The Flower Bowl Spell (2 page)

“Oh, you know,” she interrupts, per usual.
Did I really expect to complete a sentence? I prop my elbows on my
desk, eyes on the ceiling. She continues. “I think I’ve decided
something. But I’m just not sure I should…Can you have lunch
today?”

“No can do. I have to—I’m busy.”

“Oh.”

I grit my teeth. All the hurt and
disappointment in that
Oh
. I will ignore it.

“I suppose I can make a decision on my
own…”

“Maybe I can swing by later,” I say.

“Sure,” she says slowly. “After work. I’m
doing a waning ritual tonight. You can help. I’m running low on
candles.”

“I just went to Target, so I’ve got
some.”

“Oh, that’s great. Thanks. Say eight?”

I agree and we say good-bye.

Auntie Tess, not actually my aunt, is a
distant cousin of my father. They’re both second-generation Chinese
Americans. To be perfectly accurate, my father is only
half-Chinese—his mother is white. My own mother, a lovely Chinese
American from central Pennsylvania, is the one who wrangled Tess
into the whole pagan thing. Both came from solid
missionary-produced Episcopalian backgrounds. But my mother lost
interest in the occult the way she does in most things—bingo, Avon
sales, the PTA. Auntie Tess, however, flourished in her newfound
religion. And, being under her charge, I did too, but in a totally
different way. And only up to a point.

****

I write my copy—three short album reviews,
one movie review, none memorable—and turn it in. I make some phone
calls, including a chat with the third-tier band’s publicist to set
up a meeting, and I’m off for the day.

Outside, I look up into the trees, their
leaves just starting to turn from green to yellow and brown. The
limbs hold only birds—no fairy folk. Waiting for the Metro home, I
check the tracks. I do that often these days. There’s nothing but
garbage.

I plant myself a safe distance from the edge
of the platform and keep watch for any suspicious characters. I do
that often these days too. As the train arrives, just to be safe I
whisper an eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head charm, stumbling less than
I thought I would over words I have not uttered in ages. It doesn’t
literally give me eyes in the back of my head, just a heightened
awareness of what’s going on behind me. It only lasts for an hour,
but that’s all I need to get home. Still, I can’t help but turn
around every now and then, ever on the lookout for a scruffy
homeless dude.

Chapter Two

Contrary to what Sir J.M. Barrie professed,
fairies were not created by the scattering of the first baby’s
first laugh, although it’s a nice little bit of poetry. Fairies
originated from the same quagmires of water, dirt, and
simple-celled organisms that every other organic and inorganic
being on this planet did. It’s biology and O-chem. I’ve read
they’re closely related to bats.

I think about this as I walk up the stairs of
my building. Cooper is inside our apartment, drinking coffee and
correcting quizzes. The man never seems to be without a red pencil
in hand. I watch the way his fingers curl around it. The tanned
muscles in his arm gently flex as he writes, an involuntary spasm.
He’s wearing a sage green T-shirt and the gold rims of his glasses
give him something of a leafy touch, as if he had been born in a
forest, one of its creatures.

He does a slight double take when he sees
me—work absorbs him—and says as he puts down the pencil, “Is it
that time already?”

We kiss and I touch his clean-shaven chin,
his sideburns going silver beneath the wheat of his hair. With my
round face, dark hair, and short stature, I think we don’t look at
all like a couple. I look like a charity case, a refugee with hazel
eyes, thanks to my father’s European genes. But whenever Cooper and
I stand side by side and I see us reflected in a mirror or shop
window, I’m always surprised by how well we actually do work.

I answer his question by nodding, feeling a
bit like one of his high school students in his classroom for some
after-school tutoring. Which, just a few years ago, I was.

He stands up and places his glasses on the
kitchen table with a sigh. I busy myself by hanging my fleece on
its hook, hanging my keys on theirs. Everything put away,
everything tidy. Then I remember we’re supposed to be going out.
Where is my brain? I take my things back and sling my messenger bag
over my shoulder.
Let’s do it!
I want to shout, and slap
Cooper five.
Go team!
But I doubt he would find such
juvenilia all that amusing. He gets it all day from the kids.

“Did you do the picnic stuff?” I ask, and the
corner of his mouth twitches. Neither of us cooks. We’re lazy and
disinterested—we have that in common—so it’s take-out or cheap
restaurants all the way. He takes my hand and kisses my palm.

“We’re going to miss the sunset,” I say. “Mr.
Funny Business.”

“Now, now.” He kisses the inside of my wrist.
He doesn’t let go as he leads me down the hallway towards the back
of our flat.

Once we are in our bedroom, he releases my
wrist and faces me. There’s a smile fixed to his face as he
unbuttons my cardigan, removes my blouse, unzips my pants. I tug at
the sage green T-shirt while loosening his leather belt. He lets me
struggle for a while, then takes it out of my hands, unbuckling it
as his eyes stay put on mine.

Yes, Cooper is sixteen years older than me,
but he’s no fogy. He’s what Marisol calls a Silver Fox (and really,
he’s only just going silver at the tender age of thirty-nine). One
of the things I don’t understand, since I have no interest in
planned exercise, but do appreciate about him as it benefits me, is
his need to run at least five miles every morning. Keeps him in
tip-top shape.

We slip and slide across the hardwood floor
to the bed in our socks and underwear. Mine have girlish flowers on
them, blue and pink, a Costco six-pack. I was not thinking about
seduction this morning when I showered, but at least I
did
shower, and I have my good bra on, the push-up T-shirt bra that
gives me my wee bit of cleavage. As for Cooper, he’s the only man I
know who is sexy rather than embarrassing in briefs.

We throw back the covers, the scent of our
past sleeping bodies rising up. They’re a little grainy from our
walk on the beach last night. He leans over me and we kiss. And
then some.

****

I wake from a light doze, no more than ten
minutes. Outside, the sun has barely shifted. Cooper lies by my
side watching me, a smile on his lips, his eyes a little confused
with love.

“Time for the sunset now?” I yawn.

“Yes, by all means. The sunset.”

He rolls to the edge of our bed and I watch
him walk out the door to the bathroom. I hear him turn on the
shower and start to mumble-sing “Toréador” from
Carmen
, his
favorite shower song.

Cooper knows about my Wiccan upbringing and
refers to me and Auntie Tess as the Asian Pagan Invasion. I’ve even
shared tales of some of the more far-out stuff, like the green glow
that would suddenly emanate from candles when our former coven
would chant around a pentacle circle. But we don’t talk about
fairies. Or inanimate objects coming to life. I tried to once, and
he told me I had a very active imagination as a child, a sure sign
of greatness of mind. Who am I to argue?

Besides, I knew he’d say something like that.
Cooper is supportive and easy to read. It’s why I chose him. But
he’s not able to handle the fact that my imagination only gets me
so far. For reasons
I
don’t even understand, I can see and
do things other witches can’t, things you read about in fairy
tales. Only two others know about me. One is Auntie Tess, yet we
never talk about it. Something stops me from sharing too much, and
something stops her from asking. The other person—well, we haven’t
spoken in a long, long time.

I study the ceiling, my old friend. There’s a
crack that’s been there forever, before I moved into this place.
I’ve never liked the ceiling light fixture and pretty much ignore
it, even though each time I pass a lamp store I study the
possibilities. Cooper tells me to wait until we buy a place of our
own. But I doubt we’ll ever leave this apartment. Still, that lamp
with its 1950s design of starbursts and boomerang angles just does
not fit with the Edwardian crown molding and—

Something behind it moves.

My breath catches. I blink. What could it be?
A mouse? A giant spider? Something small. Something that darts.
With wings.

A face peeks over the rim of the lamp. As I
sit up it ducks away, disappearing from my view. I feel something,
almost like a raindrop, hit my belly, and I jump low into a crouch.
Slowly I stand up on the bed, trying to balance on the lumpy old
mattress. I reach for the lamp. I’m too short.

“Did you just
spit
on me?” I holler.
“What do you want?”
And where,
I wonder,
have you
been?

Footfalls pound down the hall. Cooper stands
in the doorway of our room, dripping wet and naked. He looks me up
and down. The shower is still running.

“Why are you yelling? What’s wrong?” he
asks.

“Nothing. There’s something there.”


“Where?”


I point. “The light. The lamp.”

For a second, I don’t think he’s heard me. He
continues to stare at me like maybe this is the moment where he
sees the truth about me and it all ends between us. It’s only a
fraction of a second and then he steps onto the bed—he’s a good
foot taller than I—and unscrews the knob that holds the shade in
place. Carefully, he removes it before peering inside. He raises
his eyes to me.

“You’re right. There’s something here.”

I open my mouth but don’t say what I’m
thinking:
Are you magickal after all?
He pauses, making sure
I’m ready. I nod. He holds the shade toward me like—I can’t help
thinking with a wee shiver—it’s a sacrifice.

Inside are bits of asbestos. Dead flies. Lots
and lots of dust.

“Oh,” I say. “Oh.”

“Confess.” He wipes the dripping water from
his wet hair out of his eyes. “You just wanted me to pull the ugly
lampshade down. Am I right?”

I look up at the glaringly bright lightbulbs
in their sockets. There’s a hole next to them—a swallow could fit
through it, or something of that ilk.

“Yeah, big C,” I say. “You caught me.”

“You are a piece of work, Memphis Zhang.”

“You mean a control freak.”

“
Comme tu veux
.”

Cooper goes back to the bathroom. He turns
off the shower and I hear him toweling off. I stretch out on the
bed and study my bod. The spot where I felt something drip on my
skin is dry, clean as a whistle. Cooper comes back into our room
and starts to dress.

“What did you think was there, anyway?” he
asks.

I raise my hands in a helpless shrug. “A
squirrel?”

He snorts. “A squirrel.”

“Yeah, you’re right. That’s crazy talk. It
was probably a fairy.”

“Or the ghost of Columbus.”

“Ha ha.”

Yet, I know it was a fairy because he smiled
at me.

Chapter Three

The first time the veil lifted I was eight
and very bored.

When I was a kid, my parents often left me in
the care of Auntie Tess. Since she was a practicing Wiccan of the
hippy-dippy variety, the kind that gives San Francisco its
reputation for benign lunacy, they knew I’d be safe. I don’t
remember a time when we weren’t together in someone’s backyard or a
public space celebrating Sabbats major and minor. For these
ladies—and sometimes gents—practicing magick was like prayer. Or
wishful thinking. They’d do their rituals, but nothing supernatural
actually ever happened—except, on occasion, the green light from
the candles, which not everyone could actually see. They didn’t
seem to expect real magick. They just liked to come together. Like
a book club.

On the night in question, we’d gone to Golden
Gate Park’s Lindley Meadow. In the daytime, it was the domain of
dogs, acrobats, guitarists, and Frisbee freaks. I liked to visit
the horses in the nearby stables or watch the model-boaters cutting
loose on Spreckels Lake.

But after the sun went down, the meadow was a
favorite ritual site for Wiccans and pagans. It’s resplendent with
tiny daisy-chain daisies. The other coven kids and I would collect
them, their petals tightly closed for the night, while our mothers
and caretakers prepped for the forthcoming hocus-pocus.

The priestesses would get there before
everyone else to set up, lighting candles, arranging the talismans,
laying out white ropes in a near perfect circle. They were dressed
in their robes, mostly handmade get-ups of maroon velvet or navy
blue velour. When everything was just so, they called the kids
over. As the laughter and murmuring died down, we all joined hands
and, without preamble, began to sway and hum. The women closed
their eyes. In unison, they sang a song that was some variation of
this:

Through all the world below

She is seen all around

Search hills and valley through

There she is found

The growing of the corn

The lily and the thorn

The pleasant and forlorn

All declare

She is there

In meadow dressed in green

She is seen.

La la la. Hills and valleys we have in San
Francisco, but growing corn? A few public garden plots here and
there, I’m sure, but even as a child I knew fantasy from reality.
We were urban witches longing for a landscape that belonged to Wine
Country fifty miles away. Or to a time three hundred years
past.

On and on they sang, in harmony buffered by
the fog. That night was extra-special—in the center of the circle
next to the usual beeswax candles, someone had placed skeleton
dolls dressed in bright clothing.