaids, kinnari or selkie. The world can’t seem to decide whether to condemn, covet, or celebrate them.

I have since learned that marriage is nothing more than a spell strengthened by daily ritual. The spell requires libations: mundane musings hoarded and pored over, the repetition of small dismays, the knowledge of how your spouse takes their coffee. Marriage asks for that crust of time you were selfishly saving for yourself. Marriage demands blood, for it says: Here is what is inside me, and I tithe it to you. A marriage cannot live on honest midnights alone.

Sometimes, fairy tales are little more than a litany detailing acts of devotion. Sisters knit shirts of stinging thistles for brothers turned to swans. Wives wear out iron shoes. Princes scale mountains of glass. I supposed it was a matter of will. What would you do to be happy? To be loved?

I had always found the rejected stepsisters of Cinderella far more captivating than the story’s namesake, and now I knew why. When the shoe did not fit, they cut off their toes, sliced off their heels, squeezed their feet into glass, and lowered their skirts to cover the pain. Perhaps, in the end, the prince made the wrong choice. Such devotion is hard to come by, after all. Look how I will carve myself to fit into your life. Who will not do less?

By the end of our third year of marriage, I understood that the secret to everlasting love was fear. Fear tethered love in place. Without the terror that came from imagining a life without your beloved, there was no urgency in loving them.

Only a shattered promise yields a rich, glittering yolk of a tale.

now. “A circle is a fixed infinity. Even the way it looks when it’s held up to the light is curious, as if it’s a portal to some place of mystery and your choice to wear it means you’ve allowed your marriage to be a threshold to the unknown. And yet, even in the unknown, there is a demand of mutual trust.”

When I was little, she had been a walking flame, but fire requires feeding and either my mother didn’t know how to sustain herself or had stopped working at it. Over the years she starved and shrank until she was a matchstick, a short burst that quickly chewed down the wood and inspired no warmth.

You can know a person in totality—as they are revealed in the angle of light hitting your eyes, in a poem of photons and particles, in the particular wavelengths adjusted to your height, the contours of your nostrils, the private landscape of your synapses. Your mind makes a map of them and even barefoot and blindfolded, this terrain becomes a truth. And it is a truth. But only at an angle.

Our youth was so powerful it could not possibly last, or it would consume us whole. That’s why magic kissed our bruises, coddled our hearts, and then sent us on our way. Magic hoped we would carry its echo out into the world, for we were never meant to stay here.

My husband reaches for my hand. Our wedding rings touch. I have never before considered what it means to have a good marriage. I thought it was finding intriguing and attractive company. But maybe it is about finding someone whose heart is like a mirror, whose love can make you stand the sight of yourself.

Eventually, what was once softened to a palimpsest of lost words and snowfall, starlings and sparrow wings and blue ink. In this way, the king and queen crafted a tale of their own. In the end, they lived.