Katharine McGee - The Towering Sky

Most striking of all, though, were the mirrors. They were ubiquitous, so that a girl could see herself from every conceivable angle, and perhaps a few inconceivable ones too.

Normally, being places like this—cool, expensive boutiques full of beautiful things—calmed Calliope. It was something in the proud look of them, the expectant hush as their doors swung open and you saw all those beautiful rich things arranged within. But today her surroundings seemed to be mocking her.

Livya sank into an armchair next to her grandmother and began tapping furiously at her tablet, her face sour. The dress poufed comically around her, making her look like a human-sized loofah with skinny, protruding arms. Calliope would have laughed at the sight, except that she sort of wanted to cry.

“Elise,” said Miranda, the bridal sales associate. “Do you think we could make a final decision on color? The superlooms are fast, but I’m getting concerned about timing.”

The sample dresses that Livya and Calliope were wearing had been spun from smartthreads: the playful, cheap-looking material patented thirty years ago. The final dresses that they wore at the wedding would be real fabric, of course, because who would actually want their bridesmaid dresses to change color? These smartthread models were for sales purposes only.

No one had asked Livya to move, yet she stood with an audible, resigned groan and stepped back onto the podium alongside Calliope. She kept her arms crossed over her chest, as if to convey how utterly pointless she found this entire exercise.

“Let’s start with the purples.” Miranda reached for her tablet. A colorful bar on one side depicted all the colors of the rainbow, red bleeding through to yellow and then purple again. As Miranda’s fingers moved slowly down the palette, the fabric of Calliope’s and Livya’s dresses shifted accordingly, deepening from lilac to violet to a dark wine color.

“I need to see it with the flowers,” Elise said eagerly, turning to a marble console table along the edge of the room. It was littered with sample bouquets that their florist had sent over, everything from simple all-white arrangements to vast multicolored sprays of foliage. The room smelled pleasantly like a garden.

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