Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful (47 page)

He didn’t even look up.

Demeter reached into her pocket and pulled out her cigarette case. She carefully removed one and lit up.

“You cannot smoke in here.”

“Just fill out your damn form, sunshine.”

He slammed the pen on his desk. “You can
not
smoke in here!” At his shout, the secretary rushed into the doorway.

Demeter looked from Loudcrier to the secretary and back. The fact that her remark was ignored but her lighting up wasn’t made her wonder why. “Aren’t you going to finish filling out my eviction, Mr. Loudcrier?”

Just as his fingers curled to grasp the pen, Demeter wiggled her fingers and the pen squirmed away from him. Confused, he grabbed at it again, but this time it rolled away and lifted into the air. Mr. Loudcrier gasped and pushed away from his desk. His mouth worked like a mute puppet as the pen continued to write in the blanks.

The secretary crossed herself. “You’re a witch!”

“You bet your sweet stenography pad, I’m a witch.”
Didn’t they already know that?
Demeter focused on Mr. Loudcrier again. “What did she show you before you came in?”

“Video footage of you placing a candle on the floor in the hall—which is a direct fire violation.” His face somehow got paler. “That . . . that was a spell. That’s how this is your fault!”

Pissed off that she’d needlessly outted herself, Demeter snarled, “No shit, Sherlock.” Demeter took another drag on her Marlboro. She had one last ploy. “You might want to reconsider evicting me and just build a smoking area. I mean, unless you want this to turn into an ugly witch discrimination lawsuit.”

Mr. Loudcrier’s eyes darted back and forth as he thought.

Demeter sat back, crossed her legs, and blew smoke in his direction again.

The CEO suddenly stilled. He shot a look at his secretary, nodded, pushed his glasses up his nose and smoothed his receding hair. He faced Demeter squarely. “No. I will not reconsider.” He grabbed a new pen and jerked the paper away from the hovering pen. He signed.

Demeter’s mouth fell open. “Huh?”

He turned the paper and pushed it across the desk to her. “Unless you want my video footage released and elderly witches to be shown to be belligerent and dangerous firebugs, you’ll sign by the X.”

She glared at him and stuck her cigarette between her lips before holding out her open hand. The floating pen crashed into her palm and she adjusted it into her grip.

She scanned the eviction form.
I have to leave.

Knowing she was losing this battle of the wills with Mr. Loudcrier hurt more than that thought. In fact, the idea of not having a choice in leaving here actually felt . . . good. As for her future residence . . . well, she had to trust the Goddesses. And she would fix the spell before she left. She’d promised. Besides, no one deserved to have a naked Emmet Johnson inflicted on them, not even her soon-to-be-former mundane neighbors.

Demeter signed.

Without a word she stood and walked toward the door. The secretary moved out of her way just as Demeter blew a smoke ring in her face.

Demeter shuffled a pair of steps, then spun back ready to say a nasty farewell to the secretary but, hearing an odd rustling noise from the office, she said nothing. Instead, she stepped back to the doorway and peeked in, watching as Mr. Loudcrier pulled the backing off of a small sticker, shoved his sleeve up, and slapped the sticker onto his arm.

Nicotine patch.

Demeter laughed out loud.

The piece of “crystal” Mrs. Garcia gives to the young baseball fan in Leslie What’s story is not really made of crystalline rock. But magic is said to make use of “intent” when the real item is missing, so perhaps glass can be effectively magical if it needs to be. Crystals, gemstones, semiprecious stones, and even more common stones are traditionally thought to possess powers or metaphysical energy that can be tapped in various ways. The wearing of amulets or jewelry decorated with stones or gems has been practiced throughout history to ward off evil, for protection, healing, or fertility. Some stones are even considered unlucky and to be avoided. Stones can also be used in divination—lithomancy. Most of us are familiar with the “crystal balls”—also known as shew stones—used by stereotypical “gypsy” fortune tellers. Crystal-gazing (crystallomancy or spheromancy) is actually a form of scrying—a way of “seeing” the past, present, or future by looking into a crystal ball, a bowl or body of liquid (hydromancy), or other reflective surface.

Magic Carpets

Leslie What

The Santa Ana winds arrived, whipped into frenzy by a spirit with the power to fold hot air inside wind. I lay beside my big sister Pammy in the backyard, feeling the dry breeze tickle the backs of my legs. My skin itched where the crop top had exposed a four-inch band of belly to dead grass. I sat up to scratch and Pammy sat up, too. She tugged her shirt down, as if to cover the welts Daddy had raised that morning, then reached to pull the sports page from beneath her transistor radio.

“What time is the game?” I asked. We hadn’t had a radio or a team back home, but in Los Angeles we had both.

Pammy checked her watch. “Now,” she said.

A wind blew, thick and breathy like a child learning to whistle. I watched a leaf fall from one of our two avocado trees and circle in the air, stirred by the wind’s hand. Pammy let go of the paper and it skimmed twenty feet along the grass before landing on the chain-link cyclone fence that divided the back of our property from the neighbor’s.

“I better get it,” Pammy said, “before it flies into Mrs. Garcia’s yard.” Daddy had warned us just that morning to stay away from Mrs. Garcia, “ . . . that witch next door. Stay away from her and her devil magic,” he’d said, but if it hadn’t been magic, he would have found another reason to keep us to our yard.

Pammy found his superstitions funny. I couldn’t help looking past the fence to Mrs. Garcia’s back door, wondering why she had been nice to us all summer, awfully nice for someone who wasn’t even a blood relative. I didn’t want to trust her. Maybe Daddy was right. Maybe Mrs. Garcia was a witch.

Pammy stood and slipped her tanned feet into her rubber thongs. She smoothed the wrinkles from her shorts and walked to the fence to ply away the newspaper. She crumpled the paper into a ball, which she threw at me. I straightened my arms to bat it away, but the wind changed, and the paper floated past me.

Pammy pointed to the leaves and paper scraps littering the lawn. “Daddy will be happy the wind is keeping us busy,” she said. “Won’t be able to do nothing today except clean up this mess.”

I was twelve and didn’t mind the yard. But Pammy was almost seventeen and for her, things were different. “If it wasn’t for this radio,” she said, “I’d go crazy.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to rake the yard while we listen to the game,” I said, wanting to get it over with.

Pammy winced as she rubbed a yellowing bruise above her elbow. “We might as well wait till the winds stop,” she said. She stuck out her tongue at our peeling stucco house. “Sometimes I wish Daddy was dead.”

“You don’t really mean that,” I said. Daddy wouldn’t be home for another hour, but I worried Pammy’s wish might be carried on the wind to the slaughterhouse where he worked. Daddy had learned the butcher’s trade during the Korean war, but now he hated his job, said the work was fit for idiots.

“Maybe I don’t,” Pammy said, “but I do wish things were different.” She slumped to the ground and positioned her legs out in front to catch the sun. “Well, I’m turning on the radio before we miss any more.”

We listened to the radio voice. “There’s talk Maury Wills may break Ty Cobb’s record of ninety-six stolen bases.” Hearing Maury’s name made me smile. Pammy noticed this and grinned, her lipstick forming pink lines along the creases of her lips.

I strained to hear above the static. “Turn it up,” I said; she took her sweet time to do that. A boy had given the transistor radio to Pammy, but she’d told Daddy that she’d won it at school.

Mama called out from the house. “You girls in the yard?” She opened the screen door and stepped onto the patio. She sipped her whiskey from one of the two crystal wedding glasses that had survived our move to California. “I’m going to take my nap,” Mama said, “unless you need something.” Her matted hair was the color of unbaked red clay and her brown polka-dot dress was wrinkled, discolored under her arms.

“We’re okay,” Pammy said. “Go on to sleep.”

Mama yawned. “Look at this yard,” she said in a lazy drawl. “It’s those avocado trees, stealing life itself right from the ground, bearing the Devil’s fruit. No wonder I can’t start my garden.”

“You won’t need no garden when those avocados ripen,” I said. “We’ll be eating them for the rest of the year.” I didn’t tell Mama I’d already tried the green fruit, even though it was still sour and hard and had given me a bad stomachache.

“You girls clean up before your Daddy gets home,” Mama said. “And stay in the yard.”

“We always do,” said Pammy, and Mama went inside.

“Koufax comes out of his windup . . . and the throw . . . is . . . strike three . . . and the Giants are down after scoring one run. We’ll come back with the top of the order, starting with number thirty, Maury Wills, leading off for the Los Angeles Dodgers.” The announcer made me listen by stringing out his words and letting his excitement show at the end of every sentence. He sounded thrilled even when I knew he was disappointed, even when the Dodgers were losing. “Vince Gully really loves baseball,” I said.

“It’s Vin,” Pammy said, shaking her head. “Vin Scully.”

“Vin?” I asked, feeling my jaw drop. “Vin?”

Pammy smirked. “You probably agree Wills is gonna break Ty Cobb’s record,” she said.

“You bet,” I said. “Maury Wills is the fastest man in baseball.”

“Mrs. Garcia says he’s a Negro,” Pammy said.

“I don’t believe it,” I said. I looked down, not wanting to meet her glance. “Not that it makes any difference.”

“It’d make some difference if Daddy was to see your diary,” Pammy said. She pulled up a handful of brown grass, held her palm upward and spread her fingers to let the grass fall through. “Maury Wills,” she said in a false high voice that mimicked mine. “Running. Stretching out his hand to touch . . . the base beyond reach. What’s that, a haiku?”

“Pammy! You said you’d stay out of my diary,” I said. I plucked some grass to throw toward her, but the wind blew the grass back toward me. “Maury Wills is a great athlete,” I said, knowing Daddy wouldn’t care if he was the President. There were people we weren’t supposed to talk to, weren’t supposed to think about, people my parents seemed afraid of because they were different. “How would Mrs. Garcia know if he was a Negro, anyway?”

“Maybe she’s got a television,” Pammy said, and I felt stupid because I hadn’t even thought about that.

In a little while Mrs. Garcia came into her yard—just as she did every afternoon—to water her rose garden. “Hello girls,” she called.

Pammy waved. “Our fairy godmother, at last,” she whispered.

I looked through the chain-link fence into her yard, alive with color. Mrs. Garcia wore an orange flowered sundress. Her black hair was swept into a knot sprayed stiff enough to keep it from coming undone in the wind. She always looked magazine-model perfect, like someone make-believe. “How’s your mother feeling today?” she asked.

I wanted to say, “She’s fine,” but Pammy said, “She’s gone back to sleep,” before I could get my words out. Sometimes I wondered at Pammy, telling all our troubles to a stranger.

“It’s not right,” said Mrs. Garcia, fingering a crystal necklace that made the sunlight dance along her skin. “You girls need to get out of that yard.” She bent to smell her roses. “How are my Beauties?” she said. “How’s Mr. Lincoln? And Silver Jubilee? Irish Gold? First Prize? And Honor?”

“Ground ball through the hole and into center and Wills is on with a base hit,” said the radio.

Mrs. Garcia started the faucet and held her thumb in front of her hose. A whisper of spray flew over the back fence and landed on my arms. I watched her fret over her flowers like they were something precious, not just backyard shrubs. “They get thirsty in this wind,” she said. “So, who’s winning?”

The winds shifted direction and suddenly, I caught the sweet scent of roses. The fragrance cut straight through the heat to make my nostrils tingle. It was early on in the game so I said, “The Dodgers are behind, but they’ll make it up.”

“I’m sure they will,” said Mrs. Garcia. “Would you girls like a soda?”

I looked at Pammy, suddenly afraid. “Thank you very much,” Pammy said. “We’re very thirsty.”

Mrs. Garcia smiled. She set the hose down on the grass and hurried into her house. She came out with two opened Coke bottles and made her way to the fence. She stood on her tiptoes and handed the sodas over to Pammy.

Pammy started sipping hers right away, but I held onto to mine, afraid to drink.

“There he goes . . . and the throw . . .
is
. . . in time . . . and Wills is caught at second.”

I could not stop the sigh that made me sound so young.

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Garcia.

“It’s okay,” I said. “They’ll make it up.” For the first time all day I felt as if I might break down, and I said without thinking, “Maybe you could stop by for iced tea, sometime.” I was sorry the moment I had spoken.

“That would be nice,” said Mrs. Garcia.

Pammy strained to hit me with her elbow and her crop top split along the side seam. She stuck two fingers in the hole and frowned. “Well, isn’t this just great,” she said.

“ . . . a high fly to center and Davis is going back. Back, back, back, to the wall . . . and it’s gone. One run in and here comes Mays. And the Giants lead it three to one.”

Mrs. Garcia stopped watering to listen. “Don’t worry, girls. They’ll make it up.”

“Too bad Wills got caught at second,” Pammy said.

I stared at my feet, tan except where the straps had carved out a pale upside-down V. “Too bad,” I said, but something inside me felt wrong, worried that it was a terrible omen for the fastest man in baseball to be thrown out.