Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37

by L. Timmel Duchamp

  When Sheila opened her eyes, she noticed Mary’s face had lifted a little. The firm line of her mouth had softened and curled up at the edges, as if she wanted to smile but was perhaps just a little shy. “Thank you, Sheila,” said Mary, blinking sweetly on the couch. This was when Sheila went soft, too. Whenever a client like Mary, hardened by a deficiency of love, took on a shade of her former self—a youthful self who loved and was loved, who trusted in love to see her through—Sheila had to fight to hold back tears. Not because seeing the return of love made her happy—no, the pressure behind her eyes was more a force of sadness, because the person in front of her was under an illusion, and no illusion, thought Sheila, was pleasant. They were more like the narcotics those with chronic pain took to ease their days. This returned love would only be brief and temporary.

  At the door, Mary took out three hundred-dollar bills. “Worth every penny,” she said, folding them into Sheila’s palm, meeting Sheila’s eyes and holding her stare.

  When Sheila closed the door behind her, she turned and looked at the face of her cell phone. Thirty minutes had passed. On the dot.

  Her next client was new: a good-looking young man who was a bit too earnest for only being a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate. His name was Ben, and he had just acquired a decent job with an advertising company. He’d gotten a mortgage, purchased a house, and was ready to fill it with someone else and him together, the kids, the dogs, the cats: the works. Sheila could see all of this as he sat in front of her and told her that he wanted to find love. That was simple, really. No need to drum up love where love already fizzed and popped. He just needed someone to really see him. Someone who wanted the same things. He wasn’t the completely bland sort of guy that no one would notice, but he wasn’t emitting a strong signal either. Sheila did a quick invocation that would enhance Ben’s desire so that it would beam like a lighthouse toward ships looking for harbor.

  She charged him a hundred dollars and told him that if he didn’t get engaged within a year, she’d give him his money back. Ben thanked her, and after she saw him out of the house, it was time for Sheila to sit in her living room and stare at the television, where the vague outline of her body was reflected in the blank screen.

  Lyle would be coming to pick her up in several hours. Lyle, Lyle. She said his name a few times, but it was no good. She still couldn’t believe a man named Lyle was coming for her.

  Sheila had tried to make the thing that made her different the most normal aspect of her life. Hence her business: Paranormal Romance. She had business cards and left them on the bulletin boards of grocery store entryways, in the fishbowls full of cards that sat on the register counters of some restaurants, and on the bars of every lowdown drink-your-blues-away kind of joint in the city of Cleveland, where people sometimes, while crying into a beer, would notice the card propped against the napkin holder in front of them and think about Sheila possibly being the solution to their loneliness, as the cards declared.

  She had made herself as non-paranormal as possible, while at the same time living completely out in the open about being a witch, probably because of what her father had once told her, years ago, when she was just a little girl and even Sheila hadn’t known she had magic in her fingertips. “If I had to be some creepy weirdo like the vampires and werewolves or whatever the hell else is out there these days,” her father had said while watching a news report about the increasing appearance of paranormal creatures, “then I suppose a witch would be the way to go.”

  The way to go. That’s what he’d said. As though there was a choice about being cursed or born with magic flowing through you. Vampire, werewolf. Whatever the hell else. The memory stuck with Sheila because of the way her father had talked as if it were one of those “If you had to” games.

  If you had to lose a sense, which one?

  If you had to live on a deserted island with only one book, which one?

  It was only later, after Sheila felt magic welling up in her as a teenager, that she realized how upset he was when she accidentally revealed her abilities—a tactless spell she’d cast to bring him and her mother closer. Unfortunately, her father had noticed Sheila’s fingers weaving through the air as she attempted to surreptitiously cast the spell while her parents were watching television one evening. Her mother stuck by Sheila, but he filed for divorce and disappeared from their lives altogether.

  Thus her business, Paranormal Romance, was born. She would make it work for her, Sheila decided in her late twenties. She would use this magic in a way that someone with good legs, flexibility, and balance might become a dancer or a yoga instructor.

  This desire for normality also explained why Sheila wanted to kill her mother after she opened the door that evening to find a man dressed in a black leather jacket, tight blue jeans, a black v-neck shirt, and work boots, sporting a scraggly goatee, whose first words were, “Wow, you don’t look like a witch. That’s interesting.”

  “Probably the least interesting thing about me,” said Sheila. She tried to restrain herself, but couldn’t refrain from arching her eyebrows as a cat might raise its back.

  “I’m Lyle. Nice to meet you,” the somewhat ruggedly good-looking Lyle said.

  “Charmed,” Sheila said, trying to sound like she meant it.

  “No,” said Lyle, “that’s what you’re supposed to do to me, right?” He winked. Sheila’s smile felt frail, as if it might begin to splinter.

  “How do you know I’m a witch,” Sheila asked, “when my mother specifically told me not to bring it up?”

  “Don’t know why she told you that,” said Lyle. “First thing she mentioned to me was that’s what you are.”

  “Great,” said Sheila. “And I know nothing about you to make it even, and here we are, standing in my doorway like we’re new neighbors instead of going somewhere.”

  Lyle nodded his head in the direction of the staircase and said, “I got us a reservation at a great steakhouse downtown.”

  Sheila smiled. It was a lip-only smile—no teeth—but she followed Lyle down the steps of her apartment to the front porch, where she found Gary dragging Snowman up the steps by his collar. The dog had its ridiculous grin plastered on as usual, but started to yap in the direction of Lyle as soon as he noticed him. Gary himself was grimacing with frustration. “What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

  “This guy,” said Gary. “When he ran off last night, he really ran off. Someone on the neighborhood Facebook group messaged me to say she had him penned in her backyard. Three blocks from here. You’re a bad dog, Snowman. A bad dog, you hear?”

  Snowman was barking like crazy now, twisting around Gary’s legs. He looked up at Lyle and for the first time in Sheila’s experience, the dog did not look like it was smiling, but was baring its teeth.

  “Woof!” said Lyle, and Snowman began to whimper.

  “Well, it’s a good thing she was able to corral him,” Sheila said, even as she attempted to telepathically communicate with Gary: Did this guy just woof? “I’ve never gotten along with dogs, so he’d have probably run away from me if I were the one to find him.”

  “Oh, really?” Lyle raised his brows, as if Sheila had suddenly taken off a mask and revealed herself to be an alien with tentacles wriggling, Medusa-like, out of her head. “You don’t like dogs?”

  “And dogs,” Sheila said, “don’t like me.”

  “I can’t believe that,” said Lyle, shaking his head and wincing.

  Sheila shrugged and said, “That’s just the way things are, I guess.”

  “Who are you again?” Gary asked, looking at Lyle with narrowed eyes, as if he’d put Lyle under a microscope.

  Sheila apologized for not introducing them. “This is my date,” she said, trying to signal to Gary that it was also the last date by rolling her eyes as she turned away from Lyle.

  “A date?” Gary said, clapping one hand over his mouth as he said it. “Sheila is going on a date?”

  “That’s right,” said Lyl
e. He nodded curtly. “And we should probably get started. Come on,” he said, pointing toward his car parked against the curb. Sheila inwardly groaned when she saw that it was one of those muscle cars macho guys collect, like they’re still little boys with Matchbox vehicles. “Let’s go get some grub,” Lyle said, patting his stomach.

  “Grub?” Gary whispered as Lyle and Sheila went past him, and Sheila could only look over her shoulder with a Help Me! look painfully stretched across her face.

  The steakhouse Lyle took her to was one of those places where people crack peanuts open, dislodge the nut, and discard the shells on the floor. The lighting was dim, but the room was permeated with the glow from a variety of neon beer signs that hung on every wall like a collection in an art gallery. Lyle said it was his favorite place to dine.

  He said it like that too, Sheila could already hear herself saying later as she recounted the evening to Trent and Gary. He said, “It’s my favorite place to dine.” Can you believe it? What was my mother thinking?

  “Oh, really,” Sheila said. The server had just brought her a vodka martini with a slice of lemon dangling over the rim. Sheila looked up at her briefly to say thank you, and noticed immediately that the server—a young woman with long mahogany hair and caramel-colored skin—was a witch. The employee tag on the server’s shirt said her name was Corrine; she winked as Sheila grasped after her words. “Thank you,” Sheila managed to say without making the moment of recognition awkward. She took a sip, licked her lips, then turned back to Lyle as the server walked away, and said, “What were you saying?”

  “‘This is my favorite place to dine,’ I said. I come here a couple of times a week,” said Lyle. “Best steaks in town.”

  Sheila said, “I don’t eat meat.”

  To which Lyle’s face dropped like a hot air balloon that had lost all of its hot air. “Your mother didn’t tell me that,” said Lyle.

  “No,” said Sheila, “but for some reason she did tell you that I’m a witch, even after she forbade me from speaking of it. Clearly the woman can’t be trusted.”

  “Clearly,” Lyle agreed, which actually scored him a tiny little point for the first time that evening. There it was in Sheila’s mind’s eye, a little scoreboard. Lyle: 1. Sheila: Anxious.

  He apologized profusely, in a rough-around-the-edges way that seemed to be who he was down to his core. He wasn’t really Sheila’s type, not that Sheila had a specific type, but he wasn’t the sort of guy she’d ever gone out on a date with before, either. Her mother would have known that too. Sheila’s mother had always wanted to know what was going on, back when Sheila actually dated. When Myspace and Facebook came around, and her mother began commenting on photos Sheila had posted from some of her date nights with statements like, “He’s a hottie!” and “Now that’s a keeper!” Sheila had had to block her mother. And only weeks later she discovered that on her mother’s own social networking walls, her mother was publicly bemoaning the fact that her daughter had blocked her.

  But really, her mother would have known that Lyle wasn’t her sort of guy. “So what gives?” she finally asked, after Lyle had finished a tall beer and she’d gotten close to the bottom of her martini. “How do you know my mother? Why would she think we’d make a good pair?”

  “I’m her butcher.”

  Sheila almost spat out the vodka swirling in her mouth, but managed to swallow before saying, “Her butcher? Really? I didn’t know my mother had a butcher.”

  “She comes to the West Side Market every Saturday,” said Lyle. “I work at Doreen’s Meats. Your mother always buys her meat for the week there. As for why would she think we’d make a good pair? I don’t know.” Lyle shrugged and held his palms up in the air. “I guess maybe she thought we’d get along because of what we have in common.”

  Sheila snorted, then raised her hand to signal Corrine back over. “I’d like another martini,” she said, and smiled in the way some people do when they need to smother an uncivil reaction: lips firmly held together. She turned back to Lyle, who was cracking another peanut shell between his thick, hairy fingers, and said, “So what do we have in common, besides my mother?”

  “I’m a werewolf,” said Lyle. Then he flicked the peanut off his thumb and snatched it out of the air, midflight, in his mouth.

  Sheila watched as Lyle crunched the peanut, and noticed only after he’d swallowed and smiled across the table at her that he had a particularly large set of canines. “You’re kidding,” said Sheila. “Ha ha, very funny. You might as well start telling witch jokes at this point.”

  “Not kidding,” said Lyle. Corrine stopped at their table, halting the conversation as she placed another tall beer in front of Lyle, another martini in front of Sheila, and asked what they’d like to order.

  “I think we’re just here to drink tonight,” said Lyle, not taking his eyes off Sheila.

  Sheila nodded vigorously at Corrine, though, agreeing. And after she left, Sheila said, “Well, this is a new achievement for my mother. Set her daughter up with a werewolf.”

  “What? You don’t like werewolves?” Lyle asked. One corner of his mouth lifted into a 1970s drug dealer grin.

  Sheila blinked a lot for a while, took another sip of her martini, then shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve ever thought about, you know,” she said. “I mean, werewolves aren’t generally on my radar. I get a lot of people who come around with minor psychic powers, and they’re attracted to me because they can sense I’m something out of the ordinary but can’t quite place what exactly, and of course I know a decent amount of witches—we can spot each other on the street without knowing one another, really—but werewolves are generally outside of my experience. Especially my dating experience.”

  “From what I understand, your dating experience has been pretty non-existent in general.”

  Sheila decided it was time to take yet another drink. After swallowing a large gulp of vodka, she said, “My mother has a big mouth for someone who hasn’t gotten back in the saddle since my father left her nearly two decades ago. And you can tell her I said that next time she comes in to stock up on meat.”

  Lyle laughed. It was a full, throaty laugh that made heads turn in the steakhouse. When he realized this, he reined himself in, but Sheila could see that the laugh—the sheer volume of it when he’d let himself go—was beyond ordinary. It bordered on the wild. She could imagine him as a wolf in that moment, howling at a blood red moon.

  “So what is it? Once a month you get hairy and run around the city killing people?” Sheila asked.

  Lyle leaned back on his side of the booth and said, “Are you serious?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Sheila. “I hear it’s quite difficult to control bloodlust in times like that.”

  “I make arrangements for those times,” said Lyle.

  “Arrangements, huh,” said Sheila. “What sort of arrangements?”

  “I rent an underground garage, have it filled with plenty of raw steaks, and get locked in for the night.”

  “That’s responsible of you,” said Sheila.

  “What about you?” Lyle asked. “Any inclinations to doing evil? Casting hexes?”

  “No bloodlust for witches,” said Sheila, “and I gave up the vicious cycle of curse drama in college. Not worth it. That shit comes back on you sevenfold.”

  Lyle snickered. He ran his thumb and forefinger over his scraggly goatee, then took another drink of beer. “Looks like we’re a pair,” he said, “just like your mother imagined.”

  “Why?” Sheila asked. “Because you put yourself in a werewolf kennel on full moon nights and I don’t dabble in wreaking havoc in other people’s lives?”

  Lyle nodded, his lips rising into a grin that revealed his pointy, slightly yellowed canines.

  “I hardly think that constitutes being a pair,” said Sheila. “We certainly have that in common, but it’s a bit like saying we should start dating because we’re both single and living in Cleveland.”

  “Why
are you so single?” Lyle asked. His nostrils flared several times.

  Oh my God, he is totally sniffing me! “I need to use the ladies’ room,” she said.

  In the restroom, Sheila leaned against the counter and stared at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a short black dress and had hung her favorite opal earrings on her earlobes. They glowed in the strange orange neon beer-sign light of the restroom. She shouldn’t have answered when he knocked. She should have kept things in order. Weekend BBQs with Trent and Gary, even with the obnoxious Snowman running between their legs and wanting to jump on her and lick her. Working a few hours a day with clients, helping them to love or be loved, to find love. Evening runs in the park. Grocery shopping on Wednesdays. That’s what she wanted, not a werewolf butcher/lover her mother had found in the West Side Market.

  The last time Sheila dated someone had been slightly less than underwhelming. He’d been an utterly normal man named Paul who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland downtown, and he talked endlessly of bank capitalization and exchange-traded funds. Sheila had tried to love him, but it was as if all the bank talk was more powerful than any spell she might cast on herself, and so she’d had to add Paul to her long list of previous candidates for love.

  There had been Jim, a guy who owned a car dealership in Lakewood, but he always came off as a salesman, and Sheila wasn’t the consumer type. There had been Alexis, a law student at Case Western, but despite her girlish good looks and intelligence, Alexis had worried about Sheila’s under-the-table Paranormal Romance business—concerned that she was possibly defrauding the government of taxable income. There had been Mark, the CPA (say no more). There had been Lola, the karaoke DJ (say no more). And there had been a string of potentials before that, too, once Sheila began sorting through the memories of her twenties, a long line of cute young men and women whose faces faded a little more each day. She had tried—she had tried so hard—hoping one of them would take the weight of her existence and toss it into the air like a beach ball. The love line went back and back and back, so far back, but none of those boys or girls had been able to do this. None of them.