Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

by Paula Guran

  Pammy made her way toward the fence. “Will you help us?” she asked, and Mrs. Garcia agreed.

  “Don’t worry anymore,” she said. “I’ll do whatever you need. Let me bring some orange crates for the avocados.”

  “I don’t think we should do this,” I said. “We’re not supposed to leave the back yard.”

  Pammy gave a sideways glance to me. She rubbed her cheek and I saw how the redness had given her a look of defiance. “Daddy will never know,” Pammy said, “unless you tell him.”

  Mrs. Garcia set up a card table and two folding chairs on the sidewalk. Pammy and I each filled a crate full of avocados. We carried the crates to the table and sat facing the street. Mrs. Garcia left us, saying she’d tack up a sign announcing our sale on the street corner.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” I said. I had to go to the bathroom, but didn’t want to leave my sister alone.

  “Go on and tell Mama, if you’re so worried.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said, looking back at the house.

  After a few minutes a battered green station wagon pulled up and a young Mexican boy with smooth skin and shiny black hair stepped from the car. His car keys jingled from his pinkie. He walked close to Pammy’s side of the table.

  “Good morning, young ladies,” he said. His shirt was open to the second button; a few curly hairs poked through. He tipped his blue baseball hat as he nodded his head.

  Pammy smiled. “Good morning,” she said. “Are you interested in any avocados?”

  He kneeled beside the table and set his elbow down, near Pammy’s tanned arm. “How much you want?” he asked.

  “Twenty for one dollar,” Pammy answered without lowering her gaze.

  The boy pursed his brown lips and pushed out his breath. “You drive a hard bargain,” he said, “but I’ll pay you five dollars for the two boxes.”

  “What will you do with them all?” Pammy asked.

  “My father’s restaurant,” he said. “They’ll ripen and we’ll freeze what we don’t use right away.” He handed the five-dollar bill to Pammy. I saw her red cheeks blush even darker as he folded his hand over hers.

  He walked over to open the back of his station wagon. “Help me empty them into my car,” he said to Pammy.

  A hot wind blew against my chest. I tried to say, “No,” but the wind had sucked away my breath.

  Pammy put her arms around one crate to pick it up. The boy walked close and pressed his hip against hers. They carried one crate to the station wagon, balanced it on the edge of the car door until the boy tipped the crate on its end and let the fruit roll out. They did the same with the other crate.

  “May I have a glass of water?” he asked, tipping his head toward me.

  Pammy ordered, “Go on. Get him something.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t do it.”

  “You’d better,” she said, “or I’ll tell Daddy about your diary.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, but she gave me such a look that I said, “Okay. I’ll get it.” I ran through the front yard to the house, flung the door open, and ran to the kitchen. I picked up Mama’s dirty glass from next to the sink. I didn’t worry that it was too nice a glass for a Mexican to use and that I’d get in trouble, should my parents find out what I had done. I filled the glass with water, and ran back outside.

  The boy was sitting in my chair beside Pammy, his arm over her shoulder, his head bent close to hers. I hurried to him. “Here’s your drink,” I said, thrusting the glass forward. The water splashed on the table. The boy licked his lips and said, “Thanks.”

  Pammy was hiding something from me, something big. I looked down the street toward the intersection Daddy would turn from when he came home from work.

  After a while, the boy said, “I should get going.” He set the glass on the edge of the folding table, stood up and pushed me out of his way to walk to his car. He pulled away from the curb.

  I punched Pammy’s arm, and the motion set the table rocking. The water glass tipped and rolled to the edge of the table. I reached out, but I couldn’t grab it in time, and the glass fell to the ground—Mama’s crystal—shattering into rainbows.

  I collected the shards and stacked them in a pile on Mrs. Garcia’s table. I couldn’t speak for a long time, but finally I said, “Didn’t you notice that boy was Mexican?”

  “I noticed,” Pammy said, and she was smiling. “I think he likes me.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said. It was clear that Pammy already knew this boy and I sensed that what Daddy was afraid of happening was going to happen to Pammy, soon. “We’re going to be in really big trouble,” I said.

  “Not me,” said Pammy. She picked up an empty crate and headed for the back yard to pack more avocados. I hurried after her. “You promised you’d take my punishments from now on,” Pammy said. “I’m not ever gonna get in any trouble again.”

  In a while, Mrs. Garcia came out to check on us. She saw the broken crystal, now a pile of rainbows, on her table and put her hand on my shoulder. She leaned close enough to whisper and before I knew it, she had her arms around me and was hugging me tight. I didn’t mean to do it, but in a few seconds I was also hugging her. “Don’t worry. Things will turn out okay,” she said. “You must believe that.”

  Mrs. Garcia gathered up the broken crystal and dropped the shards into her purse. She handed me one nearly round piece. “Keep this,” she whispered, “and don’t ever lose it. When you look through crystal, you can see the different facets of the world. Whenever you can’t bear to live in one of those facets, I want you to look through your crystal and find another. And then I want you to take a step and go into that world.”

  She left, but came back in an hour with an unbroken crystal glass in her purse. “Here,” she said, “good as new. Go on. Put this in the kitchen where it belongs.”

  When I looked through the crystal glass I saw one place where the glass was dull, a circle where no rainbows formed. I hid my tiny piece of crystal in my shorts pocket, but still felt its warmth through the fabric. When I pulled out the crystal I saw the sun’s reflection, red like the edge of fire.

  The last of the windfall fruit began to ripen by the end of the week. Pammy warmed a can of cream of mushroom soup for lunch, but I was hungry again by late afternoon. I picked up an avocado and felt its bumpy skin, then pushed in with my thumbs to check the softness. I found one I wanted and dug my nail into the skin. I peeled back a raspy slice that tickled me like a cat’s tongue. The avocado was wet, lush and smooth, the Devil’s fruit. I put my lips to the hole I had made and stuck my tongue inside to lap up the fruit.

  “Is there a game today?” Mrs. Garcia said when she came into her yard.

  “Starts in five minutes,” said Pammy.

  “I’m going out,” Mrs. Garcia said, looking at Pammy. She cleared her throat. “Is there anything else you need?”

  I started to say, “No, thank you,” but Pammy answered, “Yes. There is something,” before I could speak.

  Mrs. Garcia nodded and stared at us both for a minute before leaving.

  I gripped my hands into fists. “What are you up to?” I asked.

  Pammy ignored me and painted on a fresh coat of lipstick. She turned away, and looked back toward the house.

  Something bad was going to happen, but I didn’t know if it would happen to Pammy—or to Maury—or to me.

  The game started. We listened to the top half of an inning that was over one, two, three. Then commercials, then the bottom half of the inning.

  “Maury Wills steps out onto the plate. And the first pitch is high and inside. Ball one.”

  I heard Pammy say, “Hello.”

  I turned and saw the Mexican boy in the side yard.

  Pammy stood and took a step toward him. “We have to hurry,” she said. “I have money.”

  “The throw is low and Wills checks his swing. Marichal doesn’t believe it and asks for a ruling. Did Wills hold up in time? . . . Ball two!”

&n
bsp; “Get away,” I said. “Our mother is home, inside!”

  Pammy took another step toward the boy.

  “I won’t take your punishment,” I said to her. “You’re on your own for this.”

  “Next pitch is in the dirt! Unbelievable. Marichal is wild. Bailey goes over to calm him down. Two pitches into the inning and he’s already out of control. The next pitch . . . and it’s high. Wills is on with a walk!”

  “Don’t go,” I said, but Pammy shrugged me off.

  “Keep the radio,” she said. “I’ll come back for you soon as I can.” The boy held her hand and together, they walked through the side yard, then disappeared from view.

  My throat began to close and I sat stunned, afraid to stay, afraid to move. With no one out, Wills was certain to steal second. I broke into a cold sweat and tasted something sour twisting in my stomach. I stopped myself from breathing, because I was afraid my breath would blow a bad omen from my yard to Chavez Ravine, and Wills would be thrown out. The Devil only knew what would happen then.

  “Marichal comes out of his stretch and throws and Wills is off and running. . . . ”

  Breezes gathered from all directions. Then from nowhere a gust blew strong enough to knock the radio over on its side. I moved to right the radio. “Please don’t get caught,” I prayed, but I didn’t know who I was praying for—Pammy or Maury Wills. The winds pressed against my back and forced me upright, pushed me toward the side yard, then into the front. My neighborhood was a ghost town, with papers and loose garbage rolling along the empty street. There wasn’t a soul anywhere, no birds, no barking, the only noise I heard was of freeway traffic in the distance. I found myself running along the sidewalk away from our house toward the intersection. I pulled the crystal from my pocket and held it up. As I stared through the glass, my world became many.

  Winds gusted and hot breath rushed under my heels, lifting me out of my thongs and into the air. I raised my arms and looked upward, praying I’d see heaven and not the Devil. The sky was so bright it stung my eyes. When I looked down, I saw my neighborhood had become a quilt of color, alive except for one small patch of brown.

  I gripped the crystal tight and tried to imagine what Maury Wills was really like, but the man I pictured was all a blur, as if he were running past me.

  Mrs. Garcia had told me not to worry and for the first time, I started to believe her. The most important thing was that Pammy had gotten free and Mrs. Garcia had given me the magic to get away when I needed to. I felt strong enough to face whatever was about to happen.

  The Santa Anas carried me on a carpet of air that raced above the city to Chavez Ravine and the fastest man in baseball. Below, the road meandered up the dry hill, asphalt shiny as glass. I floated over the ridge of a stadium shaped like a broken bowl, where inside, a thousand fans stood screaming. Something streaked across the brilliant green of the diamond and I looked down—just in time—to see number thirty, Maury Wills, slide free into second.

  Leah Bobet writes of a modern-day witch whose roots lie in the idea of the “herbwoman.” Although similar to the “cunning folk” tradition, this concept of witchcraft grows more from seeds planted by fantasists than history or superstition. According to Jennifer A. Heise, this witch-type made her fictional appearance in the early 1970s with the rise of feminism and the development of female roles in fantasy, a time that also saw a surge in the number of women reading and writing fantasy. During the same era, there was renewed interest in herbal medicine; getting “back to the land” and a distrust of “establishment medicine” were in vogue. As Heise points out, this interest was at least partially related to a justifiable backlash against science-based medicine in the women’s movement. (The abysmal state of female health care in the 1960s has been well documented.) “Natural” cures provided by knowledgeable women—whether set in fantasy worlds, supernatural versions of our past, or modern times—became a frequent genre trope.

  The Ground Whereon She Stands

  Leah Bobet

  Alice sent me flowers. I didn’t realize until midmorning, when I walked through the hallway into the kitchen and greening stems twisted and crushed under bare feet. Then I looked back, and saw the petals shading the carpet, pulping on the grout. They didn’t like tiles. I backtracked, and there were daisies rooted in the shower drain. They smelled like the second day of spring.

  “Oh, Alice,” I said to the flowers, and instead of grinning or crying put the coffee on the stove.

  After the third cup, two cream, two sugar, I closed the laptop and went up the road to Idaho.

  I lived in the last house with electricity before the Canadian border. Alice’s house was past mine, up on a rise where the red oaks shrank to larch and bristly sumac. There was only one trail there, an old logging track wide enough for her asthmatic red old truck. She clipped the branches clean when they battered at the windows in the summertime.

  It was close enough to walk, but not without hiking boots. By the time I reached the turnoff Russian sage nosed through the eyelets, fighting my shoelaces for sunlight.

  Alice was in the back garden, coaxing a ripe heirloom tomato off its heavy stem. Idaho had three gardens: the back was the farm garden, stands of tomato plants and curling cucumber standing sentry between fat and heavy lettuces, patches of collard greens, toddler-fat corn, potatoes. There were four kinds of potatoes. “Well, it’s Idaho,” she’d said diffidently last summer when I’d first had the tour. Her hands were in the pockets of her dirt-stained jeans, head down and looking just away. She’d been smiling.

  She was humming now, a folksong in time with the pull and roll of vegetable flesh. I shifted my feet; I didn’t want the sage rooting down in her beds. Its leaves rustled and rubbed against each other, and the noise brought her head up. She smiled again when she saw me, that crooked half-wince which was the closest she ever got.

  “Hi,” I said, and tripped over a fragrant stand of fresh-bloomed lavender flowers.

  Her mouth opened, shaped a syllable. “Let’s get you inside.”

  The light in the farmhouse was orchard-light, coming from the east. Alice shed her ballcap with one hand and settled me in a chair, a carved wooden one that might have come from the Heritage Festival down in Newfane. I picked my way through the brush toward the laces, snapping off green branches as they hardened into wood.

  The boots came off in tangles. I worked both feet free and wiggled my toes. They smelled sweet, and sharp, and green.

  Alice came back in with scrubbed-clean hands, dirt still hiding under a fingernail. She took my right foot in her palms. “Russian sage,” she said mildly. “Good for fevers.”

  Her hand was cool. The sweaty muscle in the peak of my arch relaxed against it. This close I could smell her shampoo, sharp with tea tree oil and vinegar. “It started growing this morning. There’s daffodils in the shower.”

  I looked out the window instead of down at her, to spare myself the sight of it. It didn’t matter. I caught the motion; the line of her mouth pressing together and her head turning down. “Someone put a spell on you,” she said, perfectly even.

  Because you’re mine, my head filled in. Someone. Of course, Alice. I eased my foot away.

  She looked up, no change in her face but the oh-so-white whites of her eyes. “Could take a few days,” she muttered.

  “Mmhmm,” I replied. She knew full well I was rotating into town next week.

  “Come take these down with me,” she asked, barely a question. Eglantine spilled from between my toes onto her polished wood floor. The prickles tugged skin along with it. She winced watching, and I felt cruel.

  “All right,” I said. I crushed the opening petals when I stood.

  We sat side by side on the tailgate at the side of 147 with the sign out, and watched the tourists roar along the highway. LOCAL GROWN, it announced. BEST VEGGIES IN CALEDONIA COUNTY! I had painted it in bright blue and yellow at the end of last autumn. Alice coaxed taut and sweet early squash out of soil the farmers had left for de
ad, but she was clumsy with things like advertising. I swung my legs back and forth over the muddy shoulder and felt the traffic wind blow, golden dandelions fading and sporing from the creased soles of my feet.

  There was no wireless signal here; it was barely a rest stop, just a collection of picnic tables and parking spots where the brush had been hacked away. I rested the laptop on my thighs, half-open against the summer sunshine glare.

  Alice watched me from the edges of her eyes, in the way the old men called Indian. “Gonna need a few things.”

  I clicked the laptop shut.

  “To take off the spell,” she said. Cars pulled off the highway: sleek family sedans. A thick and sleepy blonde ducked out from a Honda’s passenger seat and lit up a cigarette.

  “Gonna find out who’s enchanting me?” A trio of children tumbled from the Honda’s backseat, the oldest dark-haired and pouting, her two little brothers pinching with sly and sloppy grins. I watched them, watched her Indian-style.

  “Don’t have ’em all in the garden. Have to look around.”

  The dandelions dropped to the pitted asphalt, their stems baking hot and sweet. Hissing marigolds and daisies sprung up in their place.

  “So you’re not going to find out.” I shifted onto one thigh and turned to look her in the face. She had long, sharp lines in her cheeks, a straight nose. The kind of straightnesses you wanted to touch, which would maybe send the message: give it up. I’ve known for months. “Have to start sleeping with a rowan cross.”

  Her hands clasped in her lap, long and strong and dirty. She swallowed, soft.

  “Mama,” the youngest boy’s voice rose over the traffic. “Apricots.”

  I hadn’t seen a flick of the fingers, a whisper of words, anything she could have charmed to turn the kid’s head our way. Luck; I bit down on a sigh and swung my legs again. Just a damned coincidence.

  “Saved by the bell,” I muttered, and the surprise on her face held me over until the kids came barreling across the lot.