by Lynn Red
“What have you been doing with all those frog eyes and lichens I’ve been bringing you?” Jenga asked out of nowhere. “Some kind of evil magic?”
Leota scoffed and opened her eyes wider in an angry glare. “How dare you, Mr. Cranston! To come into my own home and accuse me of using evil magic. Why, I never... I’ve never heard of such rudeness, I—”
He smiled and scrunched his nose into a confused look. Then, he began to chew. “Oh, must’ve been stuck back there,” he said. “What were you saying? So it isn’t an evil potion?”
“Most certainly not!”
Jenga looked at Leota for a moment, trying to digest what had just happened. Why’d she suddenly gotten so angry? It couldn’t have been that he mentioned evil magic – after all, she was notoriously the crankiest of all the witches in the Jamesburg coven.
“Did I say somethin’ wrong?” he finally asked, deciding to take the direct route. He’d never been very good at reading minds, no matter how much of an expert he was at talking people out of their money. “You seem all bent outta shape.”
“The insinuation that I – a highly respected natural magic practitioner would,” Leota was just about to get really ramped up when she was interrupted by a very fresh smelling zombie shambling toward her momentarily forgotten cauldron.
“Jenga!” she shouted. “Retract your zombie! He’s—”
“Leota,” Jenga said, infuriatingly slow. “He’s not a zombie. Not really. Atlas is a re-animated, improved version of—”
“He is drinking my potion!” She was gawking. Leota never gawked.
“He’s... what?” Jenga turned to see what all the fuss was over.
Sure enough, Atlas had picked up the boiling cauldron, completely unaffected by how it was burning his hands.
“That’s... that’s my test batch!” Leota cried. “Atlas! No! Bad boy! No!”
“He ain’t a dog,” Jenga said. “Atlas, put that down! You don’t know where it’s been!”
The huge bear licked his lips and took a deep breath. “Mmm,” he groaned. His voice, low and rumbling, filled the entire house. “Good.”
“Atlas! Don’t drink that!” Jenga yelled, hobbling across the house and grabbing his zombie friend’s arm.
But, neither that, nor Leota’s increasingly raspy screeching, was going to keep the big bear from his prize. Slowly, he let his grin open and he lifted the cauldron.
As the liquid went down his throat, down his chest, and down either side of his huge head, the groan that Atlas made got louder and louder. He lowered the pot, smiling still, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then let out a contented sigh.
Leota and Jenga both froze, just watching and waiting.
“What, uh, was that?” Jenga asked, breaking the moments-long silence. “Is he gonna turn into a newt? Or a birthday cake? I’d really like a birthday cake. But I wouldn’t trade Atlas for one. He’s too good of a friend.”
Jenga let out a long, rattling cackle. “You are too, Leota,” he said, clapping her on the back and surprising the old witch. “You’re a good friend. I’m so glad you’re right down the way from me. I don’t know what I’d do without our visits. Don’t you enjoy them too? Say,” Jenga finally took a breath as he went to Leota’s kitchen. “Want some tea? I can put on a pot.”
“STOP IT!” she shouted. “Stop! No tea, no biscuits, no nothing!”
Leota’s eyes were so wide open they looked like bloodshot plates. “He drank my test batch!”
“Yes,” Jenga said. “But what was it? Why does it matter so much?”
“You have no idea how much that cost,” she replied. “Ten thousand... no seventy, eighty... I’ve lost count. But it’s a huge number. All lost, unless—”
“Pardon,” Atlas said, surprising himself with his own strangely accented voice. “Would it be possible for me to have a bit of tea and possibly some cake? I’m famished.” He was still speaking slowly, but there was something British about his voice. Very proper, anyway.
Jenga’s mouth fell open, his beard jingling against his chest. The bone in his nose wobbled.
“Atlas? Are you okay?”
The zombie bear coughed, slowly of course, but lifted his hand, covering his mouth. “Excuse me,” he said. With every strange motion, every alien-sounding word, Atlas looked more and more confused.
Leota, on the other hand, looked happier and happier.
“Tea!” she said. “He wants tea! The zombie wants tea! He’s... oh, oh my goodness!”
Jenga shook his head. “From furious to excited. Confusin’ as all hell, the ways of womankind.” He and Atlas exchanged a perplexed glance. The big bear touched his chest tentatively.
“I’m not sure that’s so polite, Jenga,” he said. “After all, we’re guests in her house. Shouldn’t we be more considerate?”
By this point, Atlas looked absolutely terrified. His eyes were wide open, and getting bigger every time he talked or made some gesture that would have been at home at Downton Abbey, but absolutely not on a seven foot tall bear.
“What’s happened to him, Leota?” Jenga asked. “He looks scared as all hell, and he’s... well he obviously ain’t himself.”
Just then, the old witch appeared from the kitchen, carrying a tray full of shortbread cookies, and impossibly delicate cups of tea. There was a beautifully inlaid Bone China pot in the center of three cups.
Jenga wasn’t sure if Atlas had ever even smelled tea. At least, he’d never smelled tea that didn’t come from swamp fungus.
“How do you take it?” Leota asked. “Sugar? Milk?”
Atlas cleared his throat, once again covering his mouth. “I, um, well,” Leota sensed his discomfort and poured it for him.
“Try it regular, with nothing in it. That’s how I like it,” she said.
She and Jenga both watched in great anticipation as Atlas pinched the tiny cup between his thumb and forefinger, stuck out his pinky, and lifted the cup to his lips.
He took a sip, which turned into a drink which quickly turned into a gulp.
The huge, stitched up werebear smiled, and then suddenly the corners of his eyes relaxed back to their normal slackness. At first, Atlas’s mouth hung just a bit more open than it was a few seconds before. Before Jenga’s eyes, his friend was becoming himself again.
His mouth fell open. A long, lovable tendril of drool ran down his chin. Atlas let his eyes fall halfway shut, and he slouched into very poor posture.
Leota stared, completely beside herself.
Atlas’s smile spread from ear to ear. He was back to normal, just like that.
Leota and Jenga looked from one another to the now very-pleased werebear.
“Atlas! No!” Jenga shouted, as Atlas lifted the teacup back to his mouth, opened wide, and bit the cup off at the handle.
He chewed, smiled, and swallowed. Then, very happy with himself, Atlas patted his stomach. A moment later, he reached for another tea cup, the one Leota had filled for herself, and swallowed the whole thing at once, gulping it down like a tea-filled bonbon. Made out of Bone China.
“Atlas... you’re... Leota, he’s eating... your... uh...”
Jenga was just panicking. Atlas gobbled up the third teacup, and then took a bite out of the pot. Slowly, the zombie ground the intricate, beautiful pot in his massive jaws, and swallowed. Jenga’s lips began to tremble as he thought about how much he owed his witchy friend for her tea set.
He chanced a glance over at Leota, who was, to Jenga’s surprise, beaming.
“Why are you not madder than a possum in a hornet’s nest?” he asked.
Atlas burped.
“It works!” Leota said. She was positively bouncing from toe to toe. “The potion! It works!”
She grabbed Jenga’s hands and turned him in a rickety circle.
“Good!” he joined in, laughing and doing his best to hop from foot to foot. “I’m so happy for you! But... what is it? What worked? Your potion makes people like tea?”
Instea
d of answering, Leota just handed Jenga her notebook. He cleared his throat and squinted. “Paulina’s Properizing Potion – one dash will make even the naughtiest... Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “Who are you using this on?”
“Jasmine, of course,” Leota said as a grim smile stretched across her lips. “She’ll either behave... or I’ll make her behave. She’s well on her way to a life of lascivious promiscuity if I don’t help her!”
Her vile cackling filled the house, echoed through the woods outside. Jenga joined in, but he wasn’t really sure why – he just loved laughing.
Atlas took a big, healthy bite of the silver serving plate, chewed, swallowed, and let out another belch.
Down the road, in a very large tree nestled between Leota’s house and Jenga’s, Crazy Mary started laughing too. Hanging upside down from a branch that had pierced her top story window about two hundred years before, she just laughed and laughed.
She wasn’t quite sure why, but what did it matter? Mary was, after all, crazy.
-11-
Violet
I had just finished binge-watching season three of Star Trek and thinking quietly-out-loud to myself about how hot Jean-Luc Picard was when I got the sudden overwhelming urge to get a drink.
Not like going out to a bar – hell, it was almost ten-thirty at night, I’m not some kind of psychopath – but I just needed a drink.
Maybe it was the slightly uncomfortable fluttering sensation that Patrick Stewart put inside the deepest parts of me, or maybe it was that I hadn’t heard from Ash in over a week. I knew he was busy, that he was on the road and doing his fighting thing... but for some reason, I thought – more like wished and hoped – that he’d at least call or something.
“Jeez,” I chided myself as I poured an extremely healthy serving of Malbec and took the first soothing sip. “I sound like a love-sick freshman.” I took a second, and then a third, and before I knew it, that whole glass was gone.
“Why won’t he call me?” I fake whined, not able to keep from grinning at my own silliness. “I wonder if he thinks I have a weird mole. What if he doesn’t like me?”
I stared at the bottle, shrugged, and poured another one. The first sip tasted like wine, instead of Malbec. I was well on my way to drunk-town.
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Henry said.
Jesus! I forgot she was here! I’m a lot worse off than I thought.
She patted me on the shoulder and grabbed her keys off the pegboard by the front door. Underneath us, Mrs. Whipplebottom, my landlady who also loved being my unwanted advice-giver, was vacuuming. She always vacuumed when she was trying to snoop on me. This was made funnier by the fact that in the three years I’d lived above her, the number of times I’d done anything worth snooping on was frighteningly close to zero. The one time I had, it was out in the woods.
That got me giggling, and blushing. Or maybe it was the wine hitting me. Who knows? Who cares? Both of them feel pretty good, especially when you haven’t eaten in six or seven hours.
“You’re a mess, Viola,” Henry said with a grin. “I don’t know the last time I saw you like this, all wiggly and silly.”
I shrugged. “Can’t help it,” I said. “No matter how much I try. He just... I don’t know. It sounds stupid to even say it, but he makes me feel like I’m a little kid again.”
“So I guess that whole thing where you were going to let him chase you, that didn’t pan out?” she asked.
“Hey now, do you see me following him around? I’ve played that game with Reid, with...” I shook my head. “Anyway, I’ve played that game. This one has to come to me. I made up my mind, and I’m sticking to it.”
“Say one thing for him,” Henry said. “He must know how to treat you. After Reid, I didn’t know if you’d ever be back to your bubbly, foxy, old self. The things he said, he...”
I swallowed hard. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know why, but I felt the same way. I thought that particular hole was one I wasn’t ever gonna dig my way out of. I kinda just gave up, I guess.”
Henry grabbed my glass and took a swig. After a second of watching me, she let out a sigh. “That’s kind of the old adage, isn’t it? Love comes when you’re not looking? Something like that anyway.”
I snickered. “Yeah, I’m sure it does,” I said.
“Oh shut up!” Henry was laughing and turning red before I could react. “Anyway, you know what I mean. You were on that ridiculous date with that guy... what was his name?”
“Eustace,” I said. “Or, no... wait. That was the name you thought was his real name, but it wasn’t. He told me, but...”
Henry’s shoulders were shaking, she was working so hard at keeping in the laughter. It worked for about a half a second, and then we were both hooting, honking messes. About five seconds after that, Mrs. Whipplebottom started banging on her ceiling – my floor – with the butt end of her broom, and then we both just lost it.
“What the hell would I do without you?” I asked as soon as I was able to start breathing again. “Without the nights like this? I was about to go crazy without hearing from Ash—”
I clapped my hands over my mouth. “I just said that, didn’t I?”
“Ash?” she asked. “You’ve got two bears after you?”
I laughed. “No, no, that’s his actual name. The Crag bit is...”
“Oh is it that thing where bears have their real name, and then the nickname their family calls them and all that? It’s crazy how many rules there are around this place, and how we manage to all get along, more or less.”
“Ugh,” I said. “I can’t believe I did that. He made this big deal about trusting me enough to tell me his name, and then I go and get two glasses of wine—”
“Calling each of those things a single glass is a little bit of an understatement,” Henry said with a chuckle. “But don’t worry. I’m not going to say anything. To change the subject a little, what’s the ‘fox’ thing? Like bears have all their weird names.”
“You know the weird fox things we do – sleeping in our big, built up tunnel-looking beds.” I took another long drink. “What’s a turtle thing?”
“Oh, I have to think,” Henry said, slowly. She shrugged, also slowly. “Not a whole lot that you don’t know. There’s the thing about us falling over, though.”
“Huh?”
“You know, if one of us falls over on our back, another has to help?”
She stole my glass and took another swig. “I gotta go, had fun tonight. Especially when you forgot I was here and you started talking to yourself like a psycho. See you tomorrow?”
I smiled at her and shook my head. “Yeah, of course. Tomorrow’s Thursday right? So you have Duggan’s classes?”
She nodded. “That’s it. I also have some essays to grade for him, because I always have essays to grade for him.”
“Why does he assign so many?” I asked. I vaguely remembered taking some class with him a few years back that had more homework than all my other ones combined.
“Because he has me to grade them,” Henry said. “I’m about a thousand percent sure that’s the reason. Anyway, yep, class and then sitting in my office watching YouTube corgi videos and pretending I’m grading until someone asks if I want to go out and get a drink. After that I’ll go with them, whoever asks, and wish I didn’t because I won’t have gotten anything done.”
“That’s... oddly specific,” I said.
“It helps to have routines. Keeps me in line.” She slapped me on the shoulder. “See you tomorrow? Get some rest too. You’re starting to get the boyfriend bags.”
“The what?”
“You know – the bags under your eyes. You get them whenever you stay up too much thinking about men. I may or may not know you really well, Viola.”
“Ha! Yeah, yeah, all right. I was going to polish this glass off and hit the hay.” I yawned and stretched my arms above my head. “Anyway, I don’t want a boyfriend. I just want something to take my mind
off the other stuff going on. Ash is a nice guy, and—”
Henry pursed her lips in one of her patented ‘uh-huh, yeah right’ looks. I was getting those a lot lately. “Just be careful,” she said. “Don’t let yourself dream too hard about someone you don’t even know.”
I nodded as she turned and left. I listened to her footsteps quietly descend the stairs. Mrs. Whipplebottom stopped vacuuming. The world was completely at peace.
The world outside my heart, anyway.
Inside? Totally different story. I knew Henry was right – I knew I shouldn’t be falling so hard for this guy. But the way he made me feel, the warmth he put inside me, the fire that felt like it was burning to escape whenever I thought of him – those things were all real, and they were all things I’d never felt before. Not with Reid, not with Lex, not with anybody.
Hell, some of them were things I didn’t even realize I could feel. With a sigh, I double-gulped the wine and put the glass back on my faux granite countertop with a thunk. For a second, I thought about bed, and then I found myself pouring another glass. This one was a little less stout than the last. By the time I was done though, I had a pleasant whirring sensation behind my eyes whenever I closed them.
My cheeks were a little flushed and the world had slowed down. The booze took the edge off of missing the guy I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about, but luckily I hadn’t drunk enough to have a sulfite-induced hangover in the morning.
On the way back to my little makeshift box-bed that I love so much, I was almost fantasizing about how the soft, close walls were going to feel around my tired, achy body. That was the first time in a week that I thought about something other than my wayward bear. I climbed in, and pulled the curtain over my window.
There was a little red halo where the streetlight beat against my hand-sewed drape. I stared at it, hypnotizing myself and thinking about my mom, who made them with me back when I moved out. They were both so proud – my mom about me being able to sew and my dad about me just getting out on my own.