The Flower Bowl Spell

by Olivia Boler

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “What’s what?” Hugo says.

  “Maybe someone’s cell phone.”

  They all shake their heads. Nope, not their phones. Not mine either.

  “All’s I hear is my bro noodling his bass,” Horatio says and starts tapping a pair of drumsticks on his thigh.

  Then I see it. Sitting on the edge of a coffee-stained mug, the hummingbird-winged fairy holds what looks like a silver baby rattle. When he sees that he’s caught my attention, he starts gesticulating, pointing at the door then covering his eyes. Over and over he does this.

  I shake my head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get what?” asks Babs.

  I glance at the members of Arsenic Playground, who are watching me with a tad more interest than before.

  “I don’t get why…why you guys haven’t made a video yet.”

  They all begin to rant and rave: And what? Sell out? Go MTV? Sign their rights away? Never! Ever. Actually, just kidding: they’re going to make a video in the next few weeks and let it go viral on YouTube. They were just waiting for the right director to come along but they’ve found him, a true artiste. On and on they go. I look back at the fairy. He’s gone. But the rattle is there on the table next to the cup. The others couldn’t hear him or the bell sounds. I wonder if I could have heard the fairy if he had tried to talk. Another bell goes off, but this time it really is a cell phone, Tyson’s. He mumbles into it for a bit.

  “That was D.B.” His mates nod. His eyes are hidden behind the sunglasses, but he’s looking towards me. “Yeah Right’s manager. He’s going to be here soon. You should talk to him.”

  I try to make the connection between my interview and the manager of another band, even one as awesome as Yeah Right. I know I should jump at this opportunity, but I feel a queasiness in my belly all of a sudden, and I just want to am-scray.

  “Actually, I’d better get going.” I’ve got enough to fill fifteen hundred words. “I can always email him, right?”

  Tyson shrugs. “Suit yourself.” He looks like he doesn’t care one way or the other, but there’s something pulling at him—I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like he’s amped up on caffeine but trying to remain sleepy. He meets my gaze with a slight turn of his head. Behind the shades, his eyebrows go up. “Goodbye, Memphis.”

  I thank the band and begin packing up. They immediately ignore my presence as if I’ve disappeared. Poof! I get up from my seat and pass the table with the rattle. I don’t think twice about pocketing it.

  As I make my way through the hallway to the front of the club, something stops me. I listen, my eyes searching the dark corners of the backstage area. Shadows loom but none of them move, although I will them to. It’s not the fairy—something bigger. I touch the bell in my sweater pocket and head out the door.

  ****

  As soon as I toss my bag on my desk, Marisol pokes her head around our adjoining cubicle wall. “How’d it go with Ty Belmonte?”

  “You know his name?”

  “I read.” She eyes my cubicle-mate’s menagerie and picks up the baby Jesus from his tiny plastic manger. “So? Did you get the skinny on Cheradon? When do we get to meet her?”

  “We get nothing. Except a stern ass-whupping if I don’t get this in Ned’s inbox by sunup.” I sit down in my chair and push the on button of my computer, which bongs to life. “You know, I used to know Tyson’s younger sister.”

  “Ty Belmonte’s sister? No way!”

  “We were actually pretty good friends.”

  “But not anymore? What happened? She steal your boyfriend?”

  “No. She died.” I look Marisol in the eye.

  “Jesus.” She glances at the baby Christ in her hand, gives him a kiss on the head, and puts him back. “Really? I’m so sorry. How?”

  “In Africa.” I tell myself to just get it out. It’s normal to act sad, a little weird even, over a friend’s death. No one knows what I did. “Gabon. She was working with a European aid agency trying to get food to some out-of-the-way villages. And she got killed.”

  “Shit. I am so, so sorry.” Marisol exclaims some more. My computer is now fully awake so I open a new document and start typing. My friend drifts back to her desk. I stop and pull the rattle out of my bag, putting it next to the plastic crèche. I touch it, hoping for a morsel of information, but it’s clean—wiped of memories.

  Chapter Five

  Every band’s press kit comes with at least one of its CDs, a perk of the job that never fails to give me a bigger-than-it-should thrill, like finding cash on the sidewalk. My bookshelves and floors are piled high with jewel cases and advance copies of books from hopeful, eager musicians and authors. They pray that Ned will see their shiny glimmer of talent and pick them for a story, which will make them famous or, at the least, give their sales a boost. The Golden Gate Planet is just a little freebie rag, but Ned did win a Pulitzer back in the 1980s for his AIDS plague exposé, and he’s been riding that gravy train ever since.

  The Arsenic Playground press kit is sticking out of my bag, and I grab it, ready to listen. I slide their CD into my computer, slip on my headphones, and close my eyes. A mellow guitar strums in my ears, joined by a thrumming bass that I feel in my chest. Then the shimmering clash of the drummer’s cymbals, and finally a voice that starts out husky and low, pitching upwards to a few almost too-high notes and back down into its more natural register. This is Tyson of course. The chorus goes, “Highlight the revolution/Can’t stop the confusion/Into the forest of the night.” I open my eyes and flip over the CD case. The name of the song is “Purify.”

  I rummage through the folder, thumbing aside the usual magazine reviews and headshots until I come to a photo that catches my attention. I pull it out and place it on my keyboard. It’s a photocopy from a People magazine, dated a couple of months ago. The photo is overexposed from copying, but I immediately recognize my pop diva heroine, Cheradon Badler. Her platinum ponytail and glossy, hard-kissed lips are unmistakable. In the photo her arm is hooked into the crook of a man’s elbow. His head is turned away from the camera, but I recognize the side of that nose. It’s the one I just spent lunch with.

  Their free hands are clasped loosely in front of them and they aren’t smiling as they push through a paparazzi embankment of cameras, tape recorders, and shouting faces. The headline reads, Are They or Aren’t They? I scan the caption and the pull quote: “Neither Badler nor Belmonte will confirm or deny the hot rock on her finger is an engagement ring.”

  How could I have missed this? I won’t say I’m obsessed with Yeah Right, but I keep up with the pop gossip, or try to. Clearly I need to consider a subscription to People.

  In the photo, Cheradon Badler’s ring is just a blur, no more than a pinprick of light. Her expression is blank—she just wants to get through the crowd and into whatever movie premiere or restaurant opening they’re going to. I study their hands. Are they just holding onto each other for support or is there something more? I think back to my conversation with him. His aura was so dark, overwhelmingly so. But just underneath the darkness and closest to his body was the faintest rose-tinted gleam.

  ****

  It’s almost seven by the time I’m done with the article. Something that should have taken one hour took three because I had to throw out my first version completely. My second left nothing to be desired in the snarkasm department. I forced myself to read all of the promo materials and listen to my taped conversation with Tyson—pardonnez-moi, I mean Ty—from beginning to end. It was no exercise in futility. I write:

  “We try not to think about success in conventional terms,” says lead guitarist and vocalist Ty Belmonte. He is the heart of Arsenic Playground and a local boy to boot, a graduate of Lowell High School.

  Even if conventional success is not the driving force behind the band, it’s a sweet by-product. Their first album Unhinged was a college radio Top 30 request two years ago, and Bath Tyme has caught the ears of mainstream
listeners as well as those of the producers at MTV. The Playground’s first video, directed by O’Shaz of La Diabla and Yeah Right fame, will debut next month on the “Altie Hour.”

  It goes on. I toss in a few quotes from Babs and the twins and then mention their opening for “glam rocker grrl Cheradon Badler and her band Yeah Right, who enjoy a close working as well as extracurricular relationship with Arsenic Playground’s band members.”

  I email the article to Ned, who is hunched over his keyboard in near darkness, save his desk lamp. The man does not have a life outside of work, and I find this comforting.

  Before leaving the office, I slip the fairy’s rattle into my bag and it falls to the bottom, muffled by all of the stuff—notebooks, water bottle, extra scarf—I carry with me wherever I go.

  ****

  The next day is a dog-walking day, which gives me an opportunity to more or less turn off the hyperdrive of my brain and exercise my other muscles.

  I wish we could have a dog or cat, but Cooper is allergic. This made it easy for me to give up yet another craft habit—the keeping of a Familiar. Still, it’s what I yearn for more than any other part of my old life. For almost one glorious year I was the humble guardian of Rexie, a long-haired miniature dachshund I inherited from one of my clients. But after Cooper moved in, I had to find Rexie new digs. It wasn’t hard to do, what with all the dogs I walk and the dog-lovers I know.

  Ham Sandwich is waiting by his front door as he is every time I turn the key, his tail stump wagging, his leash tangled around his feet. He knows how to pull it down from its peg near the coats with his teeth. I let the geriatric bulldog sniff my hands—he’s pretty blind and deaf—and he licks my fingers and whimpers in ecstatic anticipation of our walk to come.

  Once his leash is attached, I lead him to the truck, which belongs to my boss, Justine. The logo on the side reads Paws in Motion and shows a cartoonish dog walking upright like a human, tongue out, elbows cocked like a competitive marathon walker. Justine has walked dogs since time immemorial. It’s possible she invented the occupations of dog walking and pet-sitting. We met at my neighborhood park and she saw me lurking on the periphery of the off-leash area like a playground pervert, watching the dogs chase and pile, their owners standing around in cliques, oblivious to my avid surveillance.

  Ham Sandwich sniffs the butts and touches the noses of the dogs I’ve already gathered for our foray—Twinkle Toes, Vincent, Junkyard, Lothar, and Daisy. We have a six-dog limit, glory be, because I don’t know if I could handle more than that on my own. Fortunately, Lothar is a pug, so he’s pretty easy to manage. The others are big’uns, rotties and goldens, but I’m top dog. Dog treats work wonders. Plus—and even though I gave up magick, I can’t help but do it, it’s such a small thing—I put an eensy-weensy binding charm over each dog before our first walk. It’s like an invisible leash, and it never hurts.

  Dog walking, not writing, is how I make the real money. Writing keeps me respectable among friends and acquaintances. It’s good party conversation. People love it, and after two to three minutes I can sense how receptive they’ll be to the news that what I really do is walk dogs for a living. It amuses me that people think they’ve got me nailed down by my paycheck source. If they only knew the rest of me—a lapsed witch who is starting to see things despite herself.

  Sometimes I take the dogs to a dog run and I hang out with the other walkers and owners. No longer a playground perv am I. But today I’m feeling more invigorated, and I take my pack to McLaren Park with its acres of trees, ponds, and views. I suppose it can get a little sketch over there—I’ve found more than one homeless encampment during our treks—but I feel safe with the dogs. And usually I get a clue in advance if something wicked my way comes.

  I park alongside a trailhead near a convenient trash bin and the dogs, led by Twinkle Toes, yank me into the forest. I wait until we’re a hundred feet in before I let them off their leashes. Away they go, lunging like greyhounds into the underbrush, barking and yipping with glee. And then they stop with a suddenness that’s startling. All at once they crap, as if they consulted with each other previously. I snap a few plastic bags from my dog-walking satchel and hold my breath. Twink gets his mouth around Daisy’s throat and she jerks away, baring her canines before running him down a hill, the two of them rolling like a couple of acrobats in a thrash of legs and fallen eucalyptus leaves.

  I toss the poop bags in the trash and whistle, and the dogs course back up the hill and down the path in front of me, stopping now and then to mark trees and check on my progress. We head up and away from the road deeper into the trees, the ground dappled here and there in sunlight. It’s not long before I’m sweating. My thoughts are filled with the light in my eyes, the smells of damp dirt and the licorice of eucalyptus leaves, the sound of my own breathing. For a while there’s no room for dead friends, sullen rock singers, scattered aunties, or rattle-wielding fairies.

  The trees begin to thin as we crest the hill. A breeze swirls around my moistened skin and I lift up my arms, letting it dry some of the perspiration. I sit on the ground and the dogs plop down around me in a circle, sodden tongues draped pinkly on their lower jaws. Lothar leans on my feet. I take out a bottle of water and a dog dish from my bag. One by one, my companions heave themselves up for a drink. I do stretches while they lap wetly at the bowl. The afternoon sun is halfway done with its day’s journey. I close my eyes and for one brief, miraculous second, my mind is completely still.

  Through the dogs’ panting, I hear a snicking sound, like small scissors at work. My eyes open and there’s the fairy floating right in front of my face, his wings rapidly beating. He’s maybe five inches away, the closest I’ve ever been to one. His face is smooth and brown like a polished seed, and he wears a fawn-colored tunic and pants. Twinkle Toes notices him and barks. Ham Sandwich startles and howls, and Junkyard the Rottweiler-spaniel mix growls in solidarity.

  The fairy zooms away.

  I scramble to my feet and the dogs heave themselves up as I run after him. We have to go off-trail to keep up—for seconds here and there I lose him in shafts of light, but he always reappears. The crashing of our running feet through fallen leaves and duff makes me think of the clashing cymbals from Tyson’s songs.

  The sun is getting stronger and I see up ahead that we are headed either for a cliff or a hilltop. I slow down, aware that the dogs won’t stop themselves, will keep running without fear of the edge. The fairy hovers, looks back at me, and with a vigorous flap of his hummingbird wings dives down and away. I stop and try to catch my breath. I swipe my gummy lips with the back of my hand, and the dogs regard me, tongues lolling with jaunty wetness.

  I walk carefully to the edge. I feel unsteady, like taking a tumble is beyond my control. It’s a steep hill. Bone-breaking steep. At the bottom is a fenced-in playground and baseball field. The fairy is nowhere in sight. I study the playground and after a while it begins to look more familiar. I definitely played there once or twice when I was little. There’s a sculpture of a bear I remember climbing on, and a larger-than-life snake the color of a clay pot. Other than that, it’s an unremarkable place. I close my eyes and try to remember those times.

  They are coming. The phrase whispers across my mind, and my eyes open.

  “They are coming?” I say. “Who?”

  The only answer I get is the panting of six hot and tired dogs. After another minute or so, I turn around and lead them back to the truck.

  ****

  The Arsenic Playground article runs the next day. Amazingly, the Planet is still a daily. It was formed by a few friends back in the grand, elegiac days of the hippies, mimeographed sheets and all. (Ned still calls photocopies dittos.) Comparing the Planet to the New York Times or even the San Francisco Chronicle is simply a reason to hoot and holler, but we have our share of subscribers as well as some foundation money—one of the hippies made it big by turning his organic garden into a baby food empire. There are also grants, government and private. A
fair portion of the money comes from those S&M advertisements, despite the advance of free online ad sites like Craigslist. And Ned and his cronies have lovingly embraced going digital, hinting that we writers should all be blogging and tweeting. Most of them are. Marisol maintains six blogs under various names about things like restaurants, relationships, and, for some reason, Japanese painters. Whatever. It’s not for me. As a part-timer, I only turn in one or two stories a week and I never read what I’ve written. The paycheck is like mad money.

  I stop by the office in the afternoon to pick up some mail, and Ned calls me over.

  “Zhang.” He says my name so it rhymes with dang even though he knows I pronounce it zong. “What are you working on?”

  “A review of the new play they’re doing at Campo Santo.”

  “Forget it. We’ll give it to someone else. I’m lending you out.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Can you do that?”

  He stands up and opens a copy of today’s issue on his desk. There’s my Arsenic Playground article in the “Pop Culture Now” section. He pokes it with his squared-off finger.

  “They loved it. Loved it.”

  “Oh.” I smile my best modest-yet-grateful smile, which is a little too much like my I-know-I-rock smile. “Well, good. I’m glad.”

  “Got a call from Chad Beane, their manager. Actually I knew Chad at Stanford and, well, let’s just say I owe him a favor.”

  “A favor?”

  “And you’re it.”

  What did he just say?

  “They want you to go on assignment with them,” Ned continues. “The tour has two cities left and then they’re shooting that music video. They want a reporter on the road with them. They picked you”—he points again to my article—“because of this.”