Section 3: Building
Building one’s own home is an attractive option for many witches. With this method, one can control almost every aspect of the project—from location to construction to the placement of the final knickknack on the tippy-toppest shelf in the cupola bedroom. However the drawback for some is that the sheer number of variables involved can often prove overwhelming.
Does one choose the seaside, a cottage of spiraling nautilus shell perched on a crumbling dune, ever in danger of falling into the waves, where one might be soothed to sleep every night by the lull of the tide, and wake to one’s joints swollen painful with the damp and arthritis? Or a remote mountaintop, wracked by storms, fraught with wind-stunted pines, sure to guarantee peaceful solitude, or unbearable loneliness and isolation? Or perhaps the woods, home to a myriad of potential familiars, infinite source of ingredients for tinctures, philtres, poutices, potions, fetishes, and charms, and sure to be infested by errant heroines bent on quests, and stray princes prone to kidnapping and seduction?
Even once the seemingly insurmountable task of choosing an appropriate location is complete, there is the plethora of building material to consider—shadow, birch, gingerbread, stone, steel, bone. Any one of these might be coaxed into fabulous shapes by a skilled witch, but consider this also: the custom of foot-binding in ancient China; the over-breeding of certain dogs for faces so flat they can scarcely breathe without choking to death on each sip of air. Think how you would feel if your limbs were shattered and set anew in fresh and aesthetically pleasing angles, removed and re-stitched in different configurations. Think if your hair was always bound in braids wound clockwise around your head, if you were always made to stand with your nose pointing to the west rather than the east.
Please don’t mistake us. This is not to suggest that no house grown with care can ever be happy, only to caution the intrepid witch who sets out on this path that houses are also willful things. Location matters, but so do feelings, and yours are not the only ones you must take into consideration when raising your house.
Section 4: Taming
Do you remember when you first became a witch? When you unbound your hair or began braiding it in ever-more elaborate and intricate knots, each twist and curl a precisely placed word in the spell you’d been rehearsing silently all your life, but never had the courage to speak aloud? Do you remember when you abandoned your family—left your wife, your mother, your uncle, your sister, and the twins with their crooked smiles and lightning-scorched eyes? When you stopped shaving your legs or started for the first time? When your stretched lips bared your teeth instead of grinning and you learned to run under the moon?
Or was it when you first started to bleed or you finally stopped? When you woke with fire inside you, setting your whole body aglow. Did your bones crack and turn inside your skin? Did you step off a cliff, in front of a train, or from a building when you first learned you could fly? Did they burn you in the road, dig you up, cut out your heart when they learned? Did they hang you and spit on you and drive nails through your feet and into the ground to keep you in your place?
Whatever the truth of it may be, keep it in your mind and in your heart when you embark upon the taming of your house, if that is the method you choose. Open your skin so the house may see these truths written on your bones. Hold them like a sliver of glass on your tongue to remind yourself not to speak. Be still and be silent. Stitch your eyes closed, sit upon the ground with your palms up, your hands open, your hair undone. Learn to hold your breath for seven days.
Do not go to the house. Let the house come to you.
When you tame your house, you are not merely catching a wild thing. You are calling to the house beneath the house and letting it know that it is safe to be whatever it has most yearned to be beneath its skin.
When your house reveals itself to you at last, do not judge it. It is not for you to choose who your house needs to be.
A hut may learn to grow chicken legs and run away to be by your side. A bungalow may be a castle beneath its bricks and aluminum siding. A townhouse may sever itself from its neighbors (a most unpleasant and painful process) and go walk about, grow a root cellar, sprout towers and bowling alleys, ballrooms and carriageways. A mansion may shed its three-car garage and go about wearing its basement game room on its head for all to see. Do. Not. Judge.
A house may be many things before it settles into its final form. Think of these early days as a courtship period. Discuss the weather, local sports teams, your favorite song. Do not bring out paint chips or flooring samples. Do not bring up window treatments, dry rot, or the need for new grout. Do not mention the cracks in her walkway, the creak in his fifth step, the draft that always creeps in through their upstairs window, no matter how tightly it is closed.
Find things that are mutually agreeable. Learn your common ground. You may be surprised and delighted to discover you would both dearly love a feeder in the backyard, filled with peanuts to attract blue jays.
The house is not your antagonist in this process. It is also not your friend. You are each working toward an abstract point in your future, one that may never come to pass. Gain its trust, let it win yours. Accept that you will break its heart one day and be open to having yours broken in return. Prove yourself worthy and make it do the same. Become responsible for one another, because that it what taming something means.
You and your house will be wrapped around each other’s hearts from the moment you walk in the door; the threshold is the bride and vice versa. The house may let you live inside it, but it will live inside you as well: an infinite series of nesting dolls, witch inside house inside witch, growing smaller and smaller until where one begins and the other ends is virtually indistinguishable, even on a sub-atomic level.
Section 5: Breeding and Growing
This method is not recommended.
Many a witch has made the mistake of believing growing or breeding a house to be simply a matter of degrees of separation based on our other methods, a more advanced form of building or taming. They are not the same at all.
Houses are capricious things. Breeding introduces variables on multiple levels, some not immediately (or ever) observable. The most obvious variables (read risks) are recessive genes for weak foundations, a tendency to flooding, or being picked up by tornados and transported to magical lands. Your house may have to live with chronic pain or under the constant threat of an early death due to some great-grand-ancestor you weren’t aware of.
Furthermore, breeding a house takes a strong constitution, and the utmost hard-heartedness from a witch. Consider carefully—could you drive iron nails through the skin of a child you held in your arms, even if it was for the child’s own good? Could you lathe its uneven surfaces, replace windows cracked and shingles warped, siding gone out of fashion? Will you be able, when push comes to shove, to look your house in the eye and make these changes, thereby letting your child know you think of it as anything other than perfect?
Another point to consider for the witch who wishes to breed a house: the temperament of a house may not be assumed based on the pedigree of its parents. Carelessly bred houses have been known to turn on their occupants, splinter, snag, or shift at inopportune times. Stairs have been known to loosen when you are only halfway down, your arms full of laundry, and unable to see where your foot will land next. Doors have been known to slam before you are all the way through. In some extreme cases, floorboards have been known to give way completely, dropping an unsuspecting witch into a previously nonexistent basement level and swallowing them whole.
Genetics are a crapshoot and nature is only half the battle where raising houses is concerned. Remember: a house may be coaxed to lie with a chicken; an egg may be persuaded to grow rooms within the delicacy of its shell, but walking like a chicken and roosting like a house does not a Baba Yaga’s hut make.
The factors mentioned above are only the risks that are most obvious on the surface of the thing. Even savvy witches rare
ly take into account the feelings of the breeding stock when embarking on the endeavor of bringing a brand-new house into the world. There is the potential for resentment or even outright loathing. Termites poured down a chimney, shattered dormer windows, and entire floors thrown off level as tempers rise. Worse still is the opposite reaction, deep and abiding passion growing between the two donor houses. A wild and torrential love affair can be every bit as destructive as a relationship built on mutual hate, if not more so.
There is, of course, the possibility of splicing, grafting, cloning, and in-vitro fertilization. The less said about these, the better. The unwary witch will soon learn that science is every bit as volatile as magic, with results just as disastrous. For a relevant example, see the case of the Stuartville Coven Frankenhouse, which went on a rampage, killing three members of the coven and six innocent civilians before it was brought to heel, unable to reconcile the disparate parts of itself—splitlevel, shotgun, and ranch—and maddened by the resulting pain.
Which brings us to the option of growth, which is equally inadvisable. There was a witch in Cambridge, MA, let us call her Jane Scribe, who cut off the tip of her finger and buried it deep in the soil. She coaxed the most amazing shapes out of the resultant tree, and her house was a thing of beauty to behold. However, it was only once she had grown delicate arches, spiraling staircases, fantastic chandeliers, and countless rooms like a many-chambered heart that she realized the folly of her ways.
You see, her finger remained a part of her body, even severed, and her body had no desire to be a house. For as long as she dwelt between the walls she had grown, she suffered fits of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and mind/body disassociation.
Often, on turning a corner, she would come face-to-face with herself, her haunted visage peering out at her from an odd angle between one wall and the next. She was prone to uncontrollable shuddering after even a simple stroll from bedroom to bathroom, haunted by the sensation of her own bare feet walking over her own bare skin. Jane is the primary reason we undertook the third volume in our Practical Guide Series, in specific, the section on Banishment and Dissolution.
Conclusion
In the end, every witch will decide for themselves upon the method of home acquisition that is right for them. As with most matters in life, it is up to the gut, the blood and sinew and bones of a person, not the head. Whichever method you choose, proceed with caution and discretion. Remember: witches have been burned, shot, hanged, and mutilated for lesser offenses than home ownership throughout the course of human history.
Last but not least, don’t forget to visit our website for additional safety tips. And don’t forget to purchase our companion volumes should something go wrong with your new home, which it inevitably will.
THE TALLEST DOLL
IN NEW YORK CITY
Maria Dahvana Headley
Maria Dahvana Headley is a New York Times best-selling author, editor, playwright, and screenwriter. She is the author of four novels and a memoir, and the co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures with Neil Gaiman. Her best-selling debut young adult novel, Magonia, was published in 2015 by HarperCollins and made the Publishers Weekly Best Books list. Her latest book, The Mere Wife, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her short stories have been finalists for the Shirley Jackson and Nebula awards and have appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Shimmer.
“The Tallest Doll in New York City” is a fanciful tale of the inner and outer lives of buildings.
On a particular snowy Monday in February, at 5:02 p.m., I’m sixty-six flights above the corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-Second, looking down at streets swarming with hats and jackets. All the guys who work in midtown are spit into the frozen city, hunting sugar for the dolls they’re trying to muddle from sour into sweet.
From up here I can see Lex fogged with cheap cologne, every citizen clutching his heart-shaped box wrapped in cellophane, red as the devil’s drawers.
If you happen to be a waiter at the Cloud Club, you know five’s the hour when a guy’s nerves start to fray. This calendar square’s worse than most. Every man on our member list is suffering the Saint Valentine’s Cramp, and me and the crew up here are ready with a stocked bar. I’m in my Cloud Club uniform, the pocket embroidered with my name in the Chrysler’s trademark typeface, swooping like a skid mark on a lonely road in Montana. Over my arm I’ve got a clean towel, and in my vest I have an assortment of aspirins and plasters in case a citizen shows up already bleeding or broken-nosed from an encounter with a lady lovenot.
Later tonight, it’ll be the members’ doll dinner, the one night a year we allow women into the private dining room. Valorous Victor, captain of the wait, pours us each a preparatory coupe. There are ice-cream sculptures shaped like Cupid in the walk-in. Each gal gets a corsage the moment she enters, the roses from Valorous Victor’s brother’s hothouse in Jersey. At least two dolls are in line for wife, and we’ve got their guy’s rings here ready and waiting, to drop into champagne in one case and wedge into an oyster in another. Odds in the kitchen have the diamond in that particular ring consisting of a pretty piece of paste.
Down below, it’s 1938, and things are not as prime as they are up here. Our members are the richest men left standing; their wives at home in Greenwich, their mistresses movie starlets with porcelain teeth. Me, I’m single. I’ve got a mother with rules strict as Sing Sing, and a sister with a face pretty as the Sistine’s ceiling. My sister needs protecting from all the guys in the world, and so I live in Brooklyn, man of my mother’s house, until I can find a wife or die waiting.
The members start coming in, and each guy gets led to his locker. Our members are the rulers of the world. They make automobiles and build skyscrapers, but none as tall as the one we’re standing in right now. The Cloud Club’s been open since before the building got her spire, and the waitstaff in a Member’s Own knows things even a man’s miss doesn’t. During Prohibition, we install each of the carved wood lockers at the Cloud Club with a hieroglyphic identification code straight out of ancient Egypt, so our members can keep their bottles safe and sound. Valorous Victor dazzles the police more than once with his rambling explanation of cryptographic complexities, and finally the blue boys just take a drink and call it done. No copper’s going to Rosetta our rigmarole.
I’m at the bar mixing a Horse’s Neck for Mr. Condé Nast, but I’ve got my eye on the mass of members staggering out of the elevators with fur coats, necklaces, and parcels of cling & linger, when, at 5:28 p.m. precisely, the Chrysler Building steps off her foundation and goes for a walk.
There is no warning.
She just shakes the snow and pigeons loose from her spire and takes off, sashaying southwest. This is something even we waiters haven’t experienced before. The Chrysler is 1,046 feet tall, and, until now, she’s seemed stationary. She’s stood motionless on this corner for seven years so far, the gleamiest gal in a million miles.
None of the waitstaff lose their cool. When things go wrong, waiters, the good ones, adjust to the needs of both customers and clubs. In 1932, for example, Valorous himself commences to travel from midtown to Ellis Island in order to deliver a pistol to one of our members, a guy who happens to have a grievance against a brand-new American in line for a name. Two slugs and a snick later, Victor’s in surgery beneath the gaze of the Verdigris Virgin. Still, he returns to Manhattan in time for the evening napkin twist.
“The Chrysler’s just taking a little stroll, sirs,” Valorous announces from the stage. “No need to panic. This round is on me and the waiters of the Cloud Club.”
Foreseeably, there is, in fact, some panic. To some of our members, this event appears to be more horrifying than Black Tuesday.
Mr. Nast sprints to the men’s room with motion sickness, and The Soother, our man on staff for problems of the heart and guts, tails him with a tall glass of ginger ale. I decide to drink Nast’s Horse’s Neck myself. Nerves on the mend,
I consider whether any of our members on sixty-seven and sixty-eight might possibly need drinks, but I see Victor’s already sending an expedition to the stairs.
I take myself to the windows. In the streets, people gawp and yawp and holler, and taxis honk their horns. Gals pick their way through icy puddles, and guys stand in paralysis, looking up.
We joke about working in the body of the best broad in New York City, but historically, no one on the waitstaff ever thinks that the Chrysler might have a will of her own. She’s beautiful, what with her multistory crown, her skin pale blue in daylight and rose-colored with city lights at night. Her gown’s printed with arcs and swoops, and beaded with tiny drops of General Electric.
We know her inside out, or we think we do. We go up and down her stairs when her elevators are broken, looking out her triangular windows on the hottest day of summer. The ones at the top don’t have panes, because the wind up there can kick up a field goal even when its breezeless down below, and the updrafts can grab a bird and fling it through the building like it’s nothing. The Chrysler’s officially seventy-seven floors, but she actually has eighty-four levels. They get smaller and smaller until, at eighty-three, there’s only a platform the size of a picnic table, surrounded by windows; and, above that, a trapdoor and a ladder into the spire, where the lightning rod is. The top floors are tempting. Me and The Soother take ourselves up to the very top one sultry August night, knees and ropes, and she sways beneath us, but holds steady. Inside the spire, there’s space for one guy to stand encased in metal, feeling the earth move.
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