A Fistful Of Sky

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Well, it’s an experience,” I said.

  “Right.”

  Our waiter returned and took orders. Ian ordered a portabello mushroom appetizer. Great minds.

  “So,” Ian said after we had finished the breadsticks.

  “So.”

  “Curses.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Since Wednesday, you said.”

  I did some mental acrobatics, ended up flipping into the tell-him-everything net. “See, in our family, if you’re going to be powerful at all, you’re supposed to get your powers by the time you’re, say, fourteen or fifteen. And I didn’t. So I’m twenty, and suddenly I get my power, when I thought I wouldn’t have any at all. And it’s curse power.”

  “Huh,” he said. “In my family, we had to figure out how not to shoot your first deer or join the neo-Nazis by fourteen. No, actually, the deer thing was more like twelve.”

  “Did your family manage that?” I knew he had four older brothers, and a sister who was the eldest.

  “It was a struggle. Actually my brother Patrick had a brief cigarette-smoking neo-Nazi period when he was sixteen, but Dad managed to talk him out of it. The parents sent us to summer camps out of state and encouraged us to make weird friends, and I finally escaped by running away to California. Of course, no one back in Dahlia will speak to me now. Idaho local thought is that California taints everything it touches. With some justification.”

  “Why do your folks live there, if they don’t have the local mindset?”

  “Mom has about half of it. She wanted to move somewhere where she could learn to survive without too many blessings of civilization. She cans tons of things all summer and autumn. She spends the winters sewing and weaving. They raise a beef cow every year and slaughter it. She makes Dad hunt stuff. I have shot birds, and I’ve caught and eaten plenty of fish. She’s tried to get everybody involved in something that will come in handy in case the world ends, like, my oldest brother Frank is a potter—he’s got some kilns in the yard, and he digs his own clay. Patrick is an apprentice blacksmith. Sarah is Mom’s apprentice. She’s learning all the skills Mom taught herself. Ricky’s always been fascinated by archaeology. He learned how to knap arrowheads and knife blades from obsidian and make stoneage weapons. Art is learning woodworking and carpentry.”

  “And your dad telecommutes.”

  “Right. He makes tons of money designing software and supports everybody else’s obsessions.”

  “So what skill did you learn?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “I was never interested in any of that. I wanted to learn music and art. Oh, and I went through a Goth period in high school, and studied everything I could get my hands on about the black arts.” He raised and lowered his eyebrows at me three times.

  “And you met Claire—”

  “In creative writing class at UCST.”

  I had heard that story before at some point, but forgotten.

  “The black arts,” I said. “Did you ever get good at them? Did anything you tried work?”

  “Gave it all up when I graduated high school. None of it worked, but I was getting too many nightmares. But a couple of my Goth friends came to Santa Tekla with me. We share an apartment. Only one of us still wears black all the time, though.”

  “Claire’s mom is a witch.”

  “Yeah, I know. So’s Claire.”

  “She told you?”

  “At one of her parties, when there were only a couple of us left, she was kind of drunk and wanted to do a love spell, but she said she needed some help. Joel and I were kind of drunk too and said we’d help her.”

  “A love spell on who?” I wondered how recent this party was and who Claire was interested in now. Had the spell worked? We hadn’t had lunch in too long. We had a lot of catching up to do.

  “She didn’t tell us. She had some of his hair. She gave us some chants to do, and lit candles and burned incense and did strange stuff with various small objects. Our job was just to chant.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Don’t know. It made me notice things about her apartment, though. Symbols above the door, the altar on the mantle. All the artwork depicting witches at work.” He smiled. “Makes you think.”

  “So what did she tell you about me?”

  “Hardly anything. You come from a big family, and you and she have been neighbors and best friends since you were kids.”

  I wasn’t sure what other questions to ask him. Some of the ones I wanted to ask verged on the pathetic. Like, “So, do you like me?” “Why do you like me?” No, forget that.

  “So, the curse thing,” I tried instead.

  “Amazing,” he said.

  “Usually it’s more complicated than just zapping something to bits.” I wondered who would pay for repairs on the concrete post I had destroyed. Should I offer to do it? I could say I hit it with a car. What if it cost thousands of dollars to fix? Maybe I should curse myself with Ultimate Fashion Sense again and fix it myself.

  Maybe I should curse myself with Ultimate Fashion Sense all the time. Wouldn’t life be easier if the magic came out straight instead of crooked and unkind? If I could tell it to do something, and it would do what I asked?

  But why did that work? Why should I be able to control the magic so much better when I had cursed myself?

  I wasn’t really myself with UFS. Close, but not really. I had had much more of my own brain with UFS than I had had when the computer told me to be a Girl Thing, but I was still a step away from my true and familiar self. Maybe the curse energy thought it was being filtered through someone else, and hence worked like regular energy.

  I could make good magic as long as I spent my life being someone else.

  Whoa. Something to think about.

  My first impulse was to nix the whole thing. Why should I turn myself into someone else? Someone I considered cursed? That would have to be a prerequisite, too; to curse myself, I had to afflict myself with something I didn’t like.

  I didn’t want to give the idea up without considering it, though. If cursing things got too hard, it was nice to know I had some alternatives—Altria, teaming up with somebody else to filter the energy, and this. Maybe I didn’t have to use UFS. I could curse myself into other, different kinds of people and see what happened.

  “Complicated how?” Ian asked.

  I told him about the chalk, and a little about the computer. Our food came, and we got more breadsticks. We traded bites of our appetizers. I shared my salad. What there was was good, but there wasn’t enough of anything. We even ate the vegetable chips.

  I told Ian about Ultimate Fashion Sense.

  “I thought you looked different, but I couldn’t quite figure out how. The makeup,” he said. He frowned. “Your hair’s a different color, too, isn’t it? And you got it trimmed?”

  Interesting. He paid more attention to how I looked than some members of my family did. “Yeah. That was part of a different curse, though.”

  “I get the feeling some of these curses aren’t too awful.”

  “They have their ups and downs. At least they expire after a certain point.”

  “Could you turn someone into a statue?”

  “I don’t know why not.” A statue. I could curse myself into a statue, maybe. But where, and what if people did things to me while I was stone? Birds could fly over and bomb you. . . . Well, suppose you really wanted to meditate. Being turned to stone might be the ultimate sensory deprivation. I’d want to try more curses before I went that far, though, to make sure that I knew the timing was firm. What if a curse lasted longer than a few hours? Suppose I cursed myself or someone else into a statue and they stayed that way for years? “Why? You have somebody you want petrified?”

  He shivered. “Not offhand. I’m just curious about what kind of limits there are on this.”

  “Huh. Me too.” I shifted my shoulders. I checked my watch. An hour and a half since my last curse, and already I was too tense for comfort? “If you
could curse anybody or anything you liked, what would you do?” Brainstorming! I could brainstorm curses. Maybe other people would have better ideas than I did.

  “That’s a scary thought.” He sat back.

  “Would you care for dessert?” our waiter asked. He waved someone over to take our plates, and then got out this little scraper tool and cleaned the crumbs off our tablecloth.

  “I’ll treat,” said Ian.

  Okay, was that some kind of signal? Did it mean I would owe him something? Or was he just being nice? Who knew date vocabulary? I could ask Ian about this, too, but I thought, we’ve already talked about all kinds of stuff. Just take it at face value. My stomach growled. “Thanks,” I said.

  We checked out the dessert menu. I ordered something that involved custard with chocolate shavings and raspberry drizzles. Ian ordered something densely chocolate.

  “Really, we could just go to my house and get dessert there. Yesterday my brother and I made acres of brownies.” I said it before I thought. Only after it was out did I realize that for the first time in my life I had invited a guy to our house. I mean, occasionally I had had over boys who were friends from school. Special occasions. But not like this.

  We never invited people over without alerting the family first.

  He was going to think it was just an idle suggestion, anyway. He wouldn’t take me up on it, would he? I mean, we were having dessert already.

  “We’ll probably still be hungry after this,” Ian said. “I bet the portions are small.”

  They were small, but beautifully presented. We traded bites again, something I’d gotten in the habit of when eating out with Claire—order one dish, taste two. Ian had been a little surprised when I suggested it with the appetizers, but he put up with it then and actually seemed to like it this time. The desserts tasted great.

  We both sat back after we finished eating. I remembered I had left a question on the table, and he had never answered, so I asked it again. “Who would you curse if you could curse anyone, and how?”

  “A long time ago, when I was in sixth grade, there was this bully at school who beat me up. He beat up a bunch of us. We could never figure out why. If there’s anyone in the world I want to kill, it would be that guy. Only now, I think if I had known more about it, I might be able to forgive him. Like, who was he and where did he come from? It might have made a difference. Or maybe not. He never broke any bones, but he split my lip and gave me black eyes and bruises, and he made my life a living hell. See this scar?” Ian pointed to a streak of white across his forehead. “He pounded my head against a brick.”

  Curse energy simmered around my heart. Just hearing this story made me hungry to curse someone. “Where is he now?” I asked. I wondered if I could do long-distance cursing.

  “I think he’s in law school at the University of Idaho.”

  “So what would you have done to him if you could have done something?”

  “Well, in my fantasies, I grew muscles like Superman and squashed him into jelly in front of everybody else in school. Maybe it would have been enough if he had to wake up one morning and feel every bruise the way we did. Maybe not.” Ian shook his head. “I bet somebody else beat him up, and that’s why he did it to us. ’Course, I didn’t have any perspective back then. I wished he would die.”

  My hand tingled. I felt the flow of energy in my arm, up and down, dipping into the red pool in my chest, waiting for me to flex my fingers and send it somewhere. I made a fist to hold it in.

  “Ian?” I said in a low voice. “I’ve got to get out of here right now.”

  “Check!”

  I clenched my fist tight, wished and coaxed the power back inside, though I felt it growing. I handed him my wallet and asked him to take out enough money to cover my meal and tip. He managed with a minimum of fumbling, and we rushed outside.

  Fog lay over the harbor and the breakwater. The air was damp, soft, and salty. Masts of ships tied up at the marinas poked up above the fog into the clear sky you could see if you looked up. The sun had gone down earlier, but there was still some blue in the sky above. Streetlights were on. The palm trees lining the harbor and the boulevard beside it made shaggy-headed silhouettes in the clouded orange light.

  “What do you need me to do?” Ian asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s get away from people, anyway. Maybe you should stay here.”

  “Forget it.”

  We headed for the breakwater, but where the concrete walkway along the top of it veered left, I climbed over the wall and dropped to Speare Beach. Maybe I could send curse energy down into the sand and not hurt anybody.

  The yardlights on the yacht club lightened the fog enough so I could see, though not very far.

  Twenty feet away, the ocean pulsed small waves against the sand, inhale, gasp, inhale, gasp. Something lay under the sea’s breathing, but my curse energy was too loud for me to hear it.

  Ian thudded down beside me. My energy pool swirled and stretched in response to the presence of another person. Look, it whispered, an outlet.

  “I cursed a rock,” I said in a low voice, “and it turned into a person who had power over me.” I had put my protection stone into my pocket before I left for work. Altria didn’t need it to manifest; I didn’t know what I wanted it for. Maybe I liked it because it gave me a false sense of safety. I closed one hand around it now. There was no heat in it.

  If I cast curse energy into the sand, would something like Altria manifest? Of course, I had said foolish words in my rock curse. Maybe I could be wiser this time, watch my words. But I needed to think fast. The energy was restless. I needed to pick an aim, a direction—something to curse, something to curse it with.

  If I didn’t send the energy out as something nasty, it would twist to get there.

  Though how nasty was UFS? Ian was right. Some of my curses weren’t too awful. The worst ones were the ones I tried to make nice.

  So choose something nasty to start with.

  Or call Altria.

  Or repeat myself.

  What was I most afraid of?

  Losing my mind. Losing myself. Losing my family and friends. Losing control. Being weak. Being noticed. Being ignored. Being hideous. Being hated. Being feared. Being stupid. Being alone. Being—

  “After this, no matter what happens, will you take me home?”

  “Of course.”

  I pressed my hand against my chest. The heat in my palm made sweat break out on my forehead. “Cast it out and keep it in. Power go. I’m normal again.”

  The heat flared hot, then exploded through me. I felt like I was blowing into bits. I screamed.

  After a long throat-scraping while, the heat left me—left me empty and sick and shattered. While I was in the grasp of the curse’s working, everything had been hot and white, but now I saw that it was dark. The fog had closed over us, and the sand I lay on had lost the day’s heat and felt cold.

  Distant voices sounded through the muffling fog. “What was that?”

  “Somebody’s being murdered!”

  “Call the cops!”

  Warmth entered my world when someone took my hand. “Gyp?”

  “Ian,” I whispered and reached for him. He leaned closer and I closed my arms around him. This curse wasn’t one of the easy ones.

  He hugged me. He was warm, and his breath smelled like chocolate. His chest was hard against my cheek. He felt solid and safe. I held him tight.

  Lights, long white lines in the mist, stabbed to where we were. “What are you doing to that girl?”

  “Get away from her!”

  Ian tried to straighten, but I couldn’t let him go.

  “Hey! You!” Someone grabbed Ian’s shoulder and jerked him up, away from me.

  “No,” I tried to say, but I had screamed my voice out. I reached for him.

  “She’s hurt,” Ian said. “I’ve got to take her home.”

  “We’ll take care of her. You, come with me.”

  One of the men h
ad a uniform. It wasn’t a police uniform, but something with some sort of badge. Harbor security, maybe. He took some plastic handcuffs out of his belt.

  “No. No.” I pushed myself up. Nobody could hear me. My voice was like wind-blown sand. I managed to get to my feet, even though I still felt shaky and sick. I pulled on the guard’s sleeve.

  “Miss, what happened to you? Did he hurt you? Are you all right?” asked the other man. “We’ll keep you safe.”

  I shook my head. I gripped the guard’s sleeve, grabbed the handcuffs. He shone his flashlight in my face.

  “I was scared,” I whispered as loudly as I could.

  “What was that?” Now that the light was on my mouth, he could tell I was trying to talk.

  “I was scared. Ian didn’t hurt me. I was scared. Please let him go.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you two come to the security office with me, and we’ll write up a report, and then I’ll let you both go? How about that?”

  “Okay.”

  The harbor security office was small and warm, and the guard wrapped me in a yellow blanket, let me gargle with salt water, and gave us both hot tea. He took our driver’s licenses and photocopied them. “If anybody asks, I need this information.” He watched me covertly, watched Ian the same way. He let me write my account of what happened because, though the salt water helped, I still didn’t have much voice.

  “I scared myself,” I wrote, “and I screamed. My boyfriend tried to help me. He didn’t do anything wrong.” Boyfriend. Should I cross that out and say “friend” instead? Finally I left it. It wasn’t Harbor Security’s business what our relationship was or wasn’t. Anyway, I didn’t know.

  After the guard went in the back room and talked to some people on the phone, he let us go.

  “Are you all right?” Ian asked me. “I mean, I know you can’t talk. What did you do to yourself? You hurt yourself. That was awful.”

  I grabbed his hand and squeezed.

  We walked to the car in silence.

  I should have phoned the family right after dinner to let them know I was bringing over a stranger, but I had needed to curse something too urgently to make the call. Now what? They wouldn’t be able to hear me if I called now. Should I ask Ian to bring me home? Or to take me to the club where Jasper was playing tonight? But it was early. Jasper wouldn’t even be there for sound check yet.