by A. G. Mayes
“Josh, I…” I paused for a minute. “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye.” It sounded lame when I said it. He looked at me expectantly. “And I’m sorry I haven’t kept in touch better. It’s been so crazy around here.”
I didn’t even know where to begin with his other confessions. There had been a time a few years ago when I thought about him that way. I’d even tried to flirt with him and hang out with him more than usual, but shortly after I began to have those feelings, he began dating a woman his sister set him up with. It was serious for a while, and I moved on too. I hadn’t really thought about it since then.
I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned, and it was Lena.
“I hate to interrupt, but we have to get going,” she said with a polite nod towards Josh.
“We?” I asked.
“I’m Lena,” she stuck her hand out towards Josh.
“Nice to meet you, Lena. I’m Josh.” He shook her hand. “I’m a friend of Susie’s from back home.”
She looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“So, we need to get going, huh?” I said.
“Right, yes,” she said.
“Bye Josh. I’ll call you later.” I followed Lena inside trying to ignore the guilty feeling in the pit of my stomach when I looked over my shoulder and saw him watching me go.
The chatter inside the pie shop stopped immediately when I came through the door. No doubt they were all talking about me. I ignored them and went back to the kitchen.
“I’m coming too,” Lena burst into the kitchen carrying her large yellow purse.
“Now, Lena,” Aunt Erma began in a tone I knew meant she was about to try and talk her out of it.
“Don’t you start with me, Erma. There’s room in the car for one more. I’ll drive.” So that’s how I ended up in the backseat of Lena’s car clinging to the handle by the window with one hand and gripping the blue velvet seat with the other. Speed limits were merely a suggestion in Lena’s world. I swear as we rounded the corners, the car tipped up on two wheels. When I said this out loud, Lena told me to stop being so dramatic.
“You’ll thank me when we get there and get this taken care of quickly,” she said, speeding up as the light in front of us changed from green to yellow.
“Here, eat this,” Aunt Erma passed a small square to me, and Lena popped one into her own mouth. I inspected the square before eating it. It was white with little green flecks in it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It will protect you,” Aunt Erma answered.
“From what, a car accident?” I asked.
“The magic.”
I took a tentative bite. It tasted like salt water taffy, so I put the rest in my mouth and chewed. I always expected to hear wind chimes when I ate something magical, but to this date that had not happened.
In between muttering wishes for a safe arrival, I thought about what Josh had said. Henry and I were having such a wonderful time, but Josh and I went way back. He was comfortable in a way that only someone you’ve known a long time can be. He was like a thick warm comforter. But then with Henry there was a spark. People always said the spark doesn’t last forever — that you need more in your relationship besides electricity. But the spark sure felt good right now. Maybe it would develop into the comfortable relationship I had with Josh. Maybe it would be even better. Plus, Henry knew about magic. There was a whole part of my new life that I wasn’t sure if I could share with Josh. The people of Hocus Hills are very private about their magic, and I certainly don’t blame them. You never know who you can trust, and if word got out that there were magic people in the world, there would be chaos.
We squealed into a parking spot on the street at the edge of town. I still wasn’t any closer to figuring out my love life, and it didn’t seem like the time to ask Lena and Aunt Erma for advice.
“We should walk in so we can sneak up on what’s happening. Get a feel for what we’re getting into,” Aunt Erma suggested.
“Everyone take note of where we parked in case we get separated,” Lena pointed to the street signs on the corner. My stomach flipped. In case we get separated? That thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.
The streets were deserted. It was Saturday. Most towns would have people coming and going from the shops. We peeked into the window of a bakery. A bakery on a Saturday should have people buying their bread and donuts, but it was empty.
We kept going down the street. We walked close together, and I resisted the urge to reach out and grab Aunt Erma’s hand for protection.
Everywhere was deserted. It was spooky. It was like every horror movie I’d ever seen, but even more surreal because it was real life. I kept looking around expecting a tumble weed to roll down the street.
“Where is everyone?” I whispered as we neared the center of town. The layout was similar to Hocus Hills except their town square was a little smaller, and there was a duck pond near the gazebo.
Lena shrugged.
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good,” Aunt Erma said.
I stopped in my tracks. “I hear something,” I said. They both stopped, and I held my breath as we listened. There was a sound coming from the church.
“We need more yarn,” we heard a deep voice yell. The church was a large white wooden building with steps leading up to a set of dark wood double doors. We crept up the steps, and Lena pushed the door open a crack. She peaked inside.
“I think we found everyone,” she said pushing the door the rest of the way open.
The church was jam packed with people of all ages. It was a flurry of activity, but I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. Some people were rushing around the room picking up balls of yarn and moving them from one pew to another. Several people were knitting. Knitting? I noticed a large red circle in the middle that they were all working around.
“What are they making?” Lena wondered aloud.
“A mitten,” a man with an armload of knitting needles yelled as he rushed past us.
“The world’s largest,” one of the women who was knitting called.
“Why are they doing that?” I asked. I almost felt dizzy from the frenzy around us. This seemed like more than just a quirky small-town activity.
“It must be part of the spell,” Aunt Erma said.
“But why?” I asked. It seemed like such a strange activity, and not at all in line with their ultimate goal.
“It’s probably an accident,” Aunt Erma said. “They’re too power hungry to focus on getting the spell right. They’re frenzied as they alter the spices. It’s very hard to get the intention right — takes a lot of finesse. They were probably trying to hit a kitten or flit off to Britain and somehow it came out to knit a mitten. That’s why you should always keep it simple.” She was speaking to me now. I nodded as I looked around at the chaos. I certainly didn’t ever want this to happen.
“How are we going to break the spell?” Lena asked, jumping out of the way of a frenzied boy who was chasing the armload of yarn balls he had just dropped as they rolled across the floor.
“Do we need to break it?” I asked, looking around. I mean, what they were doing was crazy, but it didn’t seem to be harmful. Unless they started capturing people inside the giant mitten once they finished knitting it.
“It could be dangerous to leave them like this. They won’t be able to stop until they’ve finished no matter how tired they are, and some of them could actually work themselves to death,” Aunt Erma said. OK, that sounded bad. She was surveying the scene intently.
“I’m going to need a kitchen to get the job done,” she said. “Unless,” she turned to Lena, “Do you have anything?”
“I told you you’d need me,” she said as she fished around in her yellow purse. She set it on the floor, and her whole head disappeared as she leaned into it. I was tempted to grab her feet, so she wouldn’t fall. I didn’t know what exactly was inside there. I had asked her once how the magic purse worked.
“Oh no, dear, I coul
dn’t tell you that. Your aunt may be ready to divulge all of her secrets, but I like to keep one or two up my sleeve,” she had said.
“Ah yes, here it is,” her muffled voice emerged from the purse a second before she did. She triumphantly held up an Erma’s Pie box.
“You keep a pie in there?” I asked.
“You never know when you’ll need one,” she said. “Impromptu dinner party, afternoon snack, to stop crazed knitters.”
Aunt Erma took the box from Lena and opened the lid. She took a deep breath.
“The triple berry. Yes, this one should work. The unaltered spices will counteract the altered spices they used,” she said. “They’re not all going to eat willingly. We’re going to have to coax them.”
Lena did some more digging in her purse and emerged with three plates, three forks, and a knife. We divided the pie. I watched Aunt Erma approach a young man who was knitting and offer him a bite of pie. He shook his head vehemently, his sandy brown hair flopping across his face. Without missing a beat, Aunt Erma shoved a bite into his mouth. His eyes widened so much I thought they might pop out of his head. He chewed and swallowed all the while making, “Mmmm,” noises. Then his face changed. His brow furrowed, and he looked around.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lena said. “You’re just having a strange dream. Go home.”
The man shrugged and shuffled off.
“Alright everyone, understand the plan?” Aunt Erma asked.
Lena and I nodded. Then we all set off shoving small bites of pie into people’s mouths. Most people I encountered were easily convinced to take a bite. They were probably hungry after all this knitting. The church began to clear out as people wandered back home.
“Aren’t they all going to talk and figure out they had the same strange dream?” I asked Lena as I airplaned a bite into a young girl’s mouth. Lena did the same with the girl’s mother. The girl dropped the yarn ball she had been winding up and followed her mother out the door.
“Most of them will have forgotten about this completely by tomorrow. Only a few will have a distant memory of this strange dream,” she said. “It won’t be enough for them to put it together that it actually did happen.”
“Some of them might be a little sore tomorrow from all the work,” Aunt Erma said as she ran past, chasing a man with gray hair and thick glasses. The man threw a ball of yarn at Aunt Erma, and she tackled him and shoved the bite of pie into his mouth before he could stop her.
It wasn’t easy, and I was bit at least six times, but we finally cleared the church of all frantic knitters. I leaned against the wall and began planning which pajamas I was going to wear, the footy pajamas with the turtle print, and what I was going to eat, pizza with three sides of pie.
“We have to get all this out of here,” Aunt Erma motioned to the giant knitted circle that was apparently on its way to becoming the largest mitten in the world.
“Why?” I asked. I didn’t want anything to keep me from that pizza any longer than necessary.
“It’s a lot harder to convince people it was a dream when they can come to the church and find two tons of yarn and a knitted circle as large as a parachute.
After we’d cleared everything, dispersing some of it and shoving the rest of it into the back of Lena’s car, we headed back to Hocus Hills.
“What are those?” As we pulled into Hocus Hills, I pointed at a light pole plastered with sheets of paper.
“I’m not sure.” Lena slowed the car down. Aunt Erma finished reading first and gasped.
In big bold letters, the signs said, “Tired of hiding? It’s time to work for the Improvement for Magical People. If you’re ready to step out of the shadows, stay tuned for more information from the IMPs.” The flyers were plastered all over town.
“It was all a circus. They just wanted to get you out of town, so you couldn’t stop them from doing this,” Lena practically yelled.
Aunt Erma let her head fall to the back of the seat. “I don’t know why we didn’t see that before,” she sighed.
A crew led by Violet was already pulling posters down.
“We were so focused on what you guys were doing, that we didn’t even see this happen until it was too late,” she said. “They worked fast. It was done in a matter of seconds.”
Aunt Erma’s brow furrowed. “Their magic is getting stronger.”
“I know. The regular spells aren’t working to clean it up, so we’re doing it the non-magic way,” Violet said.
I grabbed a bag and went to work pulling signs off the light poles and the sides of some buildings.
“Hey,” Holly appeared by my side. “I heard you had some hunky curly haired stranger show up today.”
“Hunky?” I asked.
“My mother’s words, not mine,” she said.
“How did she see him?”
“Nadine texted her a picture,” she said as though the answer was obvious.
“What?!”
“I forgot you’re still new to this small town living where everyone knows your business,” she said. “So, what’s the story?”
“Josh is a friend from back home,” I said evasively. I quickly asked her about the latest book she was writing, and she was off telling me how she wasn’t sure if she should kill off one of her favorite characters or not. I was off the hook for now, but at the end of the clean-up, we made plans for a girls’ night out on Friday, and I knew there would be more questions then.
Later that night I was wrapped in my very large new red knitted blanket watching television when Henry stopped by. I struggled to get out of the cocoon I had wrapped myself in.
“Did everything go OK?” he asked after greeting me with a long hug.
“I didn’t realize magic was such hard work, but yes, it went fine,” I said. I was too tired to give him the details, and I was pretty sure he would have heard them already from someone in town. News spreads fast. Especially the news that you wanted to keep quiet. Just yesterday I heard Mrs. Lansbury yell across the street asking Mr. Kelley about his colonoscopy.
“Anything interesting happen before you saved the world?” his tone was strange, like he was trying to stay super casual, but his voice was too high and too tight.
“Oh yeah,” I said, also trying to keep my tone casual as though I was just remembering something that I’d actually been thinking about all day. “A friend of mine from back home stopped by.”
“Really?” he tried to sound surprised, but his acting wasn’t that good.
“Yeah, we were coworkers. He came to say hi.” I shrugged in what I hoped was a casual gesture.
“That’s an awful long way to come to say hi,” he said.
“He’s working on a job in Mavisville for a couple of weeks,” I said.
Just then Aunt Erma bustled in. “Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt. Henry, how are you?”
Aunt Erma’s arrival saved me from an awkward conversation. Her glance out of the corner of her eye told me she knew exactly what she was doing.
Henry left after a little more small talk. He said he had some work to finish. I was the only person in town, other than his editor, who knew that he wrote the “Ask Elodie” advice column in the newspaper. I had asked him once if all the letters were sent in from people in town. He said some of them were, but some days there weren’t any letters, so he would make up letters and then answer them as Elodie. “So, you set up a problem you know you can answer?” I had teased him. Then I began to quiz him about which ones he had written. “I’m not going to ruin the magic for you by giving away all the secrets,” he’d said.
I felt bad for not telling him more about Josh, but I wanted to be able to process it more myself first. I hadn’t figured out how to present the facts because I hadn’t figured out how I felt about the whole thing.
The truth would come out eventually though.
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Acknowledgements
This book began with one page. One page over and over and over. Without Char Torkelson’s unending patience and encouragement, I might still be writing that first page. Thank you!
I’m so lucky to be a part of a fabulous Monday night writing group. Thank you Marilyn, Anne, Fay, Patty, Margie, Susan, Charissa, and Ruth. I love you all, and appreciate your feedback and weekly doses of inspiration and support (and for laughing in all the right places).
I’m very grateful for all the wonderful teachers and critique partners I’ve had, especially Mrs. Dunbar for creating a magical world in a second grade classroom (and Molly for living in that world with me) and Mary, Maureen, and Mary for reading and commenting on chapters of this book and helping me grow as a writer.
Thank you to the Harper Impulse team for making my publishing dreams come true, and Charlotte Ledger for making this happen and being an absolutely amazing editor!
I’m blessed with wonderful cousins! A special thank you to Lisa who helped me visualize and create my dreams over cups of tea, and Sarah who listened to and believed in my dreams over glasses of wine.
Thank you to my grandma, Jean, who was one of the first people to read the book. She called me up to give me my first glowing review. I will remember every word for the rest of my life.
Thank you to my husband, Chris, for always answering my questions no matter what he was doing or how bizarre the question was. Love you!
Me: Can I drop all of our plates on the floor so I can hear what it sounds like?
Him: Yes.
Me: Can I start a fire in the kitchen to see if I can put it out?
Him: No.
Me: Just a little one.
Him: No!
Me: But I’ll keep the fire extinguisher…
Him: NO!
Thank you to my brother, Daniel! When we’re not competing to be Mom and Dad’s favorite child, you’re pretty supportive.
How do I even begin to thank my parents, Richard and Sheila? You guys believed in me from the start and kept me caffeinated enough to make it happen. I love you guys!
A Slice of Magic