The Flower Bowl Spell

by Olivia Boler

  “Not really,” I say, toning it down for the sake of harmony. “But I can’t see those old windows to the soul, as it were.” I wonder how much he knows about his purported love, Ms. Badler. It’s likely not much, with that glamour on her.

  “I sure as hell hope you can’t see my eyes,” Tyson says as he removes the glasses. “You’re driving. Keep ‘em on the road, Zhang.”

  I’m a little disappointed to find out that he has control issues. As if she senses my distress, the wobbly hula girl doll on my dashboard nods her agreement, and then she steps down from her pedestal. She hulas with gentle undulations of her arms and hips until she’s swaying right in front of me. In one elegant move, she hops from the dash to the steering wheel, spins on her toes, and climbs down the wheel until her feet are resting on the top of the horn. She places her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road. Without thinking, I take my hands off the wheel and turn to look at Tyson as Hula Girl steers the car into the next lane.

  “What the—what the hell are you doing?”

  “Keeping my eyes on the road.”

  “The hell you are.”

  I press my foot on the accelerator and keep looking at him.

  “Memphis—shit—cut it out!” There is true panic in his voice. He’s gripping the dashboard with one hand, the back of my headrest with the other and his feet are all over the place—the glove compartment, his duffel bag on the floor, his car seat—stabbing at an imaginary brake. He checks his seat belt. Cleo is laughing and Romola says, “Whoa.”

  “You have to trust me,” I say. “It’s all right.” I release pressure on the gas pedal and we slow down, coming up on a slow-moving hatchback. I flip the signal, and Hula Girl steers around it. All the while, my eyes are on Tyson. He’s still tense, but now he’s watching me watch him. He relaxes his grip on my seat a little.

  “That was fun!” Cleo says, still giggling. I look back at the girls. Romola has a tentative smile on her face, like she’s trying to decide if she should be worried or not.

  “What is going on?” Tyson says, as if talking to himself.

  I turn back to him. “I’m trying to figure that out.”

  “How can you drive without looking?”

  “I could probably drive in my sleep, but I’ve never tried it.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Too cliché.” I study his eyes. They look sticky and bloodshot, and for some reason I feel like crying, as if my tears could wet his stressed-out eyes. I look at the car in front of us and then at the lines on the freeway.

  Coming out is never easy. I’ve only done it a few times, with varying degrees of revelation and success. Cooper knows, of course, but not about my true abilities. Alice knew. One of the salesgirls at my local independent bookstore sort of knows. She’s rung up my magickal almanacs in the past and, being a Wiccan herself, has chatted with me about things, but only surfacey stuff—birch wands versus cherry (hey, no wand at all works for me!), beeswax versus conventional candles. But coming out to a person I’ve known for most of my life, if not all that well, and who is clearly in someone else’s thrall (I just don’t know how deep), is no cakewalk.

  “I take it that Alice never told you I was brought up as a witch,” I say.

  “Alice? She…yeah, she mentioned something.”

  I’m surprised. “Really?”

  “Well, I thought she said you were a Goth. Which never made much sense since you didn’t have all the metal shit in your face.” He laughs. “But yeah. Witch makes more sense.”

  I think about what this could mean as I crack the knuckles of my fingers. “My mother was experimenting with paganism when I was born. But she was more into the costume drama part of it than the real thing. You know, she had one of those ‘Pagan and Proud’ bumper stickers. ‘My Other Car is a Broomstick.’” I shake my head. “That’s my mother. She eventually got bored with it and moved on to something else. I think tennis. But to me, witchcraft made sense.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It works for me.”

  “And that’s why you can drive without looking at the road?”

  “I can drive without looking at the road because I have help.” I point to the empty base glued to my dash. “See my Hula Girl?”

  “What Hula Girl?”

  I frown. “Put on the glasses.”

  His hands are shaking but he does it. “What?”

  That’s interesting. The glasses don’t give him the power of magickal sight. I guess the glamour doesn’t run too deep after all.

  “You can take them off.”

  He does.

  I lean back. “Cleo, who’s driving the car?” I hope, fleetingly, that I’m not wrong about her.

  “The pretty dolly with long black hair and a green skirt,” she answers cheerfully.

  Romola looks at her sister as if she doesn’t know what to think.

  I turn back to Tyson. “See?”

  “No.”

  “I know you don’t. But that’s what’s going on.”

  “Are you high?”

  I shake my head. “How else would you explain me driving without my hands or without looking?”

  “You’re a witch. Maybe you’re doing it with your mind.”

  I consider this. I never thought of it that way. Maybe I’m controlling Hula Girl. Maybe she’s not just doing me a huge favor. Somehow, I don’t buy that. “No. I don’t have that power. But I’ve heard of it.”

  “Okay then.” Tyson’s laugh is semi-hysterical. “If you don’t have that power then what power do you have?”

  “Well…I can read the facts of a person if they’re near me. Sometimes even if they’re far away. Unless they’ve put a blocking spell on themselves.” That’s got to be what’s going on with Viveka—she’s got clairvoyant caller ID on me and she’s not picking up.

  “You’re a mind reader?”

  I sigh. How many times have I heard that from Cooper? “Not exactly. I know things about people. The facts of their lives. Not necessarily what they’re thinking or their future, but some of what has happened to them or what they’ve done. Sometimes where they are, but I usually figure that out by picking up on scents or sounds they’ve smelled or heard. Sometimes the facts involve what they’ve thought in the past. I can also see auras.”

  “Auras?”

  “You know, the colors vibrating off people’s bodies. I guess it’s like steam coming off something hot. It’s a byproduct of their souls.”

  “Their souls?”

  “Auras are like a preview of a person’s state of mind, even if they don’t know what that state is. Seeing them just takes a little practice.”

  “What’s mine right now?”

  “Black,” I lie. It’s more of a yellow with red—fear and anger and that edge of pink that I’ve come to associate with his feelings about Cheradon. Yet, he’s taken off the glasses. Maybe they’re about someone else.

  “That’s bad, right?”

  “No. It’s good. Why do you think so many musicians and poets wear black?”

  “But if you’re not making the hula girl drive the car like you said, what is?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not sure. But I suspect that some objects are magickal when we need them to be.” I think back to all the inanimate objects that have come to life in my presence, like the Day of the Dead dolls when I was a kid. “There always seems to be a reason. Sometimes, figuring out what that reason is takes time.”

  “And you can do all of this and see this stuff because you were raised a witch?”

  I look at him and he turns away from me quickly. I face the road again.

  “Being raised a witch gave me some helpful tools. But, no,” I say. “Not because of that.”

  “Then how come you know this stuff?”

  I shrug. “Because I can.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t know why, exactly.”

  We drive in silence for a while. I lace my fingers together in my lap.<
br />
  Finally, Tyson says, “Reading auras? That doesn’t seem like a very useful superpower.”

  “There are other things I can do,” I say, wondering why I feel the need to impress him. “But I don’t want to freak you out too much.”

  He’s sitting close to his door, as far from me as possible. “You’re certifiable, Memphis.”

  “Wait. I do have a theory. About why I can do these things or how it works. Remember in physics class—”

  “I never took physics.”

  “Oh. Well, I did, but not much of it made sense. Except this thing Mr. Chun said—did you know him?”

  “Yeah. I had him for chemistry.”

  “So, you know what a dork he was for theoretical stuff.”

  Tyson shrugs.

  “He was. Anyway, he taught us about quantum mechanics, about how there are equations or formulas that show how things in particle physics that seem like science fiction could be facts. Like there’s a one in gazillion-billion-trillion-quadrillion chance that I could drive our car through that car ahead of us, and we’d just pass through it like water over a stone and come out solid on the other side.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “No, not that.”

  “But there’s a formula that can prove it could happen.”

  “It posits a baboon-billion chance that it could. That someone could make it happen. And some people are in better possession than others of the…skill set, I guess you’d call it, that could make it happen.”

  He grunts and there’s still a slight edge of hysteria in his eyes, but it’s just slight.

  “Witchcraft,” I say, “is really just science. It’s particle physics or quantum mechanics. At least, the way I see it. For some people it’s more spiritual. A religion.”

  “Sure, then by that token you could say life is particle physics.”

  I ignore his sarcasm. “Life and death.” I think about Gladys and her awful death and my brief glimpse into her afterlife. And why I stopped living the magickal life I’d always known.

  I swallow a sigh that’s threatening to turn into a sob. I have tamped this down for so long, this guilt and pain, the fury and regret, but they have been slipping back into my consciousness, awakened by fairies and Tyson and strange clothes-wearing waterfowl.

  “I actually tried to get away from it,” I say. “From being a witch.”

  “Because it’s crazy?”

  “No, because…” The urge to cry has passed. “Because of what happened to your sister.”

  This is not what he has expected me to say. Alice. His baby sister Alice, the light of the Belmonte family, the sweet, dizzy girl who went off to Africa to bravely save the third world while the rest of us remained safe and selfish in our cozy, privileged first world.

  “What does any of your insanity have to do with Alice?” Tyson asks, and before I can answer he says, “She got herself into her own mess. I mean, what was she thinking? Going to Africa where there’s war and famine and danger in just about every fucking corner. Trying to help those refugees. That’s all well and good.” He laughs bitterly. “But then she had to ramp it up a notch. Not just give them clothes and food and medicine and do her do-gooding, but actually turn into a fucking Harriet Tubman.”

  He’s talking about the escaped slaves Alice worked with, those women and children and men who had been stolen from their villages to work for and pleasure warlords and their henchmen.

  “What the hell was she trying to prove? That she was as good as you?”

  I turn and we look at each other and this time he doesn’t turn away.

  “She always said you were so brilliant, and she always said it like she wished she were you.”

  I know immediately what he means. Alice went to Africa not only to escape her failed relationship with a married man, but also to prove herself, to show she could do something beyond remarkable with her life. Because no one ever thought she could. I admit that I never did. She was always so lighthearted, happy-go-lucky, and sweet. But she was also smart enough to recognize everyone’s affectionate derision of her. By going to Africa, Alice succeeded in surpassing everyone else’s goodness and bravery. We never would have had the guts to do what she did.

  “So tell me, Memphis,” Tyson says. “Aside from being the inspiration for Alice’s African adventure, what did you have to do with her death?”

  Now I do start to cry, and the tears blur my vision. I wipe at my face, trying to squeeze the moisture back into the atmosphere. I realize I’ve been waiting for this moment, not just since the Palace Hotel when I saw Tyson for the first time in years, but since Alice died.

  “I couldn’t protect her,” I say. “I tried.” I feel something like relief as I finally confess.

  “What do you mean?”

  The tears are suddenly gone. I can see again. I put my hands on the steering wheel and Hula Girl looks up at me, her smile sympathetic and breezy. She climbs elegantly back to her perch and freezes into place. Tyson looks at the doll and blinks. He looks at the steering wheel, and back at the bobbling doll, and then at me. But he doesn’t say anything.

  “I gave her something,” I say, eyes on the road. “An amulet. It was supposed to keep her safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “From everything!” I shout so harshly that my throat feels raw. There happens to be a pause between songs on the CD player, and for a moment, the car fills with a profound silence. I wonder if the girls are listening. “From anything that might harm her,” I say more softly. “I was arrogant enough to think my magick would protect her from anything and everything.”

  “Doesn’t your magick always work?” There is something new in his voice, but I’m too lost in my sadness and shame to pay attention to it.

  The urge to cry returns, a stone tied around my neck. “It used to. But like everything, it takes practice and is only as good as I am.” It’s true. Also, I’d been either incredibly lucky or incredibly good—up until that point, my magick was rarely off and it never completely failed.

  I picture it, can almost feel it in my hand: the amulet I imbued with a protection charm, Alice’s name scratched in the runic alphabet on a piece of smoky quartz. I gave it to her before she left and I told her what it was. She teased me, called me a dippy hippie and said she had not asked me to protect her, which was true. But I did it anyway. I was taking care of her, I reasoned, giving her a little magickal insurance. What was the harm in that? I asked myself at the time—rhetorically, carelessly.

  “And she died.”

  I look over at Tyson. I feel like his words have burned me. He looks back at me as if something were my fault after all.

  I see it then. Without needing to touch him, I see it all, like with Gladys. That doesn’t happen much, reading a person without physical contact. I see him in a village in Nigeria.

  It’s hot and the earth is a brownish-orange, coating everything with a fine layer of silt that turns into a blood-colored mud when it rains. Tyson is wearing his old military fatigues, hoping they’ll bring him something—luck, better treatment. There’s someone with him, an African man, the stethoscope around his neck signaling his medical status. Tyson bends over a table where something lies under a dirty sheet. Alice. My friend, her battered body, her mutilated flesh, the bullet hole in the back of her skull and the slash across her throat.

  Alice died a horrible death. She was scared, alone, in pain, and nothing I did helped her. I wonder, as I have so many times in the past, why the magick failed. I made the amulet, and perhaps I made it with too much confidence in my abilities, with hubris, and thus with too much carelessness for the details. For a while I wondered if it failed because it was all a crock of shit. But I know magick works. So why not that time?

  “What was going on at that house this morning?” Ty’s question snaps me out of his past. I check the road, the speedometer, the rearview. When I look at him I notice he’s put on his sunglasses again.

  “A woman,” I say, wanting to g
ive him everything I can to make up for my mistake, to make up for what he had to go through. “She was part of my coven. I—I think she had something to do with Viveka, but I’m not sure what.”

  “Had?”

  I glance in the mirror at the girls, who look blissed-out on the Beatles, and mouth the words: “She’s dead.”

  He just looks at me.

  “As far as I can tell,” I whisper, “someone used magick to kill her, then strapped a bomb to the cat to blow up the house and cover their tracks.”

  Tyson doesn’t model my discretion when he says at a normal volume, “That is fucking lunacy. She’s dead, my sister’s dead. People seem to die prematurely when they know you, Memphis.”

  I slam my foot on the brake, which isn’t the greatest idea since we’re going almost seventy miles an hour. I can feel Bright Vixen’s cat under my seat roll forward. It lets out a low yowl. The car does what it can to stay steady as I drive over to the side of the highway and stop. The girls gasp, and I give them a quick once-over, but there’s no whiplash, no harm.

  I turn back to Tyson. “Get out.”

  He doesn’t hesitate but he takes his time. I fling my door open and walk quickly around to his side. There’s a defiance to him that wasn’t there a minute ago. As soon as he closes the car door behind him, I go first.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He shrugs.

  “Take off those fucking glasses!”

  He does, although his expression doesn’t change. I feel, suddenly, something I’m not used to feeling.

  I feel afraid.

  But then he closes his eyes and sobs. The sobs roll on, and he leans forward so that there’s nothing to do but catch him in my arms. His arms encircle me, and the feel of his body against mine makes my heart beat faster.

  When he pulls away his cheeks are wet with tears. “I’m so tired,” he says.

  “I know. Me too.”

  He walks a few steps from the car and I follow him. We watch the wind in the grass and trees. Over a hill, a horse whinnies.

  “In the army, I saw things,” he says. “I’ve seen worse things than my sister’s corpse. If there’s one truth I know, evil exists.”

  After a long silence he turns to me. “Magick is more than particle physics.”