The Association

by A. K. Caggiano

  “No, I’m done with that. Listen, I work here now. I’m, like, the gardener.”

  Ivy had found a second bag and was filling it with empty cans. “Here? In Avalon Estates?”

  He nodded. “It’s a big part of why they sold me the house. The old lady who used to live here, Edna something, was a landscaper or whatever, and she left the place to the association when she died. They’ve been trying to replace her.”

  “Whose is this?” Ivy plucked a lacy, blue bra from between the couch cushions and held it out by a strap.

  Oakley grinned sidelong. “That’s from last night. Her name’s Celia. I think.”

  “You think?” She threw it at him.

  He caught it then unceremoniously dropped it on the counter. “Well, there’s this other one, Marci? I have a hard time telling them apart.”

  Ivy grumbled about being disgusted, and quickly changed the subject. “So how’d you land this job? You don’t have any credentials, no resume, no references. Unless you had them call your dealer.”

  “I told you, it was Rufus.” His voice lowered then, and it was like the dead man had walked through the door. “We met on the Internet, in this gardening forum, and it just kinda fell into place. Like it was clandestine, ya know? And now he’s dead.”

  Ivy sighed. Maybe she shouldn’t be giving him such a hard time. She looked around again at the plants. It really was amazing. “You’ve kept them alive this whole time?”

  “Brought them back from the edge.” He grinned again. “When Edna died, a lot of the plants around just kinda gave up too, that’s how Rufus explained it anyway. I brought some branches and shit in here, set all this up, and bam!”

  Ivy smirked. “I guess you don’t grow weed in your parent’s basement for over a decade without learning a thing or two about gardening.”

  They stood silently on opposite sides of the breakfast bar. So, Oakley was employed by the association to garden, something he was apparently very good at, and he owned the house and former belongings of a dead woman. These were facts. And Rufus Vlcek, who’d hired him, was also dead. Another fact. But how he had died—Ivy’s eye twitched, thinking of the seriousness of Safiya’s tone—that was as cloudy as Rufus’s blue eyes had been when she’d searched for his nonexistent pulse.

  Ivy shook the image out of her mind and continued to pick up the last of the trash, reaching for a half-filled bottle of sports drink sitting precociously without a lid next to his chair.

  “I, uh, wouldn’t touch that.”

  Her hand was already wrapped around the bottle. “You’re not going to drink the rest of this. It’s warm, and who knows how long it’s been sitting out.”

  “Maybe just put it back, okay?”

  Ivy rolled her eyes. “Don’t turn into a hoarder on me. It’s going in the trash.”

  He cringed as she looked at the yellow liquid inside, then over to him. “Oakley, what is this?”

  He hesitated. “I was really into the game last night, and you know you can’t exactly pause when you’re playing with other people, so—”

  “Oh, my god!” Ivy held the bottle of urine as far from her face as possible. “You are such a disgusting, little twerp!”

  The disgusting, little twerp shrugged. “I told you not to touch it.”

  Chapter 6

  Ivy waited less than patiently, cross-legged on the ancient couch as Oakley immersed himself with killing monsters in his game. His avatar ripped its sword through the air and lobbed the head off of a blue, man-sized snake. “Did you see that?” He laughed, and Ivy felt queasy. “That one is super dead.” But that was how Oakley unwound, and it was either imaginary violence or real-life drugs, and Ivy had discouraged the latter in her presence.

  Since their eventful morning, she’d put him to work breaking down boxes and finding places for his belongings amongst the existing knickknacks of the previous occupant, of which there were many. Little cat statues, ceramic containers with hokey sayings, a white replica lighthouse built on a lone stone. Edna sure had a lot of shit. At least there was already a bed waiting for her upstairs in the extra bedroom. The useless, frilly pillows and the dozen porcelain dolls tucked under the flowery duvet could easily be moved to the closet.

  They’d tackled the kitchen that afternoon, moving the plants out into the perfectly good sun room off the back of the house. Oakley hadn’t utilized it because “it’s too far from the sink,” but she insisted, and he eventually remarked how impressed he was at all the counter space they had. “We could even have Thanksgiving here. You know how to cook a turkey, right?”

  She gave him a long look then. He was already thinking about a holiday two months away and including her in on it. Oakley hadn’t asked how long she was planning to stay, and she was glad since she didn’t know the answer herself, but her brother’s expectations were very different than her own. Or he was just being nice. She threw a frozen pizza in the oven after that and told him to relax—lawfully.

  Now it was nearly six, the plates had been cleaned and the sauce Oakley had dribbled on the hardwoods wiped up, and she could no longer sit idly on the couch. Ivy walked down the hall to the empty parlor at the front of the house to peer out the bay window. The street and drive were empty save for her own car. She turned to pace around in circles when she saw the folder sitting on the entryway table.

  Ivy flipped it open, remembering she hadn’t actually read any of the paperwork as Oakley had attested, and now might be a good time. On top, the page with the signatures sat, and she skimmed it briefly. It was all pseudo-legal jargon, approving her, “Ivy Sylvan” handwritten onto a line near the top known as “occupant,” to move into Avalon Estates, and the signatures were all there at the bottom in the bright blue ink they’d used at the meeting, but then—she squinted and lifted the page to her eyes—the empty line meant for Rufus, the one she’d seen in the meeting, was gone. Instead, Safiya’s name and signature were the last listed on the page complete with the title beneath “Interim President.”

  Ivy pulled the paper away from her face. No, that woman wouldn’t have been so stupid. And…and everyone else had seen it, hadn’t they? They’d signed it! She had even seen it, right there in the clubhouse. Ivy blinked at her own signature, but it was undeniable. The other signatures were there, all in their distinct handwriting, and Rufus Vlcek’s name was nowhere to be seen.

  The front bell rang, and Ivy jerked away from the door as her heart jerked into her throat. That would be Safiya, as promised, showing up at exactly six. What the hell was she going to say?

  “Can you get that?” Oakley droned from across the house.

  She peered down the hall, the blue, strobing light from the television illuminating its end, then back to the front door an arm’s length away. Was she about to accuse Safiya of murder? She wasn’t even really sure Rufus had actually been murdered, after all, but this paperwork, filled out as if he were already gone before he’d even been found, was pretty damning evidence in her hands. The bell rang again, and instinctively Ivy opened the door.

  “You’re human.” Safiya stood on the threshold, her eyes wide, mouth open. She was terrified.

  Ivy sputtered. “You’re…not?”

  With a huff, Safiya pushed her way in and closed the door. She craned her neck down the hall then pulled the girl into the empty room at the front of the house, shutting the curtains and plunging them into darkness. “How did you find this place? How did your brother find this place?”

  Ivy screwed up her face. “I don’t know, I just…he met Rufus on the Internet, I guess?”

  Safiya’s glasses reflected the sliver of light still coming in between the curtains. “I can’t believe it. It’s been years since we’ve had a,”—she swallowed, whispering—“a human here. This would be just my luck!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Ivy hadn’t been so quiet and Safiya shushed her, then waited. The exaggerated sound of steel on flesh and a garbled squall echoed from where Oakley was. “I’m an
idiot for not realizing,” she said quietly, more to herself, and then her phone buzzed. With a grunt, she pulled it out, and it lit up her face. “Really? Now?”

  Ivy still had the folder in her hands, and she pulled out the page they’d all signed. At least that was tangible. “Your name,”—Ivy shook the paper to distract her from the screen—“It wasn’t like that before. Rufus was supposed to sign, but look.”

  “Oh, right.” Safiya shrugged. “Look, there are a lot of things that you’re going to freak out about, so enchanted paperwork is going to have to be low on that list.”

  Ivy flipped the page back around as if expecting the words to dance across it. It looked back, plain and unmoving. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re not…supposed to be here.” She doused the light of her phone, but Ivy could still see how her features were knitted. “We’re not like you. I mean, we are, but we’re different. Avalon Estates is a community for—” She sighed, leveling her hand, her eyes searching for the right words.

  “For what?”

  She flicked her gaze to the hall entry once more. “The hexed. It’s what we’re called. Used to not be so nice, but we’ve sort of taken it back.”

  Ivy didn’t know what that meant. “I don’t know what that means.”

  Safiya let out a little, annoyed click of her tongue and snapped her fingers in front of Ivy’s face. A flame sparked to life as she opened her hand, dancing across her palm. Ivy stared at it, not burning her skin at all but hovering just above. It wobbled there for a minute, and then Safiya closed her palm and snuffed it out.

  “Okay.” Ivy felt her mind working extra hard, like being back in advanced physics and wondering how she got there. “So, you know a magic trick.”

  The woman pursed her lips, then held her hand up once more. With another snap, there was again fire, this time on the tip of her finger. In the air, she wrote between them, and the flames hung there, following the trail her finger had made. When she was done, there was an assortment of scribbles suspended from nothing in the space between the two. Ivy felt stuck to the spot, but Safiya reached around and pulled her to her own side. There she could see they were words. Safiya had written in live flames “I’m a witch” across the air in the parlor.

  Ivy’s mouth went dry.

  “You cooking something?”

  Ivy called a hollow “No” back to Oakley, her eyes trained on the burning words.

  Safiya ran her hand over the flames, and they dispersed.

  There was nowhere to sit, but Ivy needed to be not standing. She plunked herself on the ground, dropping the folder. “How?”

  “That’s a good question. Rufus usually doesn’t mess this stuff up, but we were kind of desperate for a sylvan.” Safiya’s phone buzzed again.

  “A what?”

  “Damn chickens.” Safiya flicked her fingers across the screen then stuffed her phone into her pocket. “Listen, just come with me, okay?”

  Ivy shook her head. She couldn’t have heard right, but when she glanced up, Safiya was headed for the door.

  “Wait. You have to explain. More.” Ivy pushed back up onto her feet.

  “I will, outside.” Safiya opened the door.

  “But…” Ivy pointed over her shoulder even though she was following.

  “Oakley, I’m borrowing Ivy for a little bit!” she called into the house.

  “Is that Saf?” he called back.

  “No!” she shouted and slipped outside, Ivy following after.

  It only occurred to Ivy once she was already in the car that Safiya might be crazy at best or a murderer at worst. She turned sideways in the passenger’s seat and gripped the center console as they pulled backward down the long drive. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “What? No!” Safiya was maneuvering the car expertly onto the street, her brows knit behind her glasses. “Why would I do that?”

  Because you killed Rufus? was what she wanted to say, but she willed herself to not. “I know your…secret.”

  “And I know yours,” she said, throwing the car into drive. “But you’re part of the community now, the association. You signed the papers. You’re bound to this place.”

  Ivy had, indeed, signed the papers. And she had felt very odd while doing it, but that had just been her intuition playing games with her, hadn’t it? Or a bad burger? She took a long look out the window, the sun already behind the trees that lined both sides of Ironwood Place. They passed another house, its lights on and looking cozy nestled far off the road with a sprawl of wildflowers out front. “Bound?”

  “Yes, you own that house, and the house owns you. You protect the community, the community protects you. It’s all in the charter that you said you read. The one that very explicitly talks about hexed folk living here. If we kick you out, there will be consequences for both of us.” She shivered, coming to the crossroads and turning left, a different direction than Ivy had previously been on Gingko Loop. “Things I don’t even want to think about. But the others, they’ll be so mad if they find out. Some of them loathe humans!”

  Concern jolted through Ivy, specifically surrounding the word consequences, but mostly in regard to loathe. “So Oakley’s got us locked into a community full of witches who look exactly like humans but hate them.”

  “Not just witches.” Safiya leaned over the steering wheel suddenly. “Chickens!”

  In the yard on their left there were two fat, brown hens pecking at the ground. Safiya brought the car to an abrupt halt and threw open her door.

  “What else besides witches?” Ivy called through the open door, watching Safiya hurry after one of the birds who flapped away from her. Ivy hopped out her side then, looking over the hood as Safiya almost managed to grab one of the birds. She would have called out again, but her eyes landed, instead, on the house in the distance and the sparks that shot out across the lawn.

  There was a child, maybe seven or eight, running up the pathway and laughing, behind him another little girl. At first it looked like sparklers, but it wasn’t the Fourth of July, and those weren’t fireworks shooting from the tips of their fingers. A shadowy figure stood in the doorway watching, and one of them ran to it, enveloping the child in a hug with many tendril-like arms.

  “A little help?” Safiya’s voice broke her of her trance.

  Ivy had crossed the street unknowingly and walked up into the lawn where the chickens were evading capture. She had to prepare herself for the answer, and she swallowed all the excess saliva that had made its way into her mouth. “Safiya, what is going on?”

  “These are Rufus’s chickens—well, were, I guess. Eggs are a great source of protein, he always said. They got out because somebody didn’t lock up the pen right. Probably Rufus.”

  “What? No.” Ivy looked down at the chicken who had just unceremoniously landed at her feet after trying to fly its chubby body away. “You said you’re not just,”—she glanced back up at the house, but the front door was closing, and the family was gone—“Not just witches. What else is here?”

  Safiya grabbed her bird finally, its wings flapping and almost knocking off her glasses before she tucked it under her arm. “Well, for starters we thought you two were actual sylvans. You have to have at least one in your community if you want approval from the Sylvan Society of Hexed Individuals to keep a piece of the netherlight. We’ve been trying to replace Edna all year.”

  Ivy’s brain was turning again. Suddenly the oddness at that meeting was making a whole lot more sense even though most of Safiya’s words weren’t. “So you thought Oakley…”

  Again Safiya shrugged, gesturing to the chicken at Ivy’s feet with her elbow. “I don’t know. Rufus said he was handling it, and had me doing everything else, paperwork, other association business, basically dealing with everyone else’s complaints.”

  Ivy tried to scoop up the chicken at her feet, triggering it to flap away from her, and she yelped. Safiya grunted and thrust her own hen into Ivy’s hands, going after the other bird. “I sti
ll don’t know what a sylvan is. That’s just my last name.”

  “Quiet!” Safiya hissed over her shoulder as she grabbed the rogue bird and sprinted back to her. “It’s like a…a nature spirit sort of? There are very few of them left around, so you’re super rare. Well, you’re supposed to be.”

  Ivy screwed up her face as Safiya walked back to the car. She looked down at her hen and when it thrust its pointy beak toward her she held it at arm’s length and followed after. “Wait, is that why you hired him as a gardener?” Sure, Oakley was good with plants, but he wasn’t, like, mythical creature good, was he?

  “Of course!” Safiya slid into her seat and tossed the chicken into the back. “Sylvan have all sorts of unique abilities, but plants are definitely one of them. So when he called me up yesterday and asked about you coming to stay, the board jumped at the opportunity. One is good, but two sylvans?” She threw her hands up.

  Ivy trotted over to the other side of the car and popped her head in, holding out the chicken. “But I’m just a human. We’re both just human.”

  “I know,” she said darkly, taking the bird and gesturing for her to get in. “It’s a mess.”

  “Listen, this was a mistake, okay?” She crawled onto her knees on the seat, shutting the door behind her, the gentle sounds of evening shut out. “My brother is…well, he’s kind of an idiot. And to be fair, he’s lived here for like a month and none of you figured out he was just a regular dude who taught himself how to grow pot and not a…fairy? I mean, he doesn’t even have wings.”

  “That’s offensive.” Safiya started the engine again. “But you’re not wrong. Nobody caught it, and now you’re both…and I’m…and Rufus…” She stared out past the steering wheel into the dimming lights of the evening, her eyes going glassy. The hens clucked in the backseat.

  “I am really sorry about Rufus,” Ivy said. “And I’m sorry my brother and I are making this even harder for you.”

  Safiya took a breath and started down the road. “It’s not your fault. None of it is.”