The Mothering Coven

by Joanna Ruocco

  “What does it say?” asks Ace Reporter Duncan Michaels.

  “The first part is an invitation,” says Anaxamandra.

  And the second part?

  She is pulling her wagon across the yard. Her feet are very wet. Wet feet are the danger with felt shoes.

  Ace Reporter Duncan Michaels lines up the crustaceans, two columns on the Vandercook. There is an uneven number. One of the crustaceans remains unpartnered.

  “Unpartnered,” says Ace Reporter Duncan Michaels. Is that a word in the language of love?

  “This will be a difficult print run,” he thinks.

  [:]

  Bryce decides to drop by the Greece Trap. It is the town’s only diner. Thank goodness it is a perfect diner. The stools at the counter are always empty. The milkshakes pass the straw test. Bryce sits down on a stool at the counter. She eats a spoonful of strawberry milkshake. She orders a bowl of lemon chicken soup and a cup of coffee. The coffee tastes like lemon. Bryce admires the pictures of Lebanon on the walls of the diner. Lebanon is the most beautiful place in the world.

  “Is there a sacred bird of Lebanon?” asks Bryce.

  “The city walls are made of glass,” says Mr. Hephaistos. “There is a cedar gate.” He is cleaning the same square of counter over and over again. “I don’t know about birds.”

  “Chicken,” says Mr. Dykes. He has just set out a tray of cinnamon donuts. Today Bryce doesn’t want cinnamon donuts. She is thinking about Behemoth, who drank the River of Jordan to quench the desert in her chest.

  Will Bertrand offer her flesh for the banquet in the sky?

  “Now I’m being morbid,” thinks Bryce. She spoons up the last of the milkshake. She puts the green bill in her pocket. Mr. Dykes has nice handwriting.

  Of course, Bryce also fills her pockets with straws and sugar packets. She leaves behind the napkins. She has folded them into chickens. Mr. Dykes can’t remember anymore. Is chicken the sacred bird of Lebanon? It might be the sacred bird of the United States. Mr. Dykes has been away from home for many, many years. A lifetime. Mr. Hephaistos is still cleaning the counter.

  He is singing a song in the language of love. It goes like this:

  Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, come with me from Lebanon.

  Journey down from the summit of Amana,

  From the summit of Senir and Hermon,

  From the dens of lions,

  From the mountains of leopards.

  But there are so many languages of love. It might mean something completely different. It might not mean anything.

  [:]

  Who has RSVP’d?

  Leon Czolgosz.

  The Venus of Willendorf.

  By Agnes’s count, that makes two. But is this really a party? It is more of a holiday.

  “Like Christmas,” says Agnes. “You don’t RSVP for Christmas.”

  [:]

  Mrs. Borage loves to celebrate Christmas. The star of Bethlehem is her favorite star. Of course, it is a false star. There are many explanations for the Star of Bethlehem. Occultation. Conjunction. Comet. Mrs. Borage believes it was a rocket. From France, why not.

  [:]

  Mrs. Borage also loves Canada Day. Agnes makes Canadian bacon and Canadian muffins and Mrs. Borage smokes her fragrant pipe. What does she put in her pipe?

  Canadian hemlock needles and Canadian maple leaves, Canadian pitcher plants, Canadian trilliums, little white hairs from the nectaries of Canadian Madonna lilies, a nice blend of shade tobaccos.

  The pipe makes the whole house smell like the woodlands of Canada.

  “A breakfast picnic,” sighs Mrs. Borage, “in the woodlands of Canada.” Everyone she has ever known is eating together.

  “But the picnic baskets stay full,” remembers Mrs. Borage. “Somehow, there is herring enough.” Mrs. Borage glances around her. She is alone in the kitchen. It smells like glue.

  “Herring enough,” she says.

  [:]

  Agnes is looking at the Petition of Notice and Foreclosure. Are those ladybugs? Agnes picks one off. She licks it.

  “Rice,” thinks Agnes. From some sort of paint-and-adhesive based pilaf.

  “Bryce should not be allowed in the kitchen,” thinks Agnes. Mrs. Borage is in the kitchen mixing batter. The secret is heavy cream and egg yolk. Mrs. Borage stirs briskly.

  “Womlette!” cries Agnes. It is an omelet with a waffle base, popular in Canada.

  Did the voice beneath the stairs say “womlette”?

  “H” and “W” have a complex history, at least in the field of paleozoology. Agnes recently underlined the following entry:

  Hwalebone. The horny laminae of the upper jaw of the hwale.

  Hwale. The largest fish in the sea.

  “Hmmmmm,” says Agnes. Has she been contacted by the disembodied voice of paleozoology? It must be so. She is not working hard enough.

  “Or was it a hwitch?” thinks Agnes.

  [:]

  Agnes stares at the Calendar of Drifting Hours. She sees the day of Bernadette, the day of Petronella, the day of Ethelburga, the day of Lucy, the day of Zdislava, the day of Veronica.

  “They haven’t RSVP’d either,” frets Agnes.

  While on the subject of fretting: Mrs. Borage’s fiddle is broken in two! Agnes feels between the cushions of the sofa. Mrs. Borage’s spectacles! Also, broken. Her rocking chair. Her whale-tooth cane. Her fishing pole. Even her high-heeled boots. Everything Mrs. Borage owns is falling to pieces.

  “It is to be expected,” thinks Agnes.

  Like most paleozoologists, Agnes believes that the human chrysalis exists. It has taken on the commodity-form.

  “The pupal case of worldy possessions will split open and Mrs. Borage will jump nude into the river!” predicts Agnes. “I hope we have enough processional torches.”

  Hasn’t Agnes noticed the bottles of gas? Not yet. Bryce has stored them in the bathroom. She moved the bathtub into the kitchen. The bathtub looks natural in the kitchen. It’s the same size as the ball of chewing gum, which she has rolled into the yard.

  [:]

  Mr. Henderson is knocking on the front door. He has a question. Agnes hopes it is not a question about dog licenses.

  Earlier, a tall, despondent man knocked on the door with a question about dog licenses. Ms. Kidney is very liberal with her dogs but as far as Agnes knows licenses are out of the question.

  “I can’t say one way or another,” said Agnes. “You’ll have to speak with Ms. Kidney.”

  “Does Ms. Kidney have a dog license?” asked the man.

  “Ms. Kidney is a person,” said Agnes, gently. The man looked even more despondent. He and Agnes had very little to say to each other once the facts of the matter were established.

  “Would you like to have a conversation about ideas?” offered Agnes, but the man did not. He wanted to have a conversation about dog licenses. It was an insoluble situation. Even Agnes began to feel despondent.

  Luckily, Mr. Henderson does not want to ask about dog licenses.

  “What is Mrs. Borage’s favorite lettuce?” asks Mr. Henderson. Agnes supposes that Mrs. Borage looks on the roughages equally. Don’t most people?

  Mr. Henderson can’t help but feel that the woman in the doorway is giving him an uncomfortably shrewd look.

  “Maybe her safety goggles magnify to the three power?” thinks Mr. Henderson. He notices that she is holding a broken violin, two pieces, cradled in her arms, in just the same way he holds his broken pots. Mr. Henderson has often thought that luthiers are the cousins of potters. He feels a small bubble of joy in his chest. But is it too presumptuous to assume cousinship with an adult niece of Mrs. Borage?

  Mr. Henderson has a favorite lettuce. His favorite lettuce is bronze mignonette.

  “Does Mrs. Borage like bronze mignonette?” asks Mr. Henderson.

  “Has the late capitalist world system transposed the biological imperative?” asks Agnes.

  Mr. Henderson performs a series of mental substitutio
ns.

  “Has money replaced death?” he asks. He stares into his cousin’s magnified eyes. What does she mean?

  “As a cult?” thinks Mr. Henderson. “As a social hallucination?”

  X

  Mr. Henderson stands outside the library. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is wearing a Russian hat. He has never noticed the port-wine stain on her cheek or her circular beauty mark.

  “Zdravstvuite,” says Mr. Henderson. She is staring off into space with a dreamy expression. Mr. Henderson looks up at the sky. Will he see a woman fly over the courthouse? Will he see clouds of salt and pepper? The sky is pale blue. Leaves are spinning and spinning in the street. Little vortexes are springing up everywhere. It is noon; the drifting hours spiral around the white sun.

  [:]

  Mrs. Scattergood is sitting on the circulation desk in spangled tights. She is trying to put her leg behind her neck. She looks at Mr. Henderson and blushes. She takes her leg down swiftly and almost upsets her mug of chamomile tea.

  The woman standing in the reference section looks very tweedy in her houndstooth skirt and jacket, but Mr. Henderson recognizes an adult niece of Mrs. Borage. The adult nieces of Mrs. Borage are unmistakable although Mr. Henderson may be mistaking one for another. He thinks that their faces are more or less identical.

  “But then I have never been a people person,” admits Mr. Henderson.

  “What is a pogonip?” asks Mr. Henderson. Ozark frowns. She senses it is a word filled with luminous intensity. Her flashcards are in the flannel backpack on the circulation desk. She sorts through them.

  “Is it Finnish?” she asks.

  Mr. Henderson sees that Mrs. Scattergood is drinking from a familiar blue mug. Now it is his turn to blush. He ducks his head and sifts through her collection of science journals. She has been reading about translucent concrete. Mr. Henderson imagines himself, a mason of translucent concrete. He imagines making a library of translucent concrete. It would be ferocious in its beauty, and when he poured the final wall, the structure would glow with refracted light. Mr. Henderson would be blinded. He would have to borrow back his ugly blue mug. He would have to walk all through the town begging for his supper.

  [:]

  Ozark has not gotten as far as translucent concrete. She has gotten to Postnik and Barma, who built onion domes for the fool of Moscow. She has gotten to Anna Ivanovna, who built the palace of ice, ice elephants in the garden, ice ring doves in the nuptial chamber, ice sheets turned down on the ice bed, and blue-white doves nesting on the pillow slips. She remembers that Anna Ivanovna sewed iron rods in her shirtsleeves to protect her bones, the glass balls and sockets. She was not a front-bender.

  “Or a back-bender,” thinks Ozark. She remembers the pink and gold tents pitched by the highways, all the vanished encampments, the sudden pyramids of acrobats that came down and left no trace.

  “Like the snow tomb of Ozymandias,” sighs Ozark. She drops a triangular flashcard. It slides beneath the circulation desk.

  [:]

  Ozark and Mrs. Scattergood duck into the reference section to change their clothes. Mr. Henderson sits at the circulation desk. He makes a convincing librarian. He puts the blue mug behind him, out of sight, on an empty metal cart.

  “Hot tea by the library books!” he says.

  “Goodbye!” waves the adult niece of Mrs. Borage. How bizarre. She has a rectilinear thorax. It is about the size of a reference book. Mr. Henderson glances at Mrs. Scattergood. Is she going to say something? She is.

  “Would you like some tea?” says Mrs. Scattergood to Mr. Henderson. “I have another mug.”

  X

  Dorcas and Fiona have started building a metal fence around the sixteen dogs in the garden. Agnes insists. Invariably, there are guests who fear dogs.

  Fiona went all around town collecting the poles. They all have wonderful names—Larch Saint, Bramble Saint, Honeysuckle Saint—but the lettering is inexcusably dull.

  “It will be hard to add serifs without a soldering gun,” thinks Bryce. “I’ll have to gild them instead.”

  “Dear creatures,” says Bryce, from deep in her lungs, like Ms. Kidney. “Have you ravened your krill paste?” The dogs are lying on their sides with their eyes shut tight.

  “Do they seem moribund?” asks Bryce.

  “Not really,” says Fiona. She dips a corner of toast into the krill paste and crunches.

  Her face pales. She grabs her thermos from its holster and swallows frantically, many ounces of good liquid chocolate. Bryce takes the bowl of krill paste into the kitchen. She flours the counter and flattens the paste with the rolling pin. She picks through the cookie cutters.

  “Reindeer!” says Bryce. She punches out sixteen reindeer, each mid-leap, with branching antlers. She lifts them with the spatula and lays them one by one on sixteen paper plates. They look appetizing, just like reindeer in the wild, silhouetted against the glaciers of the North. She hopes the wolves don’t get discouraged by how far away the reindeer seem, each one just a few inches tall. She tries to pick up a reindeer. It is unappealingly floppy.

  “I’ll toast them,” thinks Bryce.

  [:]

  There is Mr. Zimmer, walking down the sidewalk. He is carrying a very large box.

  “The baking pan!” says Bryce. Not a moment too soon.

  “Mr. Zimmer is about to walk into a cairn!” cries Fiona.

  Mr. Zimmer walks into a cairn. He sits down hard.

  “Do you think that hurt?” asks Bryce.

  “I doubt it,” says Fiona. “There are still so many leaves.”

  Now that he’s seated, Mr. Zimmer can look much more closely into the faces of the sixteen wolves in the garden.

  “They don’t have any teeth,” calls Mr. Zimmer.

  “Oh no, not at all,” calls Bryce.

  “I should have asked,” thinks Mr. Zimmer. He feels foolish now, with his trouser pockets filled with pork ribs. He had to take out his hip flask to fit them. Now the hip flask is under his hat. Mr. Zimmer pretends to scratch his head. He takes a sip of whisky. He wonders why the wolves are surrounded by street signs.

  The garden looks like a complicated intersection. The wolves could walk out, but which way? Even Mr. Zimmer feels a moment of indecision, staring up at the forest of street signs, and he has been mail carrier for twenty-seven years.

  [:]

  “Come inside for schnapps,” calls Bryce. Mr. Zimmer puts the box on the front step. He wipes his palms on his blue trousers. He is still indecisive, but the whisky is helping.

  “No schnapps,” he says.

  “Presbyterian?” says Bryce.

  Mr. Zimmer hesitates. Certainly he is Presbyterian. He is descended from James K. Polk.

  Mr. Zimmer is suspicious of unmarried women, particularly of a certain age. They have brash ideas.

  He wonders if he is poised to stumble upon an illegal operation. There is a strange smell coming from the house. It is a toxic smell, a new shower-curtain smell, the smell of thousands of freshly minted shower curtains, as though inside, the house is really a factory, the Shower Curtain Complex.

  Mr. Zimmer takes another slug of whisky. It is good Presbyterian whisky, the very spirit of the speyside.

  He fears he has discovered the illegitimate sister of the Security Spray Complex, which moved its operations away in the night, twenty-seven years ago.

  The morning after, workers stood outside, looking at the chains across the iron doors. They looked at each other and then at the blue sky and then at the chains on the doors and then they left all at once and no one travels up this dead end road anymore, except Mr. Zimmer, who has to, come rain or sleet or gloom of night, according to federal law.

  He tries to peek past Bryce into the house. Bryce is wearing a feather-stitched white cambric chemise. The feathers fill the doorway. Bryce is slightly embarrassed by the feathers. She tried to photosensitize the birds, but the birds did not recover. Bryce has not given up.

  “Imagine the birds,” thinks Bryce
, “photosensitized, absorbing light pollution, developing gently in the rainfall, traffic patterns appearing on their breasts and under-wings, their backs and their pinions!”

  Of course, Bryce has written to the Audobon Society. She is a very proactive person and, given the opportunity, an excellent correspondent.

  Someday the feathers in Bryce’s chemise will look like the sky over peri-urban Ohio. Someday the feathers will color faintly with the trefoil insignias of the cloverleaf highways, but not yet. The feathers are dingy gray, with chemical burns. Hardly fit for a party. She will have to change.

  “Into cherry satin,” thinks Bryce.

  “At least take this invitation,” she says. She hands it to Mr. Zimmer.

  “It doesn’t have a stamp,” says Mr. Zimmer.

  “It’s for you,” says Bryce.

  “Still,” says Mr. Zimmer. He holds up his hands. Mr. Zimmer is a strict anti-corruption man, like James K. Polk before him.

  “Especially if it’s for me,” says Mr. Zimmer.

  X

  Agnes is toasting bread. Next she will mix the nuts. Is there a tray big enough for the tremendous silver herring? No. The oven door? The oven door is gone. And the metal folding chairs.

  “The brunt of everything falls on me,” thinks Agnes. It is because she has a professional degree.

  Agnes must get out of the house. She strolls down to the center of town. She is shocked to see a bright pink arrow on the church and another on the courthouse. They must be visible for miles.

  “And they’re pointing straight to the house!” cries Agnes. Who would come to the party on the highway? No one she can think of has a license.

  “Only the dogs have been offered licenses,” thinks Agnes. “And they’re already here.”

  Gervais? No, he always comes on foot. Will Gervais come at all? He doesn’t like to travel on Kingfisher days. He always brings the frost.

  “Dear Gervais!” thinks Agnes. “Gervais Fool-for-Frost.”

  [:]

  There is a man standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the pink arrow on the courthouse. He’s wearing a black suit and a blue tie and shiny black shoes. He looks at Agnes. Examined straight-on, the man’s face gives the same aloofly pondering impression of the best three-quarter profiles. He has a little mustache. He looks very familiar. Agnes thinks he must be a currency model from the Commonwealth. She smiles to put him at ease.