A Fistful Of Sky

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  What was the worst thing a grapefruit could imagine? Probably being eaten.

  Rock to chalk. Was chalk a rock’s nightmare? It did involve being broken into bits and worn down to nothing through use, whereas if the rock stayed a rock, probably neither of those things would happen. I hadn’t considered rock to chalk a curse when I did it, but it had worked out like one. Maybe, ultimately, only the curse energy knew what worked.

  Oh, for godsake. I should just try things. I could worry about theory later.

  I held the grapefruit between my palms and stared down at it. Tension twitched my shoulders. “May you be plump and juicy and tasty,” I said.

  Again, heat went through me, and came out of my chest. It shot into the grapefruit. The grapefruit swelled, and swelled, and swelled. It pushed my palms apart, then spread my arms. It grew to beachball size, then weather-balloon size, then even bigger. I let go of it when it got bigger around than a car tire, and I backed away as it grew. So did Flint and Tobias.

  Eventually the grapefruit reached the size of a small hot-air balloon, having pushed me and Flint and Uncle Tobias out of the kitchen and smashed the furniture up against the counters and even raised the ceiling a bit.

  Then it just sat in the middle of the kitchen, a giant, fragrant, looming globe of citrus with pale gold, pink-washed skin. The pores were enormous, and the scent was overpowering, sweet with a large dollop of throat-closing sour.

  I felt incredibly relaxed. I also noticed that I felt heat from the direction of the grapefruit. Okay, good. I could sense my own power in something outside of me. The power felt pretty warm, too. I had used a lot of power on this one.

  “Dear me,” Tobias said.

  “Way to go!” said Flint.

  Dad strolled down the hall. “What are you looking at?” He peered over our shoulders into the kitchen. “Hmm. That’s not particularly convenient. Would one of you gifted people get me a cup of coffee? With cream and a spoonful of sugar?”

  “Hey, Dad. Gyp did it,” Flint said.

  Dad stared at me. My heart flattened. Dad and I had a great relationship based on our mutual status as normal people in a house full of magic-users. Mama always protected Dad from anything the kids might be tempted to do to him, and made sure we respected his authority by backing up most of what he told us with her own irresistible force; but she didn’t dictate our attitudes, and some of us had gotten pretty cocky after transition.

  My eyes got hot. A tear streaked down my cheek.

  Dad hugged me. “Hey. It’s all right. I don’t know why you need a giant grapefruit, honey, but it’s all right.”

  Then his hand stilled, stopped stroking my back.

  I had a morbid sense of him pulling away from me, even though we still embraced.

  He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me back so he could look into my eyes. He was smiling. Maybe I had imagined that new distance. “What happened?”

  I rubbed my eyes. My throat felt tight. I couldn’t speak.

  “She went through transition while we were in L.A., Miles,” Tobias said. “Not a normal transition. She received a dark power.”

  “Aw, come on,” said Flint. “How dark is it if it makes giant grapefruits? Maybe it’s sort of misty gray.”

  “Interesting,” Tobias said. “Something midway between curse power and wish power? Perhaps you’re right. Any chance you can grab that fruit and take it somewhere else, Flint? The backyard, perhaps?”

  Flint shrugged. He stepped over the threshold into the kitchen and put his palms against the grapefruit.

  The grapefruit growled.

  Seven

  FLINT jumped back as a slit appeared on the side of the fruit, split to reveal the fruit’s sleek, juicy, ruby-red interior. The slit gaped wide, the growls louder now that the mouth was open. Flint leaped over the threshold into the hall and slammed the kitchen door. “Okay. Maybe I was wrong about the gray part,” he said.

  “Gyp?” Dad said.

  I swallowed. “I got the power of curses, Daddy. Only I don’t know how to use it.”

  “Killer grapefruit?” He smiled at me.

  “I just wanted it to taste good.”

  “Hah!” Flint said. “Maybe it tastes good, all right. Maybe it wants to taste us good!”

  Tobias sketched signs across the kitchen door. “We had better stay out until it goes away,” he said. Black bands of force stitched from side to side across the door, binding it shut. “Sorry about the coffee, Miles. I guess we’ll all be going out to eat until later.”

  “What? You’re just leaving a giant grapefruit in charge of the kitchen?”

  “So far, Gyp’s curses have lasted less than eight hours. If this follows the pattern, it will revert in time for us to make supper. Small price to pay, don’t you think?”

  Dad frowned. “Eight hours? You were cursing things more than eight hours ago? You transitioned last weekend? Gyp, what has been going on?”

  “I thought I had the flu. I didn’t know it was transition. Nothing happened until last night. You and Mama were watching TV and we didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  He looked rueful. “Oh. I wish. . . .”

  “I’ll be cursing things the rest of my life, Daddy. I’m sure you’ll experience as many curses as you can stand, and probably more.”

  He ruffled my hair. “It’s not that I’m asking for curses. I just want to help.”

  “You will.” I would need everybody’s help, I was pretty sure, especially Dad’s. He was a psychology professor. It used to make us mad when we were little and he analyzed us all the time. He grew out of it, and we grew out of some of our resentment; analysis was part of his character. Sometimes he told us things about ourselves we would never have been able to figure out on our own.

  Maybe he could help me think about my power and figure out how to make it work better. I trusted Tobias for that kind of knowledge, but what did Tobias know about curse power? Not that much, if Great-Aunt Meta was the only other person he had known who had had it, and she had died before she could master it. Maybe a fresh brain would help.

  “So what’s the game plan?” Dad checked his watch. “I have to leave for work in about twenty minutes—earlier if I want to stop for coffee and a doughnut somewhere on the way.”

  I said, “I want to go back to bed.”

  “You should record everything as soon as possible,” Tobias told me. “What you did, how it manifested, what you felt while you did it. All these things are important.”

  I growled at him.

  “Gypsum.” Ice voice again.

  I straightened, then glared at my great-uncle.

  He held a hand up, palm toward me, and I saw a faint blue shield in front of it. Light glanced off a translucent blue disk.

  My eyes went wide. Tobias was shielding himself from me? Never-hurt-anybody me? How could anybody be scared of me?

  He took my power seriously. And he thought I’d use it on him.

  I backed up a couple steps, swallowed, and said, “Okay. Right. I’ll go upstairs and find a blank notebook right now and write everything down. Bye, Dad.” I darted forward to kiss my father’s cheek. “Have a good day at work. See you later. Flint. Uncle.” I left the hall and ran all the way up the stairs, trying to escape some phantom self who could scare other people, even my oh-so-powerful great-uncle.

  I woke up later that afternoon with my notebook on my chest. My fountain pen had leaked blue ink on my T-shirt and sheets. “Damn,” I said.

  The pen shriveled and cindered into dust. Its apotheosis burned my fingers.

  Suddenly I was wide awake.

  One word could do that. Destroy some innocent thing that just happened to be nearby, had followed its own nature and done something I didn’t like.

  This power was real.

  My burnt fingers throbbed. My eyes leaked.

  House-eating plants, a man-eating grapefruit, somehow those things had felt like a game. Maybe a really bad video game. Total destruction of my favorite
pen with one careless word? Somehow more serious and scary.

  I remembered the shield Tobias had thrown up just because I was mad and glared at him. He understood.

  Tension rode my shoulders. I glanced at the clock. One-thirty in the afternoon. I’d slept for about four hours; I had had time to build up a big charge. What was going to happen when I managed to sleep eight hours in a row, if I ever did again? What kind of charge would that give me?

  I got my wastebasket and studied the litter in it. The basket was half full of crumpled drafts of an anthropology paper, used Kleenex, candy wrappers, empty ink cartridges, magazines I’d finished reading minus the pictures and articles I had ripped out to save in my information morgue, and other miscellany. Slated to go out with the garbage unless I had a recycling moment and sorted the papers from the other stuff.

  I set the wastebasket on the floor. I licked the tip of my index finger. I thought it through: the waste, not the basket. I pointed. “Damn!”

  A flash, a spiral of smoke, a few sparks. The litter was gone. The inside of my wastebasket bore scorch marks.

  My shoulders felt incredibly tense, still. Maybe there was a fraction of ease.

  But hot dog! Something constructive to do. I could fry all the garbage in the house. Maybe that would bleed off some of this power. After that, I could visit Dumpsters and trash cans all around town, maybe the landfill out in the salt slough near the university, burn off power by cursing waste into oblivion. Something! Something safe.

  I went to the closet and looked for regular clothes. As I flipped through my shirts, I glanced up at the chalk box. No heat came from it. I took it down and looked inside. It was still full of chalk, but the colors had faded, and some special nuance of the way the chalk had looked while it was cursed had gone.

  I took a pink piece and drew a small, simple five-petaled flower on the closet wall. I waited a minute. It stayed a scribble.

  Whew.

  I should be writing this down to show to Tobias later.

  Instead I found a blue blouse and a pair of jeans. I changed, put on tennis shoes, and dropped my ink-splotched sleeping T into the laundry.

  I was about to leave the room when I noticed the protection stone Jasper had given me eight years earlier. Now that I didn’t use it and Flint had stopped hiding it from me, I kept it on my desk. Sometimes when I was working on a paper for a class and I got stuck, I’d hold it until my mind settled. It had become a friend.

  I picked it up. There wouldn’t be a charge in it now. When Jasper had charged it, he had to do it pretty often; the stone wasn’t a natural holder of power. I didn’t sense any special energy in it. It was just a pretty green sea stone.

  Maybe if he charged it, I could carry it around with me and hand it to people before I cursed them. What would happen then?

  I tucked it in my pocket, then snuck downstairs and out the porch door.

  I went down to the orchard.

  On the upper terrace just south of the house below the back porch, there was the pool, the lawn with one big orange tree in the center, Mama’s rose garden, and a retaining wall. The wall was broad; you could sit on it and look out to the sea.

  About ten feet below the upper terrace was the orchard, a wild place not as maintained as the lawn and pool grounds above. Nobody mowed the orchard; native grasses grew knee high around all the fruit trues. We had lemon trees, plum trees, orange trees, apricot trees, even a grapefruit tree in the orchard, but the centerpiece was a big loquat tree, very tall and scraggly with shiny dark green leaves and millions of clusters of pale yellow fruit that turned almost apricot when they were ripe. Eating loquats was a lot of work; first you had to peel the skin, then you could eat the thin layer of flesh, sweet and fine-textured, but not much food before you hit the big glossy seeds in the center.

  In the eastern half of the orchard just below the pool yard lay a small plot of land that Dad had had rototilled. For a while when we were kids, we each raised some kind of vegetable or fruit in that plot. I raised carrots one year, and corn another. The others raised radishes and zucchini and tomatoes, green beans, bell peppers, strawberries, watermelon. We had to learn how to take care of our plants. I had hated thinning carrots. It was hard to pull up something already alive that I had planted, though I didn’t have much sympathy for weeds.

  Jasper had a year when he raised pumpkins. He even milk-fed a couple so he would have giant pumpkins for Halloween, but their skin turned pale, so they looked wrong.

  We each tended our own crop, put the Burpee packet on a green-stained bamboo stick at the end of our rows to weather and fade as the season progressed. I remembered how excited I was the first time I ate a carrot I had actually grown.

  I wandered over to the plot where we had had our vegetables. Weeds choked it now, though there were traces of the old rows and the squash and bean mounds. When had we stopped planting things? I squatted next to the plot. Maybe the year Opal and Jasper went through transition; everything had changed after that. As though they had turned into other people, and everybody and everything had had to adjust to it. We had lost track of some of our family rituals and started others.

  I picked up a stick, stuck it in the ground, and pointed at it. “Damn!” The stick vanished in a flash of light and a puff of smoke.

  Three damns down, and I still felt awfully tense.

  I wished I had brought the notebook and a pen with me. I should be keeping track of all this data. Tobias was right, even though it made me grumpy.

  How would curse power answer if I actually wished aloud for my notebook and pen?

  No time like now to try it, and better here, where I was alone in a big open space, than somewhere inside the potentially fragile house, close to loved ones.

  “I wish I had my curse notebook and a pen from my backpack,” I said. A small dart of heat stroked my breastbone on its way out of me. An instant later, my notebook dropped out of the sky into my lap, and a Bic pen thumped down on top of it.

  Clean and simple. Huh.

  I opened the notebook.

  Every page was covered with black ink scribbles, none of them legible.

  I found a little space near the top of one page and tried the pen. No ink.

  I sighed. I was glad I had just started the notebook this morning; there wasn’t much lost work I would have to reconstruct.

  I cleared a patch of earth in the garden plot and used the pen to draw three lines in the dirt, one for each of my experimental “damns.” I cleared another section, wrote W at the top, and wrote one line below it for my first wish of this session.

  After that I wandered through the orchard, picking up small objects, bringing them back to the plot, and damning them. I zapped loquats, rocks, oranges, twigs, a really big stick, a beer can—which left a little dribble of melted metal; now, that was scary—and a faded hula hoop I found in some tall grass, so old it must have been left behind by children a couple generations before us. The ancient plastic vaporized without leaving a trace.

  I had crosshatched fifteen “damns” in the dirt and my shoulders still felt tense when Beryl showed up.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked from behind me.

  I jumped a foot. Then I whirled. “Don’t sneak up on me, Beryl!”

  “Sneak? I was just wandering around.”

  “Don’t even come near me, okay? Or, I know, has Tobias taught you how to shield yet?”

  “Shield?” She looked bewildered. “I need a shield with you now?”

  I sucked on my lower lip. “Watch this.”

  I grabbed a big stick I had been saving and stuck it in the ground. It stood as tall as I did. I pointed at it. “Damn!” I said.

  A brief thumbprint of heat at my chest. Light outlined the stick, then it turned black, then vanished. A small drift of acrid smoke, a flashmark on the ground were all that remained.

  Beryl gasped. Her face went pale.

  “I don’t even have to mean it,” I said. “I could do this by mistake. I’ve never had to gua
rd my words before. I’ll do the best I can, but until everybody in the house is shielded, I think I better stay outside.”

  She blinked a couple of times. “I’ll go tell them this is what you’re doing,” she said after a minute. “I’ll tell them about the shields.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You hungry?”

  I checked in with myself. “Starving. Is the grapefruit still in charge of the kitchen?”

  “Yep. I’ve got a box of granola bars in my room—” Her eyebrows lowered and she looked inward. A box appeared in her hand. Wish power! She handed me the box. She frowned again and materialized a bottle of water, handed it to me. It was cold, straight from the refrigerator.

  “Thanks. Thanks, little sister.”

  “Hang in there.”

  I nodded. She left, pushing through the high grass of the orchard, burrs catching at the hem of her dress.

  I ate a couple of granola bars and drank some water, then realized I was delaying the inevitable.

  My shoulders felt stiff and tight. Damns didn’t seem to do it as far as discharging curse energy; I would have to curse something else soon or suffer lockjaw or something worse.

  I hesitated, then pulled my protection stone out of my pocket. Maybe it could protect itself. I cupped it in my hands. I couldn’t sense any energy in it, but then, before my transition I hadn’t been able to sense magical energy. Maybe now I could only sense my own.

  I was going to think this through. I was! But words dropped out of my mouth. “Stone, be bone. Be within muscle and skin. Be own. Be kin.”

  At last I felt real heat gather. From my toes and fingers and the top of my head, from all my outer edges, heat streaked toward my center. This’ll do it, I thought, cast off curse energy for at least a little while. The heat swooped out of me, leaving cool behind, and traveled into the rock.

  Within my hands the rock’s surface changed from hard and cold to smooth, warm, pliant. The rock swelled and shifted, stretched and spread. It grew limbs and a head—at first as generic as the body of a gingerbread boy, a cookie cutter shape of a small human. The curse energy kept working on it, spinning across its skin in pearly drifts, drawing details to the surface. It sprouted hair and features and selfhood. Finally it opened large black eyes and looked up at me.