The Air in My House Tastes Like Sugar

by ZZ Claybourne

  “Kids die here,” said Anselm. “It’s happening all around. Mama says it comes during the night.”

  “When we sleep,” said Rebecca. “We hear the stories. We heard about the witch with the oven. They said the house was sweet and they were lured by a child. A stranger. You’re strange.”

  “There’s nothing mysterious about dreaming or anything having to do with sleep,” said Amnandi with irritation. “Falling asleep is just fainting very slowly anyway. And I only told you about the sugar because that’s all you eat here, sugared, candied things! I only wanted to play. I wanted to...” She fell silent.

  The other kids respected her by doing the same.

  “Do you ever see the small people?” asked Amnandi.

  “We call them fae,” said Rebecca.

  “Or fairy,” said Anselm. “I’ve never seen them but I know they’re there. They move my shoes.”

  “Where do you come from?” asked Rebecca.

  “The same as your father,” said Amnandi.

  “Father’s from here,” said Rebecca.

  It would have been rude to say “You don’t know your family history”—a witch was never rude.

  “Unina—my mother—will fix this,” said Amnandi.

  Anselm leaned in to ask “Why does the air in your house taste like sugar?” just as Unina Khumalo’s voice traveled to them without being raised.

  “My sweet?”

  “Yes, Unina,” said Amnandi, and hopped atop her mount. “You can ride with me,” she told the muddied.

  “It’s only a pony,” said Anselm.

  “A very strong pony,” said Amnandi. “You can help your abazali with your home.”

  “Stop speaking two languages,” said Rebecca.

  “Your parents,” said Amnandi.

  “Mama tells us this is the best way for us to help,” said Anselm.

  “Mama is wrong,” said Amnandi.

  Their eyes shot wide.

  “See?” said Anselm. “You’re strange.”

  “Ride or stay?” said the strange girl with the colorful scarves.

  “We’ll stay,” said Rebecca.

  Amnandi patted Natuun. They rode.

  Mother and child traveled at a leisurely pace through the village. Khumalo carried heavy thoughts with an even heavier silence. Amnandi kept watch on her mother’s random frowns and squints.

  This was the first Amnandi had the freedom to observe the village and its people. A man from Chin had set up shop; she knew it was Chin by the writing that ran the length of a cloth banner across a trough, which reminded her to resume her practice at writing Chin. There weren’t a lot of people active this early. The few out moved slowly.

  The Red Constable whispered to the man from Chin: “There she is.”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Unina, nodding across the distance at the man from Chin without interrupting her horse’s walk. “I look forward to meeting a fellow traveler.”

  A woman, flush with anger, shouted “Witch!”

  “Yes?” Unina responded, as though called by name.

  The constable trotted to the woman and shushed her, draping an arm around her shoulder and giving it a squeeze.

  Khumalo sighed, said, “A moment, please” to her horse, and hopped down, her long legs quickly closing the distance to the accuser. She glared as hard as she could in Khumalo’s face.

  “Are the witches here very harmful?” Unina asked the angrier of the two, a woman who, if not for telltale signs of constant rage, might have appeared her age instead of twice it. Before the woman could speak, Unina took her hand in both her own and heaved a deep breath, eyes locked with the woman’s through the exhalation. The woman cried profusely yet silently via her eyes alone, her body surprisingly calm in the connection.

  The Red Constable reached in and led her away. Khumalo returned to her horse. She mounted and rode. Her daughter followed.

  When they were out of earshot, Mother Khumalo said, “Her child was eaten.”

  “Wolves?”

  “Not literally. From the inside. Hollowed. I could feel the emptiness of it.” She allowed Amnandi to think on that.

  There would be, Khumalo decided, extra lessons that afternoon.

  And many meditations.

  ~~~

  “You didn’t tell me how one of the children was found,” Khumalo accused Jobam that evening. She’d ridden to his home under cover of night, and didn’t care that she knocked uninvited. “And you said there were three. There were four children. You know of the fourth. This place,” Unina Khumalo said, “this place is…odd. You live with evil—you know its name—yet are only brave toward falsehoods.”

  Jobam quickly grabbed blankets and moved the sacred witch to the privacy of a nearby tree.

  To an untrained eye Jobam’s dark skin blended with the trunk he rested against. To hers, the life coming out of him made him clear as day even as the moon fought to make its way through clouds.

  “When I first arrived here,” he said, “there were stories of a child. Port, town, village, hamlet, the same story. A child who was much more than child, given to ancient rages. They called her a changeling.”

  “And you, fresh from home and full of magicks?”

  “I set out to find her. I had nothing else. My name meant nothing.”

  “Can I tell you something, Jobam? I get no pleasure from rescuing people, the living or the dead. I prefer to be home with my daughter now, reading, breathing, or making soup. What did you do?”

  “She was already ensorcelled!” he flared. “I shifted her.”

  “Gah!” Khumalo turned away and paced.

  “They would have killed her, madam. When I found her she attacked me. I will not kill. This happened over a month’s journey from here!”

  “Did you think nothing of the veils!”

  “Not until you. The child’s soul was tethered to the Earth by the thinnest thread. I thought that at least she would die in peace,” he said. “And I thought nothing more of her.”

  “And that,” Khumalo said, “is why this place knows nothing but fear.” She sighed. “You now have a son and daughter.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Everything I am I give to them. The lost girl was far away and barely a memory.”

  “Attracted to the magicks,” said Khumalo. “A bee to sugar. You have endangered my daughter by shielding yourself and not speaking truly! Gah! What I thought was shame and pride preventing my seeing you was guilt. Useless, inane guilt.”

  “That was over ten years ago!”

  “You think time matters to the forgotten?”

  “You think she uses the veils to play?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t play, it feeds. Feeding on what feels most like itself.” Khumalo sighed deeply. “It knows to close me off in the dreaming. Magick and fools account for too much heartache here.”

  “I tried to be good.”

  “Now try to be smart, for I must lie to my daughter and will need counsel on that act.”

  Amnandi, when Khumalo returned home, was nowhere seen. Khumalo closed her eyes and felt the sweetness of the air. The veils. She sat cross-legged, allowing the smallest pride to cross her lips briefly, and waited.

  It didn’t take long. Amnandi had spent the time speaking with her other selves while Khumalo was away. When she reappeared she hugged her mother from behind, and came around to sit in front of her.

  “You smell like flowers,” said Khumalo, eyes still closed.

  “I was in the Blue World. The Host found a new way to make oil from vine leaves.”

  Khumalo opened her eyes to the wondrous sight of her daughter.

  “Unina…the rains have only happened like that this year.”

  “And three children disappeared this same year,” said Khumalo.

  “Do you think spirits?’

  “I think spirits.”

  “Are we in danger?”

  “No.”

  “Are we hunting them?”

  “We are.”

&
nbsp; When Amnandi later visited her other selves again before bed she told them of this new adventure, feeling the excitement grow in each until the nervousness was like lightning to release from her hand. Part of her deep consciousness noted, however, that Unina stayed vigil over this time spent in the veils, which was a new thing.

  There were times, as a witch, one did not ask but evolved and adapted. Amnandi took this as such.

  In the morning, Unina reached into the shifted place and brought out two masks. The hyena and the hare.

  ~~~

  Khumalo looked upward into the face of the taller Red Constable; the Red Constable looked down. “I am going to do something today,” said Khumalo, “that will endanger. You can’t prevent it. Keep the adults out of my way, and keep the children near Amnandi.”

  “Two wagons departed at first light taking the children to Lethern,” said the Red Constable. “Fire festival. Only a few adults and small ones still here. My sister respects you.”

  “You?”

  “I get things done.”

  “There won’t be any need to fear me if this turns out properly.”

  “You leaving anyway?”

  “At a point, yes.”

  They set to work.

  ~~~

  In the middle of the village, in front of the granary, Khumalo counted breaths. Not ordinary breaths. Beacon breaths. Beacons through the veils. Dusk had settled. The clouds, for a change, allowed a few orange smudges of late afternoon sun to paint the ground and structures. She had Amnandi spend the day with the remaining children, a total of six with various illnesses, punishments, or sour demeanors keeping them from seeing a sky full of lanterns set ablaze, her only instruction to her daughter that she tell them she, Amnandi, did magick.

  The conversation that Amnandi kept returning to played out.

  “You can’t do magic. Teach us magic. I want to do magic.”

  "You can't just do magick, you have to understand a thing to do magick. It is learning, child,” she said, perfectly and sincerely mimicking Unina. “Learn to be part of the cause and the effect." And with the veil mask of the hare, she showed them how she could make a portal by binding space to her thoughts: she walked through a barn doorway and disappeared.

  She reappeared as though simply leaving the barn. For a moment the group stared frozen. The smallest child, a five-year-old with a cough, whooped a second later and rushed forward as next in line for the trick. The other five swarmed.

  “Form a line,” Amnandi ordered.

  In her meditative state, Khumalo permitted a fluttering sensation of readiness to travel the thread to her daughter, who received it only as a flash of self awareness.

  Khumalo returned to being energy, light, and comfort: lures to sickened souls. She flooded the area immediately around her with unseen acts of magick: trampled grasses renewing, weeds flowering, the damp ground beneath her warming to welcome the activity of a hundred different insects responding to the sugary electricity in the air.

  She felt the terrified, lost thing coming.

  Hunger. Thirst. Fear. Anger and consuming loneliness tied to the absolute thrill of hatred. The child was no longer a child, it was simply need. It rose from the grass, invisible at first, then murmurings of heat, then wisps; it wafted from the trees, becoming thicker, a thin fog that moved as one.

  It thought to rush her.

  Khumalo donned her mask and became the hyena in the blink of an eye.

  The fog wrapped her.

  It also tasted the multiplied sweetness of the children.

  It splintered.

  Khumalo blasted intention to her daughter in the split-second before the mask assumed the bulk of her soul. Flee!

  The wraith of intent, like smoke blown yet recoiled, tried to be surreptitious. It tried to be ground-hugging fog from the day’s end rising toward the children. It hoped to be a thing unnoticed.

  A witch’s daughter was not one to miss things.

  “Follow me!” Amnandi shouted, panic in her voice both real and a prod to the children.

  Caught off-guard, they hesitated, and because they were afraid, they laughed, first one, then all. The oldest pointed to the wooden, jagged mask, saying, “Magic rabbit girl.”

  “Follow me or you die!” Amnandi yelled. She felt every veil she’d visited growing colder, growing dark. Becoming hungry.

  Shreds of fog charged.

  The children ran, Amnandi in the lead.

  She cast magick ahead of her as they bolted into the waiting granary door and popped out running along an upper platform which led to a chute. Amnandi threw herself at the chute, knowing in her mind where she wanted to be from remembrances of the village square. They popped out between the porch columns of the constabulary and made for one of several homes left open. The Shreds were quick; she quicker. Anything the children fit through became portals. There was no time to think, only to keep moving and keep the gray mists confused. Amnandi raced the group from doorway to oven to cabinet to closet, the Shreds—bold and even more aggravated now—never far off but never close enough. Amnandi never looked back. She didn’t slow for a second, keeping everyone one twist or leap ahead of danger.

  She flashed out of a home and willed the structure to seal itself the moment the last child dashed past her, then she whirled to create another opening, this one beneath the high wheels of a granary wagon. Before charging through she caught a glimpse of her mother surrounded by fog and dancing so fast the flashes of her scarves became knives.

  The spirit sought ways in. Khumalo’s magicks of mind and body prevented it. She didn’t think of it as a child because it was no longer a child, only hunger, emotion and instinct. An elemental wind. But the winds didn’t direct a witch; she directed them, arms like windmill blades, scarves as funnels, breaks, and diverters. The mask heightened the power in her hands so much they became claws, ripping pieces of the teeth-like fog away, the pieces dissipating, until all that was left on that soggy square in Eurola was a sense of crying, a sense of pain so extreme that without the hyena mask she might have been broken by it. Might have faltered. To falter was to give this sickness strength.

  The spirit didn’t attempt to flee.

  Khumalo’s face beneath the mask changed. Reality cracked, muscles shifted, until had the mask fallen off no one would have noticed the difference.

  She ripped the last of this personal plague to a tattered wisp, feeling from the enveloping presence a sense of loss.

  A sense of rest.

  Hyenas, being efficient, didn’t rest. They weren’t merely scavengers. In the absence of fallen spoils, they hunted.

  The hare across the way was quick, agile, and in the open.

  Khumalo ran.

  Amnandi kept the children moving unpredictably, effectively trapping the Shreds within a vortex of indecision. She saw her mother running toward her, and with one last cast of her tired arms drew a portal that led through the Blue World and back to the Green, only this time she exited without the children. She sensed the Shreds were too weakened to enter the veils.

  She dashed forward to tire them further.

  Her mother leaped over her.

  The hare sped away as a hyena made of scarves and motion hacked at the trapped shreds which put up as much fight as a whisper to a storm.

  Until there was nothing left.

  Except the hare and the hyena.

  The hare’s chest rose and fell tightly. The hare fled.

  “Stop!” Khumalo commanded, blasting comfort from her heart.

  Amnandi stopped. She looked left, right, crouched on the balls of her feet, and waited.

  Khumalo didn’t remove the hyena. If her daughter could come to her in this form, her strength of self and mind would be proven.

  Khumalo dropped to her knees and opened her arms.

  The hare bolted into a veil. It returned with six tired, crying children.

  Amnandi removed the small mask, her eyes and face as wet and streaked as the rest. She looked only vaguely
hare-like, and that only for a moment.

  Khumalo removed her larger mask. Amnandi bathed in the sight of her mother’s face, the wise eyes full of concern, the lips pinched at wanting to call to her. Her mother set the mask at her knees and opened her arms again. Amnandi closed the distance, painfully, until she was in them.

  Parents burst from their locked homes and ran for their children. Khumalo watched until each child was accounted for, then she heaved a breath, stood shakily, and placed a hand on her daughter’s shoulder to lead her away, free hands dangling the masks at their sides. The constable could handle things for the moment. The horse and pony trotted up as if they’d been watching for this moment. Khumalo smiled at them and continued walking, her arm around her daughter.

  “I don’t want to leave here again, Unina,” said Amnandi, bringing fresh tears.

  “We won’t leave until you are ready to.”

  Midway to their home, Beedma neighed and Natuun nuzzled Amnandi’s neck. “Is that so?” Khumalo said, giving a small, tired laugh. “They’re saying that if we don’t want to ride them, they should ride us.”

  When they were almost home—both witches calm and almost sleepy—they dismounted at a burbling stream and bathed, only partly drying off by rubbing themselves down with handfuls of the lush delicious grass to the sound of happily chomping jaws.

  At home Khumalo filled the essence of the home with as much calming magick as she could while they put on fresh scarves and robes. She lit no fire save the cooking fire, allowing the night to enter undisturbed. They ate a meal of stew, bread, and porridge, then sat on Khumalo’s mat, Amnandi half in her lap.

  “I told them to run and they stood there, Unina. So foolish!” A powerful yawn rippled her small body, top to toe. “Will you love me when I’m foolish?”

  “I will.”

  Amnandi snuggled deeper. “That won’t be for a long time.”

  Mother Khumalo willed warmth and comfort through her skin. She kissed the bit of Amnandi’s cooled forehead left uncovered. This little body had managed to retain the scent of flowers, the taste of sugar, but had grown.

  “I hope never, my child,” said Khumalo, her lips and breath warm against the skin to address the soul through the bone. “Not till the last star grows cold and old and reaches, my sweet, for its blanket.”