A Fistful Of Sky

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Okay.” She touched dark pink into her lips, frowned, wiped it off, tried something a little redder.

  I left her staring into the bathroom mirror.

  I had a completely different reaction to my wardrobe this time.

  Jasper knocked on my door while I was working on it. “Come in,” I said.

  “So how are you now?”

  “Good.” I took a yellow blouse out of my closet and held it up to my chest, checked the color in my closet door mirror. Made me look sallow. I stroked the blouse and the color changed to pale spring green. Much better. Made me look rosy. I put the blouse away and grabbed a sweater, frowned at the pattern.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Fixing things.”

  “With curse power?”

  I ran my hand over the sweater, made its pattern of roses shrink to delicate instead of overpowering. Then I held the sweater up toward my face. No heat. “Beryl made me curse myself, and now my power is acting like yours.”

  “You look different again.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled at him.

  “Beryl made you curse yourself? How’d she do that?”

  I explained about Beryl’s shield.

  “Wow. Smart,” he said. “Wonder if I could figure out how to do that.”

  Before he got lost in planning and technique, I asked, “Can you give me a ride to school later?”

  “When?”

  “Three-thirty?”

  He thought, then said, “Okay. I can do that. So, you mean you’re actually going out?”

  “I have to sooner or later, and Phil needs me today.” I looked at him. That hair. It was longer on one side than the other, and—I snipped my fingers surreptitiously, and a little sheaf of hair separated from his head and fell to his collar.

  Jasper frowned. “What’d you do?”

  “I’m sorry.” I collapsed onto my bed. “I can hardly help myself.”

  “What’s the curse?”

  I told him.

  “Something’s wrong with my hair?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Don’t fix me.”

  I gripped one hand in the other. “All right.” My voice came out squashed.

  “You’re going out like this?”

  “Nobody will be there. It’s the last afternoon before break and everybody will have finished their finals. They’ll be gone. Phil just has this thing. I think it’s connected to funding. We have to be open and available during the stipulated hours.”

  “Maybe you better talk to Tobias first.”

  I glanced at my closet. I was only halfway through. Well. I’d probably have some more time. “All right.”

  I followed Jasper out into the hall, and saw the place that I’d scorched that morning while talking to Mama. Now I ran my hand over it, and repaired the wallpaper and the carpet. Good. Another problem solved. Maybe I better do something about the bread now that I was feeling confident. I had left sacks of bread out back, not to mention stacks of bread. The birds couldn’t eat it all. Besides, it looked bad, and nothing bothered Mama as much as things that looked bad.

  Tobias wasn’t in his tower. I wanted to deal with the bread question and get back to working over my wardrobe while I had time from inside this curse, but Jasper said, “Let’s find him.”

  We went downstairs.

  Tobias and Hermina and Mama were sitting on the back porch. The instant I saw their heads through the great hall window I felt uneasy, and not just because I wanted to give Hermina a haircut and a makeover and change the color and cut of Tobias’s shirt. What were they talking about?

  It’s not all about you, I told myself. It was almost never about me. I had been happy as a low-profile, low-maintenance, and self-entertaining person. But that had changed.

  I would have to face Hermina sometime. I hoped she wouldn’t yell at me to go away again. If she did that every time we ran into each other, it would make for a tense household, even though she spent most of her time in the guest house. Anyway, I needed to apologize. I might as well try it now.

  I could figure out what to do with the bread after that.

  I headed for the porch. Jasper followed me.

  “Did you go shopping without me?” Mama asked when she saw me. She, Tobias, and Hermina were grouped around one of the wicker tables with the glass tops that lived out on the porch between the Adirondack chairs. On the table was a platter of sliced banana bread, a knife, and a dish with butter in it. They also had coffee steaming in mugs. Tobias was eating.

  “No. These are things I found in my closet.” I had done some alterations, that was all. Now I had a blouse, jeans, and penny loafers that actually looked good on me. “Aunt Hermes?”

  She met my gaze.

  “I’m really sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do for you. I had no idea all those things would come out of that curse.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “I have to take some responsibility. I gave you permission to make that curse. Who knew.”

  “I realize you lost years of work.” I squeezed one hand in the other. “Did the disks work in Dad’s computer?”

  She shook her head. “I took them to the shop to see if they could retrieve any of the data. I think it was part of the curse that when that thing stored my data on them, it did it so the disks couldn’t be read, but there are some smart people at Motherboard. They might get something out of it.”

  “Do you—Uncle, can you think of any way I could make some of this go backward?”

  “Backward is too dangerous a road for you right now, Gyp. For any of us. Best if we move on.”

  “Once I get this curse thing under control I’ll do whatever work you want me to do, Aunt. Water plants, enter data, whatever. You want my computer?” I had an old desktop Dad gave me when he upgraded. It was great for writing assignments when I had them, and for finding stuff on the Internet and e-mailing distant friends I had made in boarding school, but I didn’t spend a lot of time with it.

  “I’ll buy a new one. That one was old and irritating even before you cursed it. I should have upgraded last year. Then none of this would have happened.”

  “I think other things are going to happen anyway. I just hope they’re not as dire. May I give you a haircut?”

  “What?” She laughed, maybe startled by the subject change.

  “Please?”

  “That’s your idea of restitution?”

  “No. It’s part of my current curse. I—” Unable to restrain myself any longer, I waved at Tobias, and his white shirt shaded to pale blue-green, which brought out the color of his eyes and contrasted nicely with his white hair. I grabbed my hand again.

  Tobias looked down at his shirt, then up at me. “What is it this time? Do you suppose this shirt will strangle me?”

  I perched on a chair, grabbed some banana bread and butter, and told him the latest curse news.

  AS I cut Hermina’s hair in the upstairs bathroom, I calmed down. She was letting me touch her. She even laughed. Somehow we were all right again, and that eased my heart. She even let me touch color onto her fingernails and stroke an embroidered placket of leaves into her shirt. “Pretty useful curse,” she said. Then she looked at herself in the mirror and screamed.

  “What!” I cried. Had I butchered her hair? No! It had been long and straggly before, and now it was shorter and shaped to flatter her face. I had toned up the color a little, upgraded it from gray to soft silver.

  “It was just such a shock!” Then she patted my cheek. “I wanted to scare you.”

  I clutched my chest. “It worked.”

  She turned her head this way and that. “I do like it. It’ll look like this if I just wash it and leave it?”

  I put my hand on her head and told her hair to do that. “If this curse works like the others, my impulse to inflict fashion on everybody will vanish this evening, but I’m not sure about these effects. I think they’ll last after I’ve lost the power.”

  “Unless there are hidden s
ide effects, I think I can manage to deal with the consequences of this curse,” she said. “Thank you, Gyp.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She gave me a hug and headed out.

  I checked my watch. Two-thirty. I still had an hour for bread, my wardrobe, and maybe lunch before I had to leave for work. If I dealt with the bread I’d get my lunch, although I should probably eat some fruit or carrots at some point.

  In the backyard, I discovered that most of the bread was already gone. But where? I had grabbed more grocery sacks on my way through the house, and I set them on the walk, then looked at the remains. Most of the pecked loaves had been moved over to the retaining wall, where more birds visited them. Not much was left of the intact bread.

  Flint came whistling around the house.

  “You changed again?” he asked as soon as he saw me.

  I posed.

  “Cool. What did I miss this time? Hey, I borrowed Calvin’s pickup, and I’ve been putting the bread in the back.”

  “Great!”

  We loaded more sacks with bread and took them around to where the truck was parked. Its bed was already lost under largesse.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Drive around giving it away.” He grabbed a big poppyseed muffin out of one of the sacks and bit into it. “I don’t have to be at the Toussaints’ until five-thirty.”

  “Thanks, Flint. Thanks.” I hugged him.

  “Hey, it was my work, too.”

  “Because you were helping me.”

  “That was so fun.”

  “Except I burned your hands. How are your hands?”

  He showed me his palms. They looked much better. “After I helped Aunt Hermes get her plants under control, she gave me this magic salve she had. It helped.”

  “Oh, good. You got the plants under control?”

  “We trimmed them down so she can at least move around. Without the computer pouring out your power on them, they stopped growing so wild. They’ve almost settled down.”

  “Oh, good.” My shoulders were tight again. “You want a makeover?” I asked my brother. I had energy to spare, and I could apparently use it without hurting people under the current curse, but little alterations didn’t use it up very fast. Did I have to cast another curse? I wondered what else I could do with it.

  Make over something else?

  “A makeover?” asked Flint.

  I had an idea. I took a grocery sack of bread off the load in Flint’s truck, and took out a loaf. Make over that. I narrowed my eyes and thought at it, and a second later, it was wearing a lovely paper wrapper like the kind French bread came in, with a label that said what it was and what was in it. “Ooh.” I licked the tip of my index finger and started zapping bread loaves.

  Flint got into it. He took loaves out of bags and handed them to me, suggested color changes in the labels. At one point when we were halfway through, he said, “Is this environmentally sound?” So I rezapped everything. It took us half an hour to go through all the bread, even though we worked really fast.

  “This is better,” Flint said when we had finished. “Makes it more presentable. People think something’s safe to eat if it comes in a wrapper. Okay. I’ll see who wants it.”

  “Tomorrow I’m making Christmas cookies,” I said, “but I think I’ll do it the old-fashioned way. If that’s possible.”

  “Let me know if it isn’t. I’ll work on a save-my-hands idea. Mmm, cookies.”

  Making bread wrappers had used up some of my energy, but not enough of it. I better curse something else before I left for work. “Gotta go,” I told Flint.

  “See you later.”

  Had I finished every cleanup thing Mama had told me to do? I hadn’t helped with Hermina, but she hadn’t wanted me to. I had better do everything I could while I had the ability. I couldn’t think of anything else undone, so I went back to my room to work on my clothes and come up with a curse or two.

  While I was at it, I redecorated my room. Slate blue wallpaper, white trim around the window, an upper border of fancy nineteenth century printer’s ornaments just below the roof, a bedspread that matched, and pale icy green carpet. Lace curtains. Hmm.

  Not enough.

  Beryl came in while I was stuffing things into my pack for work. “Wow,” she said, looking around. “I really don’t like the new look.”

  “We have dueling taste even though we both have Ultimate Fashion Sense? Cool.” I checked her outfit. It looked like she had been adjusting her wardrobe, too. She looked almost Hollywood, brilliant magenta and acid green clothes, and a scattering of small objects, like a gold necklace with old watch fobs on it, to add interest. She had put a gold ribbon flower in her hair. Somehow it all went together, and though it wasn’t anything I’d have chosen, she looked fabulous. I said, “So I need to curse something else now. Any ideas?”

  “You could curse me again,” she said in a small voice. “I said before you started that I’d let you.”

  “I already cursed you today.”

  “I’m having fun with it. Maybe you can do something else I’ll enjoy.”

  “You promise not to bounce this one back on me? I need to go to work in about ten minutes.”

  “I promise.”

  “So what kind of curse would you like?”

  “How can it be a curse if I choose it?”

  “As long as I think it’s a curse, it should be a curse. Or maybe it’ll seem like it’s something nice, but then it turns out to be a curse. Wait, I’m confused.” Two different things had happened, I now realized, just when I thought I had the rules figured out. I knew that my normal self thought Ultimate Fashion Sense was a curse, and now that I had it, I thought it was a good thing. When I had cursed the computer, though, I had given it energy in hopes it would act for the benefit of everybody involved, and it had done me and Aunt Hermina ill. So my best bet was to use a curse that I thought would do someone ill, and see if they liked it.

  I frowned. “I have to read more fairy tales. There should be examples of curses in there.”

  “They’re always turning princes into frogs and stuff. Or how about Sleeping Beauty? Pricked her finger on a needle and fell asleep for a hundred years.”

  “That would be awful. I could curse you into an animal. If the computer was right, that would last for six point seven hours. But a frog is too fragile. You could get stepped on, or dry up. It should be something bigger and safe to be.”

  “If you cursed me into a frog, I wonder if somebody could kiss me back to myself?”

  “Who do you know who would try it?”

  “Orion,” said Beryl. She dimpled.

  Orion was Claire’s little brother. He was young and energetic and wild. He was about Flint’s age. He and Beryl and Flint had been friends since the Rhodes moved to our neighborhood, when Orion and Flint were ten. I didn’t even know Beryl thought about him that way.

  “The problem is, I have to do this curse and then leave. I won’t be around to make sure it works out all right. So I have to do something you can live with.”

  “Only kidding,” Beryl said.

  “How about if I cursed you younger?”

  Her eyes glowed. “No. Curse me older.”

  “Curse you older.” Heat flowed from my shoulders to gather in my chest, and I felt the curse take shape. “Let her see through older eyes, give her wisdom and disguise her in the elements of age—”

  The heat traveled down my arm, flowed from my fingertips, and formed a ball of red light above my hand. “For a day, then disengage.” I lifted my hand, and the curse flew from it to splash over Beryl.

  She gasped and gasped again.

  My little sister was a sturdy girl of seventeen with wild clothes and a good haircut before the curse hit her. Once it went to work, everything about her changed except the clothes and the haircut. Her face and hands aged. Her back humped and her body dwindled. When the energy stopped working, she looked about ninety years old.

 
“Goodness,” she said. Her voice cracked.

  “Are you all right?” I felt so relaxed I was ready to fall over, even though worry ate at me.

  She lifted her arm, looked at the papery, spotted skin of her forearm, stretched one of her legs so she could peer at the broken veins and shrunken muscles in her calf. “Oh, dear.”

  “Beryl?”

  She smiled. “My joints feel creaky. Wonder if I can do this to you,” she said. She walked over to my closet and peered at herself in the full-length mirror inside the door. “Oh, my.” She edged closer. “I need glasses.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. This is a good one. I asked for it. Oh, my.” She touched her wrinkled face, pulled the skin to the side so that her cheek straightened into youthful smoothness, let go so that it folded again. Her hair had gone white. “For a day, you said.”

  “I don’t know if having a rhyming dictionary in my head is good or bad. Maybe I should have just said ‘age,’ instead of all that. But I also don’t know how my being cursed affects my ability to curse things. What if this came out clean and stayed with you? I thought I better put an ending in it. In fact—” I held my hands out to her as though she were a fire, trying to sense curse energy on her. I felt no heat. Fear brushed my mind. “In fact,” I whispered, “this is not a curse but straight magic. Why did I think it had to be a curse? It could have been a wish!” I stared at my ancient younger sister. Tears thickened my throat. For once I could have been nice to somebody with my power, and I hadn’t even realized it. Damn!

  “I’m so sorry, Beryl. It’ll probably last longer than it’s supposed to, but if the words work, it’ll be gone by this time tomorrow. I’m sorry.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But you’re basically all right?” I asked again.

  She walked around the room. She moved more slowly and creakily than she usually did, but she seemed to have enough energy to get around. “If I need help, I’ll ask someone,” she said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I sighed. I packed my curse journal in my backpack. I figured I could update it at the Center while I was waiting for students who wouldn’t show. “Thanks for being my guinea pig, Beryl. As usual, I owe you.”