I still worry about them breaking while my feet are in them—
Especially when we tango.
I don’t know how to tango—
But you do.
I look down and see it’s true: My feet, moving with minds all their own across the floor of the great hall, marking the loss of two more things I was once able to control before I arrived here.
“Stop thinking.” My husband’s voice, solid and unrushed, so certain of its worth. The sound of benevolence that’s never been challenged, never proven. Hearing it only makes me want to do the opposite. He dips me, pulls me upright, eyes twinkling like a gremlin’s: “Your willful resistance is one of the reasons I picked you.”
Picked.
The word ignites my ire like petrol. I stomp in tango punctuation and for the first time notice the people encircling us like a human wall, still as stone and shoulder to shoulder, watching us like our lives are theirs to judge.
I home in on mother first, an involuntary instinct. Her face reproaches as much as it sympathizes. On her left is poppa, his face a map of betrayed pain. To her right is Beatrice, all mean mirth and smug scowl. On poppa’s other side is Charles, with two heads: one male, the other female, each wearing the glee of a child before puberty.
It does my heart good to see Charles this way, and for a moment I am free enough to hear more than just the train of my thoughts: the string quartet serenading us from the shadows; the baritone clang of the tower bell.
“It is counting midnight,” my husband says.
It is measuring something.
He dips me, pulls me upright, eyes drilling into mine; asks: “Which is?”
Me.
“Bollocks. And I said stop thinking.” The pressure of his hand on my back feels like fuel pushing me into the future. The man’s confidence is as radioactive and reliable as the sun—behind clouds or beneath the horizon, it’s always there, burning without care. For this odd, rare moment, I am glad for it.
“I get it from her,” he says, pivoting me to face his mother, standing opposite mine in our ring of spectators. She is the reason I am here, performing like a windup doll—the reason I am her son’s wife. “She chose you same as I,” he continues: “We agreed together.” Instantly I know it is a lie. My husband has never agreed with his mother.
“Not until you, the anomaly,” he corrects: “You are my perfect match: a timebomb. You fission. I fuse. Together, we create the Apocalypse.” The truth of it feels like liquid mercury in the back of my throat, powerful and monstrous. “It is only a matter of time,” he says, glaring over my shoulder at one of the revelers ringing us—a person I cannot see but whose eyes I can feel on my back, peeling me open like picked fruit.
My husband pivots, again, me so I too can see who he’s looking at: Time himself. He is, you see, a very real, very ancient man—a wizard, with pitch-black eyes and a husk of a voice you can only hear inside your mind. Your mind is no longer yours, the rasps: Nothing of you is yours anymore.
My husband pulls me closer than ever, whispers into my ear: “Don’t listen to him. It doesn’t matter. You and I are now We. There is no stopping this. Why would you want to? I love you.”
Do you?
“Oh, by far I do.”
The clang of the tower bell crescendos, deafening. And yet beneath it I can still hear the wailing of the quartet — angry bows scratching against strings, sounding shrieks that feel far too human. I want to escape this upside-down dance, but I know by now that he will never release me.
I blink hard in the hope the blackness will take me, then reopen them to find the dream has changed: My husband and I are now alone, swallowed by a moonlit sky pierced by a thousand diamonds. The bell continues its count, but it is now softer, muted—a dull resonance that holds us in its cupped hands, no longer a time bomb. I exhale a great sigh, relieved.
“Indeed,” he sighs, almost a song. It takes me a moment to realize where we are, as is often the case when a dream takes you from one reality to another. High above the kingdom, we are perched on the ledge that wraps itself around the bell tower.
Below us, the kingdom covers the valley in a patchwork quilt of homes, surrounded by steep mountains capped by snow even now in this early summer quarter. Holding my hand, he squeezes it with the excitement of a child. “You are my best friend.” He raises it to his lips. “Never leave me,” he orders.
Could I if I wanted?
“No.”
Together, we sigh. I know I am ensnared, yet somehow I still imagine a way to my own freedom. A shooting star scratches a white arc across the sky, and then I hear it: the voice of the wizard, radiating from everywhere and nowhere: It is time, my dear.
Time for what?
No response comes. Only the push of air of the huge bronze bell, swinging only a few feet behind us like an invisible hand. Its clangs should have burst both our eardrums by now.
My husband takes my face in his hands and puts his close to mine. “My sweet, you forget this is a dream. You forget you can guide it.” He means it to soothe me; instead, it sparks a knot of white fire beneath my breastbone. The feeling steals my breath; slices a rip in the sheer fabric of reality.
Suddenly the full volume of the bell barrels through, pushing me off the ledge. My husband reaches to grab me, but gravity is stronger. Everything is stronger: the volume of the tower bell; the stone-god glares of everyone I’ve ever loved or known or wished I didn’t; the regret I should have seen coming. All of it.
The panic eclipses me. I am in the black void of space, impossible pressure that promises implosion. And then the dream deposits me once again in the great hall.
My first awareness is that of my husband’s hand, clasping mine, electricity conducted through laced fingers. We are back where we started. Time, of course, has taken its toll. The music is dead. The bell is silent. In place of the spectators, who had only moments before formed a human wall around us, only puddles of empty clothes and shoes remain.
Everyone has evaporated, save two: his mother, the Machiavellian matriarch who uses beauty and intelligence the way men use brawn and swords; and mine, the rebel rouser whose frenzied injustice eclipses the kindness she fears she’s lost.
I feel their glares, razor sharp; feel gooseflesh break out on my arms, my legs, my breasts. My sex. I look down at my body and see am naked.
Silence amplifies the divide between me, vulnerable and raw, and my husband and our mothers, still wearing and protected by the armor of their costumes. The sound of cracking crystal announces what comes next, and all four pairs of eyes go to the shoes I never wanted, the monstrosities that can only be filled by me, now filling with the blood of my flayed feet. A crimson circle grows around me.
I have become a target, the only target.
Each mother delivers her own self-satisfied judgment. To her son, the queen recriminates: “I told you she was an impostor.”
To me, mine sighs, resigned: “I told you those weren’t your shoes.”