The Flower Bowl Spell

by Olivia Boler

  “Either way, we’ll go to the concert afterwards. With or without your charges.”

  “Tyson. Ty.”

  “Memphis. Mem.”

  We argue for a while, going back and forth. Finally, because time is short, I lie and say fine, he can come along. We agree to meet in half an hour out front. Tyson swallows the last of his coffee and goes back to his room. The girls are done eating, have cleared the table, and are reading books. I notice the salt and pepper on our table and remember what Smarter Me said about a witch always needing salt. I pocket one of the saltshakers.

  “Come on girls. Time to get in the car.” I hustle them off to the elevator. Tyson will think I’m a jerk for leaving without him, but I can’t feel bad about it—there’s simply no time.

  ****

  I don’t know what I expected to find at the home of Gladys Jones, but the repellence spell enveloping her property is more powerful than I would have given her credit for.

  My nutshell memory of Bright Vixen is a woman who needed to eat more, with long hair of no particular color pulled back into a bun, and an accent my mother told me was from Queens. In the coven she was Gru’s second in command, the high priestess in charge of setting up our sacred space as well as breaking it down when ceremonies were over, and she kept track of Gru’s magickal appointments and such. A sort of Wiccan personal assistant. By day she was some Silicon Valley corporate honcha. I never heard what happened to her after the coven dissolved, but I guess she eventually made her way to Santa Barbara and started selling jewelry online as Foxy Lady. I wonder what incarnation of herself makes her happiest—the vixen or the lady?

  Her house is a ranch-style on a residential street that’s pleasant yet slightly decrepit. The neighbors own American cars or older Japanese models, a few with sun-bleached, peeling paint. Several lawns have gone weedy, and there are toys and car parts scattered in the driveway of the house next door. Gladys Jones’s house stands out in that it looks freshly painted. The flowers out front—dahlias, sunflowers, wild roses—bloom with health. There’s even a pretty wind chime tinkling near the front door.

  We’re standing on the sidewalk at the beginning of the front walk, and my pulse quickens with what I recognize is dread.

  A fat gray-and-white cat sits on the front stoop, its tail swishing. It’s wearing a thick, awkward collar with some sort of attached box nestled under its chin. Some of my dog-walking clients use collars like that to cure a barking dog with puffs of citronella oil or a high-frequency whine. This cat looks at me and yowls low in its throat. I take on its staring-contest challenge. I think I’m about to win when it suddenly drops onto its belly and slinks away under the oleander.

  “Where are we?” Romola asks.

  I toy with various answers. “An old friend of Gru’s—your great-grandmother—lives here.”

  I touch the necklace lying at the hollow of my throat. It buzzes under my fingertips. It’s both drawn to and repelled by the house, or what’s inside. I let go of it and reach out, like I’m going to touch an invisible wall, and I do. There’s an incredible, shocking pain in my fingertips that travels up my arm—what I imagine it would feel like to have the skin and flesh burn and melt off my bones. Quickly, I withdraw my hand and the pain disappears.

  “Let’s go back to the car,” I say.

  We sit for a few minutes with the windows rolled down and the doors open, the day’s heat fanning over us in unsympathetic waves. I close the moon roof against the broiling sun.

  Back in the day, I carried an emergency store of magickal tools stuffed in an old gym bag in my trunk. Most of it was for Auntie Tess—she’s always running out of supplies. Now I wish I hadn’t been so hasty in throwing it away. I take off the necklace and open it up. The face that isn’t mine is back, and at first I’m not sure what I’m seeing. Maybe a fairy? No. It’s not anyone I recognize although he seems familiar. It’s a man with cold eyes. A scruffy older man.

  My heart begins to race and I am suddenly covered in sweat. Without thinking, I fling the necklace out the open car door towards the house. There’s a faint noise—like a switch being clicked off and then a whoosh that sends the hairs on my arms standing at attention. The necklace falls onto the lawn. I get out of the car and pat at the invisible wall. The repellence spell has vanished. The house is just a house now. But I still dread it.

  I pick up the locket and toss it into the gutter next to my car. The girls hang out the window, looking down at it. They seem a bit worried about the way I’m treating this bauble that looks like their mother’s.

  “Why did you do that, Memphis?” Cleo asks.

  I beckon them. “Come on, girls. Let’s go.”

  They climb out of the car obediently.

  “Hold my hands.”

  They put their hands in mine and we walk up the path to the front door. I let go of Romola and knock. There’s no answer, but that doesn’t surprise me. I jiggle the lock, willing the tumblers to tumble, and they do. We go inside and stand in a modest foyer. The fat cat with the funny collar trots in behind us. He looks around before sitting on the welcome mat and begins grooming his face.

  Something is beeping, and I understand why Gladys doesn’t feel the need to use a deadbolt. There’s a security system mounted next to the front door. It’s been triggered and will call a central office and the police if I don’t think fast. I study the keypad and quickly enter 3699, the numerals that correspond to the letters F-O-X-Y. I hit the off button and it works.

  We all take a deep breath. The girls look at me and we smile and chuckle.

  “Phew!” I say, wiping real and imaginary sweat from my brow.

  “This is Gramma Gru’s friend’s house, right?” Romola asks. “And your friend too?”

  I give it a think. I was a child when last I saw Bright Vixen, and she never seemed interested in children. “Depends on your definition of friend. But sure, in a way.”

  We look around. The walls are papered in pink-and-cream stripes over a cream-painted wainscoting. To our left is a living room full of mid-twentieth-century furniture. Everything is impeccable. Everything is still.

  From the back of the house I hear an appliance buzzing steadily. I tell the girls to sit on the couch and walk past a dining area into a breakfast nook and kitchen. The buzzing comes from the refrigerator, like every other refrigerator in the world. Sliding glass doors lead out to the garden. There’s a swimming pool, aquamarine and kidney-shaped.

  Something floats in it, something larger than a leaf but smaller than a child. I unlatch the door and slide it open. I unhook a long-poled net from the fence and use it to fish the thing out. It drips, sodden, in my hands. It’s a doll, a woman with yarn hair wearing a brown suit. I squeeze it and water gushes out of its lifeless, bloated body. I squeeze it again and again and the water keeps coming. Something falls out of it—a lock of wet, bland hair. In my hands, the doll’s painted-on eyes regard me with an expression that tells me I’m too late.

  I run back into the house and search through the rooms—a bathroom, a workshop, a guest room. At the very back of the house is the master bedroom. Gladys is lying in bed face up, her arms up on either side of her head the way Cleo sleeps.

  “Gladys?” I say softly. “Bright Vixen?”

  Already, I know she’s dead, and I become very aware of everything I’ve touched. I take a handkerchief from my pocket and use it to turn Gladys towards me. The whites of her eyes are blood red, and water sloshes out of her nostrils and mouth, smelling lightly of chlorine. Her skin is blue and puffy, yet she is dry. She is bone dry.

  My throat clenches, my stomach heaves. I’m just deciding whether or not to give in to my body’s reaction when I hear a small voice behind me.

  “Memphis?”

  I turn and start to say, “Go back to the living room, girls,” before I realize that it’s not them.

  It’s her. Gladys stands near the bedroom doorway—stands being a general term, since the only parts of her that I can really make out are her
face, shoulders, and hands. The rest is obscured in a darkening fog that I realize is my own vision.

  “Who would do this to me?” She is crying, chin trembling, lips pressed together.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No.” But she hesitates, looks away. Can ghosts really lie?

  “You have an idea.”

  She looks at me imploringly. “We thought we were going to be strong again. Together.” She shakes her head. “I miss my life. I want it back. I want all of it back.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  “I didn’t know it would go this far.” She fades away and I am left alone with her body. I run to the bathroom and vomit my continental breakfast into the toilet.

  ****

  Like any disciplined witch, Bright Vixen has a well-stocked magickal cabinet. Under normal circumstances—whatever those are—I would not rummage around in a sister’s stuff, never mind use any of it, but she is gone. She won’t mind.

  The cabinet is in the kitchen, among her everyday cooking things. I toss her effigy on a chopping block and sort through the bottles of herbs, spices, and brews. Not all are labeled so I have to use my nose, sniffing about like a hound to raise the memories and recognize what I need. My hands tremble, and I knock over some of the containers more than once.

  Romola wanders in from the living room, trailed by her sister. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing exciting. Go back to the living room and watch some TV, okay? Whatever you want.”

  They comply and the sounds of a late morning PBS kids’ show relax me. I take a big breath and pull out a jar of dried basil, a tin of dried white rose petals, and a vial of cypress bark. Along with a bottle of olive oil from the pantry and a mortar and pestle on the countertop, I think I have everything I need.

  A pinch of this, a sprinkling of that, and I grind everything up into a paste. With a basting brush, I paint the doll with the concoction, light the gas stove, and set it on fire in a pan. In the ensuing smoke, the highlights of Gladys’s life unfurl.

  There’s Gru anointing young priestess Bright Vixen in a candlelit ceremony in Golden Gate Park, both of them wearing their hair long and adorned with circlets of woven flowers. There’s Gladys in her corporate casual attire, sitting in a conference room arguing with colleagues at a table full of legal pads and official-looking documents covered with schematics of computer bits—microchips or nanobots or some other tech ephemera. There she is in a dark bedroom in bed with a man, the two of them naked, their limbs entangled as they make love. There’s middle-aged Gladys in this house, sitting at her dining room table with a bunch of jewelry—not only lockets, but necklaces of garnet, amethyst, and moonstone—placing them into dozens of shipping boxes labeled Foxy Lady Designs. And there she is sleeping at night, peacefully at rest until she starts to cough and gag, waking from her slumber. Her eyes dart around in bewilderment as her mouth and nostrils fill with water that doesn’t spill out. Her cat, meowing outside her bedroom window, starts to hiss, but gloved hands grab it, fastening something around its neck, and it is the last thing Bright Vixen sees before she stops struggling and falls back onto the pillow.

  This last image startles me, and I involuntarily suck in some of the smoke, snapping the connection.

  “No friggin’ way,” I breathe. My dream last night about being paralyzed—it must have been a premonition.

  I turn and run, calling to the girls in the living room to get out of the house, never mind turning off the TV, just go, go, go. Their faces as they join me at the front door are startled and exhilarated by my urgency, by the very fact that I am moving faster than they’ve ever seen me move in our short acquaintance.

  We trip over ourselves getting out the door, and there’s the cat, still on the mat, cowering at our noisy departure. I scoop it up, fumbling with that heavy, whirring collar, and the girls are running safely ahead of me, almost to the car, where Tyson stands, leaning again the passenger-side door. He’s watching us with his mouth open as I finally yank the collar off the cat and release it, but not before it scratches me all down my stomach, its claws hooking for a sharp, painful second into my thigh. I fling the collar back into the house, slam the door, and run. Behind me there’s a boom that rumbles through the earth, like a moan a wounded animal would make, and it carries me forward so that I think stupidly, I don’t need a broomstick—I can fly all by myself. But I can’t, not really, and I land with a thud—my wrists and hands taking the brunt of my fall as I protect my head—at Tyson’s feet.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The girls are safe in the car, and I’m behind the wheel. From the backseat Romola screams, “The kitty!” and Tyson grabs it one-handed, dives into the passenger seat, and pulls the door closed. As I drive, the cat snarls, scratches him, and makes a beeline for the gas and brake pedals. I scuffle my feet at it until it scrabbles under the seat.

  “What the hell?” Ty shouts at me.

  “Later,” I say, my voice surprisingly quiet and firm.

  There are some things magick can control and some it can’t. That’s why, as I grip the steering wheel and drive a cautious three miles over the speed limit, I comb my memory for everything I touched in Gladys’s house. I peeled out of there like a drag racer, and who knows whether the neighbors saw us, noted our looks or the license plate?

  I was able to do a very quick read of the immediate area, and picked up only mere traces of activity. It’s a Sunday morning, so maybe people are at church or synagogue or brunch. Maybe the traces were just pets. There was one, however, two doors down, that was pretty powerful—a man, I think, surprised but not afraid of the explosion. I got pictures from his speculative imagination of a car backfiring, an unusually loud video game, and, unpredictably, an opera performance with a singer dressed like Napoleon Bonaparte.

  I drive for a while, taking right turns, left turns, going straight. I have no destination in particular. Just away.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask Tyson.

  “Why did you ditch me?”

  “You saw what happened.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “That’s the answer you’re going to get.”

  Tyson tells me he already had his bag packed, and, guessing I’d take off on him, he followed us from the hotel in a cab. This surprises me. He’s been so readable, but apparently there’s more deviousness in him than I thought—almost as much as in me. Tyson got chatty with his cab driver, who happened to recognize him—his daughter is a fan. In light of Gladys’s bombed-out house, we have to take care of that. I zone in on Ty’s story about the cab, which leads me to an image of the yellow car, and then I’m able to get a fix on the cabbie himself.

  We pull to the curb on State Street, flanked by chic shops and cafés. I turn to Romola. “Sweetie, do you think you could give me one of your shells?” She has about twenty in her little pink backpack, some that I bought her in the San Francisco aquarium gift shop. Romola reluctantly passes me the saddest, smallest, dullest shell in her collection. I cup it in both hands, closing my eyes, and whisper an incantation over and over: “Secret wishes…rebirth of hope…midlife mope…” I feel Tyson watching me, but I shut out all static. When I open my eyes, Ty’s cab has just pulled up in front of us and a passenger climbs out.

  I hop out of my car and run over, leaning into the driver’s open window. His face is startled and a little delighted by my smile. He opens his mouth as if to ask a question.

  “Here’s to a fresh start,” I say, and hand him the shell. Before he can utter a word I jog back to my car, get in, and drive away. I hope all he does is blank out on Tyson’s ride instead of, say, quitting his job or walking out on his family. I would have preferred the Forget About It Spell, but that takes a lot more equipment, including aluminum foil, moonwort, antiperspirant, and, ideally, a new moon. Going back to Gladys’s house for supplies is out of the question—the front door and windows are blown out, the house is on fire—so the New Beginnings Charm will have to do. I woul
d have liked to hit all of Gladys’s neighbors with the Forget About It, but c’est la vie.

  So, we’re rabbiting. Heading out on the Pacific Coast Highway for who knows where. South for now, like bandits. If the cops get a bead on us, I’ll just deal with them head-on.

  Tyson and the girls are being very quiet, and I realize that they’re in shock. This is a good thing. Not the shock, but the quiet. It gives me headspace to think. Actually, the shock isn’t so bad either. Their bodies are taking care of them, cocooning their sensibilities, for the time being at least.

  I drive past lunchtime. I’m not hungry and neither are they. We’re getting close to Santa Cecilia, but the car needs fuel so we stop. Ty mans the gas pump while I take the girls to the bathroom. They each pick a snack in the mini-mart and I get icy cold bottles of water for Tyson and me. We get back in the car and drive on. The cat hasn’t budged.

  Tyson turns on the stereo and the music of Arsenic Playground fills the car. He pops out the CD, the twist of his lips showing his embarrassment and pleasure. My dream of us doing the nasty pans through my mind, and I feel suddenly flushed.

  “Research for the piece,” I say. “And the girls like it.”

  “We like the Beatles too,” Cleo says through a mouthful of trail mix.

  Tyson flips through my CD case and inserts the Beatles. He adjusts the sound so that the music comes out mainly through the rear speakers right next to Romola and Cleo’s heads. He turns to me.

  “You said we’d talk later. It’s later.”

  “You have questions.” I keep my eyes on the road. “I get that. But I can’t talk to you when you’re wearing those sunglasses.”

  “What do you have against my sunglasses?”

  I think about how to answer this. “Just take them off.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “You look like a poser.”

  He doesn’t say anything, nursing a wounded silence.