My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

AIMEE BENDER. The Color Master

OUR STORE WAS EXPENSIVE, I MEAN EX-PEN-SIVE, AS ANYTHING would be if all its requests were clothing in the colors of natural elements. The Duke’s son wanted shoes the color of rock, so he could walk in the rock and not see his feet. He was vain that way, he did not like to see his feet. He wanted to appear, from a distance, as a floating pair of ankles. But rock, of course, is many colors. It’s subtle, but it is not just one plain gray, that I can promise, and in order to truly blend in, it would not do to give the Duke a regular pair of lovely pure gray-dyed shoes. So, we had to trek over as a group to his dukedom, a three-day trip, and take bagfuls of the rocks back with us, the rocks he would be walking on, and then use those, at the studio, as guides. I spent five hours, one afternoon, just staring at a rock, trying to see into its color scheme. Gray, my head kept saying. I see gray.

At the shop, in general, we built clothing and shoes, soles and heels, shirts and coats; we treated the leather, shaped and wove the cloth, and even when an item wasn’t ordered as a special request, one pair of shoes or one robe might cost as much as a pony or a month’s food from the market stalls. Most villagers did not have this kind of money so the bulk of our customers were royalty, or the occasional traveler riding through town who had heard rumors of our skills. For this pair, for the Duke, all of us tailors and shoemakers, who numbered about twelve, were working round the clock. One man had the idea to grind bits of rock into particles, and then he added those particles to the dye washing bin. This helped, a little. We attended visualization seminars, where we tried to imagine what it was like to be a rock, and then, quietly, after an hour of deep thought and breathing, returned to our desks and tried to insert that imagery into our choices about how long to leave the shoes in the dye bath. We felt the power of the mountain, in the rock, and let that play a subtle subtextual role. And then, once the dye had reached ultimate power, and once the shoes were a beautiful pure gray, a rocky gray, but still gray, we summoned the Color Master.

She lived about a half mile away. In a cottage, behind the scrubby oak grove. We summoned her by sending off a goat down the lane, because she did not like to be disturbed by people, and the goat would trot down the road and butt on the door as her cue. She’d set up our studio and shop, in the first place, years ago; she does the final work. But the Color Master has been looking unwell these days. For our last project, the Duchess’s handbag, which was supposed to look like a just-blooming rose, she wore herself out thinking about pink, and was in bed for weeks after, recovering, which had never happened before. Pink, she kept saying, as she tossed around, in her bed. Birth, sex, blushes, kisses. She had a very high fever, and lost too much weight. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Also her younger brother suffers from terrible back problems and cannot move or work and lives with her, on the sofa, all day long. Also she is growing older, and she is certainly the most talented in the kingdom and gets zero recognition. We, the tailors and shoemakers, we know of her gifts, but does the King? Do the townsfolk? She walks among them, like an ordinary being, shopping for tomatoes, and no one knows that the world she’s seeing is about a thousand times more detailed than the world anyone else is looking at. When you see a tomato, like me, you probably see a very nice red orb with a green stem, smelling fresh and delectable, with a gentle give to the touch. When she sees a tomato, she sees blues and browns and yellows and curves, and the vine it came on, and she can probably even guess how many seeds are in a given tomato based on how heavy it feels in her hand.

So, we sent over the goat, and when she came into the studio, with the goat, we’d just finished the fourth dying of the rock shoes. They were drying on a mat, and they looked pretty good. I told Cheryl that her visualization of the mountain had definitely helped, because it was a deeper, stronger gray than I’d expected. Cheryl blushed. She’s one of the nicer ones. I said, too, that Edwin’s addition of the rocks to the dye had added a useful kind of rough texture. He kicked a stool leg, pleased. I hadn’t done much; I’m not the most skilled, but I like to commend good work when I see it. But the thing is, even with all our hard work, with all our deepening, they still looked like really beautiful gray shoes. The kind any normal person would love, if they didn’t have this curious vanity about vanishing feet.

The Color Master walked in, wearing a linen sheath woven with blue threadings. Her face hinting at gaunt. She greeted us all by nodding, and stood at the counter where the shoes were drip-drying.

Very nice work, she said. Esther, who had fronted the dying process, curtsied.

We sprinkled rocks into the dye, she said.

A fine choice, said the Color Master.

Edwin did a little dance in place, over at his table.

The goat settled on a pillow in the corner, and began to eat the stuffing.

The Color Master rolled her shoulders a few times, and when the shoes were dry, she laid her hands upon them. She lifted them up, to the sunlight. She picked up a rock, next to the shoe, and looked at the rock, in the light, next to the shoe. She circled both, inside different light rays. Then she went to the palette area and took out a handful of blue dust. We have about 150 metal bins of this dust, in a range of colors. The bins stand side by side, running the perimeter of the studio. They are narrow, so we can fit a whole lot of colors, and if someone brings in a new color, we hammer down a new bin and slide it into the spectrum, wherever it fits. One tailor found an amazing deep burgundy off in the driest part of the forest, on a series of leaves; I located, once, a type of dirt that was a deeper brown than sand but not like rich mud, over by the reddish iron deposits near the lake. Someone else found a new blue, in a dried-out pansy flower, and another in the feathers of a dead bird. We have instructions to hunt for color everywhere, at all times. The Color Master toured the room, and then took that handful of blue dust (and always, when I watch, I am thrilled — blue? How does she know, blue? It was a darkish blue, too, seemingly far too dark for shoes this light, unless he wanted wet rock shoes) and she rubbed the dust into the shoe. Back to the bins and then she got a black, a dusty black, and then some sage green. All rubbed into the gray shoe. While she worked everyone stood around, quiet. We dropped our usual drudgery and chit-chat.

The Color Master worked swiftly, but she added, usually, something on the level of forty colors, so the process, even quickly, took more than two hours. She added a color here, a color there, sometimes at the size of salt particles, and the gray in the shoe shifted and shaded under her hands. She would reach a level and ask for sealant and Esther would step forward and the CM would coat the shoe to seal in the colors and then return to the sunlight, holding a shoe up, with the rock in her other hand. This went on for about four rounds. I swear, I could start to feel the original mountain’s presence, in the room, the great heavy lumbering voice of it.

When she was done, the pair was so gray, so rock-like, you could hardly believe they were made of leather at all. They looked as if they had been sheared straight from the craggy mountainside.

Done, she said.

We circled her, bowing our heads.

Beautiful, I said.

Another triumph, murmured Sandy, next to me, who cannot color-mix to save her life.

The Color Master swept her gaze around the room, and her eyes rested on each of us, searching, slowly, until they finally settled on me. Me?

Will you walk me home? she said, in a deep voice, while Esther tied an invoice to the foot of a pigeon and then threw it out the window in the direction of the dukedom.

I would be honored, I said. I took her arm. The goat, full of pillow, tripped along behind us.

I am a quiet sort, except for the paying of compliments, and I didn’t know if I should ask her anything on the walk. As far as I knew, she didn’t usually ask for an escort home at all. Mainly I just looked at all the stones and rocks on the path, and for the first time saw that blue hint, and the blackness, and the shades of green, and that faint edge of purple if the light hit just so. She seemed relieved that I wasn’t asking questions, so much so that it occurred to me that that was probably why she’d asked me to walk her home in the first place.

At her door, she fixed her eyes on me: gray, steady, aging at the corners. She was almost twice my age, but had always had a sexiness I’d admired. A way of holding her body that let you know there was a body there, but that it was private, that stuff happened on it, in it, to it, but it was stuff I would never see. It made me sad, seeing that, while also knowing about her husband who had gone off to the war years ago, and had never returned, and how it was difficult for her to have people over because of her brother with the bad back, and how long ago she had fled her own town for a reason she never spoke of, plus she had a thick cough and her own money issues, which seemed so unfair when she should’ve been living in the palace, as far as I was concerned.

Listen, she said. She held me in her gaze.

Yes?

There’s a big request coming in, she said. I’ve heard rumors. Big. Huge.

What is it? I said.

I don’t know yet. But start preparing. You’ll have to take over. I will die soon, she said.

Excuse me?

Soon, she said. I can feel it, brewing. Death. It’s not dark, nor is it white. It’s almost a blue-purple, she said. Her eyes went past me, to the sky.

I will do my best, she said. I will do a fair bit of prep. But start preparing your color skills, Missy.

She lowered her brow, and her look was stern.

My name is Patty, I said.

She laughed.

How do you know? I said. Do you mean it? Are you ill?

No, she said. Yes. I mean it. I’m asking for your help, she said. And when I die, it will be your job to finish.

But I’m not very good, I said. Like at all. You can’t die. You should ask Esther, or Hans—

You, she said, and with a little curt nod, she went into her house, and shut the door.

The Duke’s son loved his shoes so much he sent us a drawing, by the court illustrator, of him, in them, floating, it appeared, on a pile of rocks. I love them, he said, in swirly handwriting, I love them, I love them! And then he added a small cash bonus, including horse rides, and a feast at the dukedom. We all attended, in all our finery, and it was a great time. It was the last time I saw the Color Master dancing, in her pearl-gray gown, and I knew it was the last, even as I watched it, her hair swirling out as she glided through the group. The Duke kept tapping his toe on the side, holding the Duchess’s hand, her free one grasping a handbag the perfect pink of a rose, so vivid and fresh it seemed to carry over a sweet scent, even across the ballroom.

Two weeks later, almost everyone was away when the King’s courtier came riding over with the request: a dress the color of the moon. The Color Master was not feeling well, and had asked not to be disturbed; Esther’s father was ill, so she was off taking care of him; Hans’s wife was giving birth to twins, so he was off with her; the two others ahead of me had caught whooping cough, and someone else was on a travel trip to find a new shade of orange. So the request, written on a scroll, went to me, the apprentice. Just as the Color Master had hoped.

I unrolled the scroll and read it quietly by the window.

A dress the color of the moon?

It was impossible.

First of all, the moon is not a color. It is a reflection of a color. Second, it is not even the reflection of a color. It is the reflection of what appears to be a color, but is really in fact a bunch of bursting hydrogen atoms, far far away. Third, the moon shines. A dress cannot shine like the moon, unless the dress is also reflecting something, and reflective materials are generally tacky-looking, or too industrial. Our only options were silk and cotton and leather. The moon? It is white, it is silver, it is silver-white, it is not an easy color to dye. A dress the color of the moon? The whole thing made me irritable.

But this was not a small order. This was, after all, the King’s daughter. The Princess. And, since the Queen had died a few months before, of pneumonia, this was now a dress for the most important woman in the kingdom.

I paced several times around the studio, and I went against policy and tried knocking on the door of the Color Master’s cabin, but she called out, in a strong voice, from a window, Just do it! Are you okay? I asked, and she said, Come back once you’ve started!

I walked back, kicking twigs and acorns.

I ate a few oranges off the tree out back, until I felt a little better.

Since I was in charge, due to the pecking-order issue, I gathered together everyone who was left in the studio, and asked for a seminar on reflection, to reflect upon reflection. In particular for Cheryl, who really used the seminars well. Those of us who were there gathered in a circle in the side room, and we talked about mirrors, and still water, and wells, and feeling understood, and opals, and then we did a creative writing exercise about our first memory of the moon, and how it affected us, and the moment when we realized it followed us (Sandy had a charming story about going on a walk as a child and trying to lose it but not being able to), and then we wrote haiku. Mine was this: Moon, you silver thing/Floating in the sky like that/Make me a dress. Please.

After a few tears over Edwin’s story of realizing his father in the army was seeing the same moon he saw, from home, we drifted out of the seminar room and began dying the silk. It had to be silk, of course, and we selected a very very fine weave, a really elegant one from the loom studio that had a touch of shimmer in the fabric already. I let Cheryl start the dying with shades of white, on the silk, because I could see a kind of shining light in her eyes, from the seminar. She is so receptive that way. When we did our series on bugs, I could practically spot the fighting ants in her pupils. Today, reflective light, in the irises, and even a luminosity to her skin. While she began that first layer, I went to see the Color Master again. She was in bed. It was shocking, how quickly she was going downhill. No one usually went over there but I let myself in, got her brother a glass of water and an apple/cheese snack — Angel, he called me — and then I settled next to the bed where she lay resting, her hair spread over the pillows in rays of silver. She was not very old, the Color Master, but she had gone silver early. Wait, can we use your hair? I said.

Sure. She didn’t seem bothered by my presence, and pulled out a few strands and handed them over. This’ll help, I said, looking at the glint. If we try to make this into particles?

Good, she said. Good thinking.

How are you doing? I asked.

Moon today, sun soon, she said. I heard word.

What?

Sun soon. How goes moon?

It’s hard, I said. I mean, hard. And, with your hair, that’ll help, but to reflect?

Use blue, she said.

What kind?

Several kinds, she said. Her voice was weaker, but I could hear the steel behind it, as she walked through the bins in her mind.

The pale blue, but don’t be afraid of the darker blue. Never be afraid of the darker colors.

I’m a terrible color mixer, I said. Are you in pain?

No, she said. Just weak. The moon is easier than you think, she said. Blue, and then black, to provide shading.

On the dress? Black?

A tiny bit, she said. She pulled out a few more strands of hair. Here, she said. And, she said, shavings of opal, do we have those?

Too expensive, I said.

Go to the mine, she said. There are always shavings there. Get opals, shave ’em, add to the mix, a new bin. An opalescent bin. Do you know the king wants to marry his daughter? Her eyes flashed, for a second, with anger.

What?

Put that in the dress, too, she said. She dropped her voice to a whisper, every word sharp and clear. Anger, she said. Put anger in the dress. The moon, as our guide. A daughter should not be ordered to marry her father, she said.

Put anger in the dress?

When you mix, she said. Got it? When you’re putting the opal shavings in? The dress is supposed to be a dowry gift, but give the daughter the strength to leave instead. All right?

Her eyes were shining at me, so bright I wanted to put them in the dress, too. Okay, I said, faltering. I’m not sure—

You have it in you, she said. I see it. Truly. Or I would never have given you the job.

Then she fell back on her pillows and was asleep in seconds, exhausted.

On the walk back, through the scrubby oak grove, I felt as I usually felt, both moved and shitty. Because what she saw in me could just as easily have been the result of some kind of fever. Was she hallucinating? Didn’t she realize I had gotten the job only because I’d complimented Esther on her scarf at the faire, plus I always took out the trash on time? Who’s to say that there was anything to it? To me, really?

Anger in the dress?

I didn’t feel angry, just defeated and bad about myself, but I didn’t put that in the dress, it didn’t seem fair to anyone. Instead I went to the mine and befriended the head miner, Manny, who I knew a little from my cousin who had worked there awhile back to make some extra cash, and Manny gave me a handful of opals that were too small for any jewelry and would work well as shavings. I spent the afternoon with the sharpest picks and awls I could find, breaking open opals and making a new bin for the dust. Cheryl had done wonders with the white, and the dress was like a gleaming pearl — almost moonlike but not enough, yet. I added the opals and we re-dyed, and then you could see a hint of rainbow, hovering below the surface. Not so moonlike, but still somehow good, like the sun was shimmering in there, too, and that was addressing the reflective issue. When it came time to color-mix I felt like I was going to throw up, but I did what she’d asked, and went for blue, then black, and I was incredibly slow, like incredibly slow, but for one moment, I felt something, as I hovered over the bins of blue. I just felt a tug of guidance from the white of the dress, and it led my hand to the middle blue. It felt, for a second, like harmonizing in a choir, the moment where the voice sinks into the chord structure and the sound becomes larger, more layered and full than it had been before. So that was the right choice. Wasn’t so on the mark for the black, which was slightly too light, and seemed to make the moon more like the moon when it’s just setting, when the light of day has already started to rise and encroach, which isn’t the moon they wanted — they wanted black-of-night moon, of course. But when we held it up, in the middle of the room, there it was, moonlike — not as good as anything the CM had done, maybe one one-hundredth as good, but there was something in it that would pass the test of the assignment. Like, the King and Princess wouldn’t collapse in awe, but they would be pleased, maybe even a little stirred. Color is nothing unless next to other colors, the Color Master told us, all the time. Color does not exist alone. And I got it, for a second, with that blue, I did.

Cheryl and I packed the dress carefully in a box, and sent off the pigeon with the invoice, and waited for the King’s courtiers to come by, and they did, with a carriage for the dress only, and we laid it carefully on the velvet backseat, and they gave us a hunk of chocolate as a bonus, which Cheryl and I ate together in the side room, exhausted. Relieved. I went home and slept for twenty hours. I had put no anger in the dress; I remembered that when I woke up. Who can put anger in a dress when so focused on just making an acceptable moon feeling for the assignment? They didn’t ask for anger, I said, showering, eating a few apples for breakfast. They asked for the moon, and I gave them something vaguely moonlike, I said, spitting toothpaste into the sink.

That afternoon, I went to see the Color Master to tell her all about it. I left out the absence of the anger, and she didn’t ask. I told her I’d messed up on the black, and she laughed and laughed, from her bed. She liked hearing it. I told her about the moon being more of a morning moon. I told her what I’d felt at the blue, the feeling of the chord, and she picked up my hand. Squeezed it lightly, and smiled at me.

Death is glowing, she said. I can see it.

I felt a heaviness rustle in my chest. How long? I said.

A few weeks, I think, she said. The sun will come in soon. The Princess still has not left the castle.

But we need you, I said, and with effort, she squeezed my hand again. It is dark and glowing, she said, her eyes sliding over to lock onto mine. It is like loam, she said.

The sun? I said.

Tomorrow, she said. She closed her eyes.

At the studio, the absentees were returning, slowly, from their various tangents, but I’d received such good marks on the moon dress that I was assigned to the King’s next order, because everyone felt a little jittery about the Color Master’s absence and wanted to go with what/whoever seemed to work. And sure enough, when I got to work the next day, there was an elaborate thank-you note from the castle with a lot of praise for the moon dress, in this over-the-top fancy calligraphy, and a bonus bolt of fuchsia silk, and then the new assignment, for a dress the color of the sun. Esther told me congratulations. I did a few deep knee bends and got to work.

I liked that guy at the mine a little bit, the Manny guy, so I went back to ask about tourmaline, for the sun, even though it didn’t really fit, color-wise, and I knew I wouldn’t use any shavings. But we had a nice roast turkey lunch together in the sunspot outside the rocky opening of the cave, and I told him about the dress I was making for the Princess. Sun, he said, shaking his head. What color is the sun? Beats me, I said. We’re not supposed to look at it, right? All kids make it yellow, I said, but I think that’s not quite right.

Ivory? he said.

Sort of burned white, I said. But with a halo?

That’s hard work, he said, folding up his sandwich paper. He had a nice face to him, something chunky in his nose that I could get behind; it made him into the kind of guy you’d want to call on in an emergency.

Yours, too, I said. His hands were rough from pulling at the walls for years.

Want to go to the faire sometime? he asked. The outdoor faire happened on the weekends, in the main square, where everything was sold.

Sure, I said.

Maybe there’s some sun stuff there, he said.

I’d love to, I said.

We began the first round of dying at the end of the week, focusing initially on the pale yellows. Cheryl was very careful not to overly yellow the dye — yellow is always more powerful than it appears in the bin. It is a stealth dominator, and can take days and days to undo. She did that all Saturday, while I went to the faire. It was a clear warm afternoon, and the faire offered all sorts of goodies and a delicious meat pie. Nothing looked helpful for the dress, but Manny and I laughed about the latest tapestry unicorn craze and shared a nice kiss at the end, near the scrubby oaks. Everything was feeling a little more alive than usual. We held another seminar at the studio, and Cheryl did a session on warmth, and seasons, and how we all revolved around the sun. Central, she said. The theme of the sun is central. The center of us, she said. Core. Fire.

Careful with red, said the Color Master, when I went to visit. She was thinner and weaker, but her eyes were still coals. Her brother had gotten up to try to take care of her and had thrown out his back to the worst degree and was now in the medicine arena, strapped to a board. My sister is dying, he told the doctors, but he couldn’t move, so all they did was shake their heads together. The Color Master had refused any help. I want to see Death as clearly as possible, she’d said. No drugs. I made her some toast but she ate only a few bites and then pushed it aside.

It’s tempting, to think of red, for sun, she said. But it has to be just a dash of red, not much. More of a dark orange, and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white.

White, I said. No, really?

Not bright white, she said. The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way.

Yeah, I said, sighing. And where does one find that kind of white?

Keep looking, she said.

Last time I used your hair, for silver, I said.

She smiled, feebly. Go look at fire for a while, she said. Go spend some time with fire.

I don’t want you to die, I said.

Yes, well, she said. And?

Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color, the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I’d heard mentioned but never experienced. So I decided it made sense to use all of those in the dress: the white, the yellow, the red, a little spot of blue. We hung the dress in the center of the room and we all revolved around it, spinning, imagining we were planets and what did we need. It needs to be hotter, said Hans, who was playing the part of Mercury, and then he put a blowtorch to some silk and made some dust materials out of that and we re-dipped the dress. Cheryl was off in the corner, cross-legged in a sunspot, her eyes closed, trying to soak it up. We need to soak it! she said, standing. So we left it in the dipping longer than usual. I walked by the bins, trying to feel that harmony feeling, what could call me, or not call me. I felt a tug to the dark brown so I brought a bit of it out and tossed it in the mix, and it was too dark but with a little yellow-white from dried lily flowers, and something started to pop a bit. Light, said Cheryl. It’s also daylight — it’s light. It’s our only true light, she said again. Without it, we live in darkness and cold. The dress drip-dried in the middle of the room, and it was getting closer, and just needed that factor of squinting — a dress so bright it couldn’t quite be looked at. How to get that?

Remember, the Color Master said. She sat up, in bed. I keep forgetting, she said, but the King wants to Marry his Daughter, she said. Her voice pointed to each word, hard. That is not right, she said, okay? Got it? Put anger in the dress. Righteous anger. Do you hear me?

I do not, I said, though I nodded. I didn’t say “I do not,” I just thought that part. I played with the wooden knob of her bed frame. I had tried to put some anger in the sun dress, but I was so consumed with trying to factor in the squint that all I really got in there was confusion. I think the confusion was what made an onlooker squint more than the brightness. Confusion does make people squint though, so I ended up fulfilling the request accidentally. We had sent it off in the carriage, after working all night on the light factor that Cheryl had mentioned by adding bits of diamond dust to the mix. Diamonds are light inside darkness! she’d announced, at three A.M., with a bialy in her hand, triumphant. On the whole, it was a weaker product than the moon dress, but not bad — the variance in subtlety is unnoticed by most, and our level of general artistry and craft is high, so we could get away with a lot without anyone running over and asking for his money back.

The sky, the Color Master told me, after I had filled her in on the latest. She had fallen back down into her pillows, and was so weak she spoke with eyes closed. When I held her hand she only rested hers in mine: not limp, not grasping.

Sky is last, she said.

And death?

Soon, she said. She didn’t move, with her hand on mine, and she fell asleep, midway through our conversation. I stayed all night. I slept, too, sitting up, and sometimes I woke and just sat and watched her, sleeping. What a very precious person she was, really. I hadn’t known her very well, but she had picked me, for some reason, and that picking was changing me, I could feel it, and it was like being warmed by the presence of the sun, a little. The way a ray of sun can seem to choose you, as you walk outside from the cold interior. I wanted to put her in that sun dress, to drape her in it, but it wasn’t an option; we had sent it off to the princess and it wasn’t even the right size and wasn’t really her style, either. But I guess I just knew that the sun dress we sent was something of a facsimile, and this person here was the real sun, the real center for us all, and even through the dark night, I felt the light of her, burning, even in the rasping breathing of a dying woman.

In the morning, she woke up, saw I was still there, and smiled a little. I brought her tea. She sat up to drink it.

The anger! she said, as if she had just remembered. Which maybe she had. She raised up on her elbows, face blazing. Don’t forget to put anger in this last dress, she said. Okay?

Drink your tea, I said.

Listen, she said. It’s important, she said. The King wants to marry his own daughter. She shook her head. It was written, in pain, all over her forehead. It is wrong, she said. She sat up higher, on her elbows. She looked beyond me, through me, and I could feel meaning, thick, in her. She picked her words carefully.

You cannot bring it into the world, and then bring it back into you, she said. It is the wrong action, she said.

Her face was clear of emphasis, and she spoke plainly, as plainly as possible, as if there were no taboo about fathers marrying daughters, as if the sex factor were not a biological risk, as if it weren’t just disturbing and upsetting as a given. She held herself steady, on her elbows. This is why she was the Color Master. There was no stigma, or judgment, no societal subscription, no trigger morality, but just a clean and pure anger, fresh, as if she were thinking the possibility over for the first time.

You birth someone, she said. Leaning in. You birth someone, she said. And then you release her. You do not marry her, which is a bringing back in. You let her go.

Put anger in the dress, she said. She gripped my hand, and suddenly all the weakness was gone, and she was right there, an electric pulse of a person, and I knew this was the last time we would talk, I knew it so clearly that everything sharpened into incredible focus. I could see the threads of the weave of her nightgown, the microscopic bright cells in the whites of her eyes.

Her nails bit into my hand. I felt the tears rising up in me. The teacup wobbling on the nightstand.

Got it? she said.

Yes, I said.

I put the anger in the dress, the color of sky. I put it in there so much I could hardly stand it — that she was about to die, that she would die unrecognized, that none of us would ever live up to her and that we were the only witnesses. That we are all so small after all that. That everybody dies anyway. I put the anger in there so much that the blue of the sky was fiercely stark, an electric blue like the core of the fire, so much that it was hard to look at. It was much harder to look at than the sun dress; the sky dress was of a whole different order. Intensely, shockingly, bluely vivid. Let her go? This was the righteous anger she had asked for, yards of it, bolts of it, even though, paradoxically, it was anger I felt because soon she would be gone.

She died the following morning, in her sleep. Even at her funeral, all I could feel was the rage, pouring out of me, while we all stood around her coffin, crying, leaning on one another, sprinkling colors from the dye bins into her hands, the colors of heaven, we hoped, while the rest of the town went about its business. Her brother rolled in on a stretcher, weeping. I had gone over to see her that morning, and found her, dead, in her bed. So quiet. The morning sun, white and clear, through the windowpanes. I stroked her hair down for an hour, her silver hair, before I left to tell anyone. The dress request had already come in, the day before, as predicted.

At the studio, under deadline, Cheryl led a seminar on blue, and sky, and space, and atmosphere, and depth, and it was successful and mournful, especially during the week after the funeral. Blue. I attended but mostly I was nurturing the feeling in me, that rage. Tending to it like a little flame candle, cupped against the wind. I knew it was the right kind, I knew it. I didn’t think I’d do much better than this dress, ever; I would go on to do good things in my life, have other meaningful moments, share in the experience of being a human being in the world, but I knew this was my big moment, and I had to be equal to it. So I sat at the seminar with half a focus, just cupping that candle flame of rage, and I half-participated in the dying of the fabric and the discussion of the various shades, and then, when they had done all they could do, and the dress was hanging in the middle, a clear and beautiful blue, I sent everyone home. Are you sure? Cheryl asked, buttoning up her coat. Go, I said. Yes. It was night, and the blue sky was unlit, and it was a new moon, so it was up to me to find the blue sky in here, only. It was draped over us all, but hidden. I went to the bins, and listened for the chords, and felt her in me. I felt the ghost of her, passing through me, as I mixed and dyed, and I felt the rage in me, that she had to be a ghost: the softness of the ghost, right up next to and surrounding the sharp and burning core of my anger. Both guided my hands. I picked the right colors to mix with blue, a little of so many other colors and then so many different kinds of blue and gray and more blue and more. And in it all, the sense of shaking my fists, at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky because that is what we do, when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all, we shake our fists at the sky, the vast sky, the big blue beautiful indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.

When the sun rose, it was a clear morning, the early sky pale and wide. I had worked all night. I wasn’t tired yet but I could feel the pricklings of it, around me, peripheral. I made a pot of coffee and sat in the chill with a cup and the dress, which I had hung again from a hanger in the middle of the room. The rest of the tailors drifted over in the morning, one by one, and no one said anything. They entered the room and looked up, and then they surrounded it with me, and we held hands and they said I was the new Color Master, and I said okay, because it was obvious that that was true, even though I knew I would never reach her levels again, but at least, for this one dress, I did. They didn’t even praise me, they just looked at it and cried. We all cried.

Esther sent off the invoice pigeon, and with care, we placed the dress into its package, and when the carriage came by, we laid it carefully over the backseat, as usual. Manny came by right before the carriage left, and he looked at an edge of fabric to see the color as we were packing it up, and he held me close. We ate our hunk of gift chocolate. We cleaned up the area around the bins, and swept the floor of dust, and talked to a builder, a friend of Manny’s, about expanding one of the rooms into an official seminar studio. The carriage trotted off, with the dress in the backseat, led by two white horses.

From what I heard, soon after the Princess got the third dress, she left town. The rest I do not know.

The rest of the story — known, I’m told, as “Donkeyskin”—is hers.