Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

by Paula Guran

  Demeter signed.

  Without a word she stood and walked toward the door. The secretary moved out of her way just as Demeter blew a smoke ring in her face.

  Demeter shuffled a pair of steps, then spun back ready to say a nasty farewell to the secretary but, hearing an odd rustling noise from the office, she said nothing. Instead, she stepped back to the doorway and peeked in, watching as Mr. Loudcrier pulled the backing off of a small sticker, shoved his sleeve up, and slapped the sticker onto his arm.

  Nicotine patch.

  Demeter laughed out loud.

  The piece of “crystal” Mrs. Garcia gives to the young baseball fan in Leslie What’s story is not really made of crystalline rock. But magic is said to make use of “intent” when the real item is missing, so perhaps glass can be effectively magical if it needs to be. Crystals, gemstones, semiprecious stones, and even more common stones are traditionally thought to possess powers or metaphysical energy that can be tapped in various ways. The wearing of amulets or jewelry decorated with stones or gems has been practiced throughout history to ward off evil, for protection, healing, or fertility. Some stones are even considered unlucky and to be avoided. Stones can also be used in divination—lithomancy. Most of us are familiar with the “crystal balls”—also known as shew stones—used by stereotypical “gypsy” fortune tellers. Crystal-gazing (crystallomancy or spheromancy) is actually a form of scrying—a way of “seeing” the past, present, or future by looking into a crystal ball, a bowl or body of liquid (hydromancy), or other reflective surface.

  Magic Carpets

  Leslie What

  The Santa Ana winds arrived, whipped into frenzy by a spirit with the power to fold hot air inside wind. I lay beside my big sister Pammy in the backyard, feeling the dry breeze tickle the backs of my legs. My skin itched where the crop top had exposed a four-inch band of belly to dead grass. I sat up to scratch and Pammy sat up, too. She tugged her shirt down, as if to cover the welts Daddy had raised that morning, then reached to pull the sports page from beneath her transistor radio.

  “What time is the game?” I asked. We hadn’t had a radio or a team back home, but in Los Angeles we had both.

  Pammy checked her watch. “Now,” she said.

  A wind blew, thick and breathy like a child learning to whistle. I watched a leaf fall from one of our two avocado trees and circle in the air, stirred by the wind’s hand. Pammy let go of the paper and it skimmed twenty feet along the grass before landing on the chain-link cyclone fence that divided the back of our property from the neighbor’s.

  “I better get it,” Pammy said, “before it flies into Mrs. Garcia’s yard.” Daddy had warned us just that morning to stay away from Mrs. Garcia, “ . . . that witch next door. Stay away from her and her devil magic,” he’d said, but if it hadn’t been magic, he would have found another reason to keep us to our yard.

  Pammy found his superstitions funny. I couldn’t help looking past the fence to Mrs. Garcia’s back door, wondering why she had been nice to us all summer, awfully nice for someone who wasn’t even a blood relative. I didn’t want to trust her. Maybe Daddy was right. Maybe Mrs. Garcia was a witch.

  Pammy stood and slipped her tanned feet into her rubber thongs. She smoothed the wrinkles from her shorts and walked to the fence to ply away the newspaper. She crumpled the paper into a ball, which she threw at me. I straightened my arms to bat it away, but the wind changed, and the paper floated past me.

  Pammy pointed to the leaves and paper scraps littering the lawn. “Daddy will be happy the wind is keeping us busy,” she said. “Won’t be able to do nothing today except clean up this mess.”

  I was twelve and didn’t mind the yard. But Pammy was almost seventeen and for her, things were different. “If it wasn’t for this radio,” she said, “I’d go crazy.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to rake the yard while we listen to the game,” I said, wanting to get it over with.

  Pammy winced as she rubbed a yellowing bruise above her elbow. “We might as well wait till the winds stop,” she said. She stuck out her tongue at our peeling stucco house. “Sometimes I wish Daddy was dead.”

  “You don’t really mean that,” I said. Daddy wouldn’t be home for another hour, but I worried Pammy’s wish might be carried on the wind to the slaughterhouse where he worked. Daddy had learned the butcher’s trade during the Korean war, but now he hated his job, said the work was fit for idiots.

  “Maybe I don’t,” Pammy said, “but I do wish things were different.” She slumped to the ground and positioned her legs out in front to catch the sun. “Well, I’m turning on the radio before we miss any more.”

  We listened to the radio voice. “There’s talk Maury Wills may break Ty Cobb’s record of ninety-six stolen bases.” Hearing Maury’s name made me smile. Pammy noticed this and grinned, her lipstick forming pink lines along the creases of her lips.

  I strained to hear above the static. “Turn it up,” I said; she took her sweet time to do that. A boy had given the transistor radio to Pammy, but she’d told Daddy that she’d won it at school.

  Mama called out from the house. “You girls in the yard?” She opened the screen door and stepped onto the patio. She sipped her whiskey from one of the two crystal wedding glasses that had survived our move to California. “I’m going to take my nap,” Mama said, “unless you need something.” Her matted hair was the color of unbaked red clay and her brown polka-dot dress was wrinkled, discolored under her arms.

  “We’re okay,” Pammy said. “Go on to sleep.”

  Mama yawned. “Look at this yard,” she said in a lazy drawl. “It’s those avocado trees, stealing life itself right from the ground, bearing the Devil’s fruit. No wonder I can’t start my garden.”

  “You won’t need no garden when those avocados ripen,” I said. “We’ll be eating them for the rest of the year.” I didn’t tell Mama I’d already tried the green fruit, even though it was still sour and hard and had given me a bad stomachache.

  “You girls clean up before your Daddy gets home,” Mama said. “And stay in the yard.”

  “We always do,” said Pammy, and Mama went inside.

  “Koufax comes out of his windup . . . and the throw . . . is . . . strike three . . . and the Giants are down after scoring one run. We’ll come back with the top of the order, starting with number thirty, Maury Wills, leading off for the Los Angeles Dodgers.” The announcer made me listen by stringing out his words and letting his excitement show at the end of every sentence. He sounded thrilled even when I knew he was disappointed, even when the Dodgers were losing. “Vince Gully really loves baseball,” I said.

  “It’s Vin,” Pammy said, shaking her head. “Vin Scully.”

  “Vin?” I asked, feeling my jaw drop. “Vin?”

  Pammy smirked. “You probably agree Wills is gonna break Ty Cobb’s record,” she said.

  “You bet,” I said. “Maury Wills is the fastest man in baseball.”

  “Mrs. Garcia says he’s a Negro,” Pammy said.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. I looked down, not wanting to meet her glance. “Not that it makes any difference.”

  “It’d make some difference if Daddy was to see your diary,” Pammy said. She pulled up a handful of brown grass, held her palm upward and spread her fingers to let the grass fall through. “Maury Wills,” she said in a false high voice that mimicked mine. “Running. Stretching out his hand to touch . . . the base beyond reach. What’s that, a haiku?”

  “Pammy! You said you’d stay out of my diary,” I said. I plucked some grass to throw toward her, but the wind blew the grass back toward me. “Maury Wills is a great athlete,” I said, knowing Daddy wouldn’t care if he was the President. There were people we weren’t supposed to talk to, weren’t supposed to think about, people my parents seemed afraid of because they were different. “How would Mrs. Garcia know if he was a Negro, anyway?”

  “Maybe she’s got a television,” Pammy said, and I felt stupid because I hadn
’t even thought about that.

  In a little while Mrs. Garcia came into her yard—just as she did every afternoon—to water her rose garden. “Hello girls,” she called.

  Pammy waved. “Our fairy godmother, at last,” she whispered.

  I looked through the chain-link fence into her yard, alive with color. Mrs. Garcia wore an orange flowered sundress. Her black hair was swept into a knot sprayed stiff enough to keep it from coming undone in the wind. She always looked magazine-model perfect, like someone make-believe. “How’s your mother feeling today?” she asked.

  I wanted to say, “She’s fine,” but Pammy said, “She’s gone back to sleep,” before I could get my words out. Sometimes I wondered at Pammy, telling all our troubles to a stranger.

  “It’s not right,” said Mrs. Garcia, fingering a crystal necklace that made the sunlight dance along her skin. “You girls need to get out of that yard.” She bent to smell her roses. “How are my Beauties?” she said. “How’s Mr. Lincoln? And Silver Jubilee? Irish Gold? First Prize? And Honor?”

  “Ground ball through the hole and into center and Wills is on with a base hit,” said the radio.

  Mrs. Garcia started the faucet and held her thumb in front of her hose. A whisper of spray flew over the back fence and landed on my arms. I watched her fret over her flowers like they were something precious, not just backyard shrubs. “They get thirsty in this wind,” she said. “So, who’s winning?”

  The winds shifted direction and suddenly, I caught the sweet scent of roses. The fragrance cut straight through the heat to make my nostrils tingle. It was early on in the game so I said, “The Dodgers are behind, but they’ll make it up.”

  “I’m sure they will,” said Mrs. Garcia. “Would you girls like a soda?”

  I looked at Pammy, suddenly afraid. “Thank you very much,” Pammy said. “We’re very thirsty.”

  Mrs. Garcia smiled. She set the hose down on the grass and hurried into her house. She came out with two opened Coke bottles and made her way to the fence. She stood on her tiptoes and handed the sodas over to Pammy.

  Pammy started sipping hers right away, but I held onto to mine, afraid to drink.

  “There he goes . . . and the throw . . . is . . . in time . . . and Wills is caught at second.”

  I could not stop the sigh that made me sound so young.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Garcia.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “They’ll make it up.” For the first time all day I felt as if I might break down, and I said without thinking, “Maybe you could stop by for iced tea, sometime.” I was sorry the moment I had spoken.

  “That would be nice,” said Mrs. Garcia.

  Pammy strained to hit me with her elbow and her crop top split along the side seam. She stuck two fingers in the hole and frowned. “Well, isn’t this just great,” she said.

  “ . . . a high fly to center and Davis is going back. Back, back, back, to the wall . . . and it’s gone. One run in and here comes Mays. And the Giants lead it three to one.”

  Mrs. Garcia stopped watering to listen. “Don’t worry, girls. They’ll make it up.”

  “Too bad Wills got caught at second,” Pammy said.

  I stared at my feet, tan except where the straps had carved out a pale upside-down V. “Too bad,” I said, but something inside me felt wrong, worried that it was a terrible omen for the fastest man in baseball to be thrown out.

  The winds blew hard that night. My bedroom faced the back yard and I was awakened by the noise of something walking on the roof. I crept from my room through the hallway to the door. I stepped out to the patio and into a warm breeze that pressed a dry kiss against my skin. The moon was low; streamers of light peeked through the tree branches. One avocado fell onto the roof, followed by another.

  The wind blew around me, above me, over my ears, and down my neck, and in and out of the spaces between my toes. I felt warmth under my feet and knew it was truly the very breath of the Devil. Leaves hovered in the sky like hummingbirds. I heard an echo in the canyon and imagined that the canyon was Chavez Ravine, the Dodgers’ new stadium.

  I leaned forward and felt the wind hold me in an unnatural tilt. I could fly, I thought, with the Santa Ana winds lifting me into the air. I ran to the chain-link fence and back to the patio, then tried running from one side of the yard to the other, but I couldn’t gather enough speed to take off.

  I knew now that I was in the presence of magic, and I did not want that magic to end. “Never,” I said aloud, as I plucked an eyelash and let it fly away into the night because Mama used to say that wishing on eyelashes made things come true.

  In a while I went back to my room. I pulled my diary from its new place under the mattress and started another in a series of imaginary correspondences. “Dear Maury,” I wrote, and when that didn’t sound right, I changed it to “Dear Maurice.” I chewed the end of my pencil and thought. “I will show you how to fly,” I wrote, “and maybe you could teach me how to run.”

  After breakfast, Pammy and I dressed and put on our thongs to go out into the yard. The air smelled of eucalyptus, a medicinal scent, only faintly distasteful. We saw hundreds, maybe even thousands of avocados on the ground, shiny skins, bumpy and green. Our yard had never looked so alive. I pretended money had fallen from heaven as I skipped through the yard, kicking avocados out of my way. “Fastball,” I said, and threw one at Pammy, barely missing her. She grabbed an avocado and beaned me on my head.

  That made me cry, which brought Daddy out. He hadn’t finished eating and his yellow paper napkin was tucked inside his collar. He glared at Pammy with his concrete-gray eyes. A wad of toilet tissue covered a red spot on his chin.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he said. “I’ve got to get to work. I can’t be bothered with you.” He looked at the yard. “What’s happened here?” he said.

  “It’s the wind, Daddy,” Pammy said, using the haughty tone she’d recently adopted.

  “You making fun of me, girl?” he asked. “You think I don’t know that?” He narrowed his eyes. “What’s that on your face?” he said. Pammy reached up to wipe away her lipstick. “I know you been using my razor,” he said. “Who you showing off for, Pammy? You think I don’t know what goes on here when I’m gone to work?”

  “All the girls my age shave,” Pammy said. “Wear makeup, too.”

  “You hear that?” Daddy said to no one. “What a place Los Angeles turned out to be.” He threw his napkin to the ground and stormed over close enough to grab Pammy’s hair. He shook her head back and forth.

  Daddy swatted her belly, then switched to the small of her back. Pammy cried out as he smacked her cheek. He raised his hand again. If Mama was there, she would have told him, “Not in the face.” That was what Mama always said since reading about the child whose face was paralyzed by a slap to the head. But Mama wasn’t there, she was inside, still asleep.

  Pammy cried out, “I can’t see. Stop it, Daddy!”

  Daddy held her chin in one hand and lifted his other hand to hit her.

  I yelled, “Not in the face! Not in the face!” He was breaking our family rule, one that even Mama believed.

  “You shut up,” he said. “This is none of your concern.”

  “I can’t see, Daddy!” Pammy said. She was bawling.

  I felt scared. I was the one who had wished for the winds to continue and now our yard was ankle-deep in debris and Pammy was getting a beating. I should have been more careful after Maury Wills was caught at second.

  “Stop,” I said. “Please, Daddy. Not in the face.”

  Daddy stopped and stared at me.

  “You telling me what to do?” he asked.

  “No, Daddy,” I said. I hoped it wasn’t too late to save Pammy. “Hit me instead,” I said, thankful when he walked my way because I thought I could take anything.

  At that moment I understood what it meant to see things crystal clear. The winds trickled to a breeze while the fury in Daddy grew. The air was clean and I
saw the world as it was, with all the haze stripped away. Daddy raised his hand to strike my backside and I knew all at once that he wasn’t even mad at me. Daddy didn’t care who he was hitting. Just knowing that made me feel strong, because I loved him and I wanted him to love me. I let my body take the beating while my thoughts floated up with the leaves, tiny magic carpets on the wind.

  After a while Daddy stopped and rubbed his hands together. He said, “You girls stay in the yard, now. I don’t want any boys coming to the house.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I said in a whisper. I didn’t know why Daddy was so afraid of boys. Pammy knew, but she wouldn’t tell me.

  “And clean up this mess,” Daddy said. He left us to go to the job he hated.

  Pammy held her hand against her face. She blinked hard. “I’m okay,” she said. It was already hot outside, but she was shivering. “Why did you do that for me? Why’d you take my punishment?”

  “I couldn’t watch,” I said. “Anyway, it really don’t hurt that bad, so long as you don’t keep your mind on it.”

  Then we heard Mrs. Garcia call, “Good morning,” from her yard. There was an urgent questioning in her voice and I froze, not knowing how long she’d been there. Pammy bowed her head.

  “Everything okay?” asked Mrs. Garcia. She fingered her crystal necklace.

  “Just fine,” Pammy answered, but there was a hard edge to her voice.

  “You’re sure?” Mrs. Garcia said. She stood just on the other side of the fence and slipped her fingers through the wire. “You’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do.”

  “We’re fine,” said Pammy, her voice breaking.

  Mrs. Garcia narrowed her eyes and I knew she didn’t believe that we were fine. After a while she said, “Look at all those avocados. What a waste.” She shook her head. “What a waste,” she said again, but she was looking at Pammy and not the avocados. “Must be fifty dollars worth, at least. Maybe it’s time you girls got out of that yard. At the same time, you might as well try to make some money.”