A Snicker of Magic

by Natalie Lloyd

  “I’m telling the truth, Cleo,” Day said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “You look just like an angel right now.”

  Cleo’s wings were bent, turned sideways against her back. With her hair piled haystack-high on her head and her black sunglasses covering half her face, she looked to me more like an angry bumblebee than an angel. Cleo didn’t respond to Day’s compliment. She kept on walking.

  I waved at Day when we passed him. When he waved back, I thought I saw a sad smile hiding under his beard.

  Boone stayed back to talk to him for a few minutes. When he caught up to us, he gave Cleo a playful punch on the shoulder and said, “What happened to all those new beginnings you were talking about?”

  “Hush, Boone.” Cleo tucked a cigarette into her teeth. “Mind your own business.”

  Mama chuckled. Boone winked down at me and started whistling. Frannie Jo slid her hand into mine and held on tight.

  Someday, when I got brave enough to taste Blackberry Sunrise, I hoped that exact memory is the first one I’d think of: The sunset colors stretched across the sky. Tiny red leaves twirled down around us along the wooded path. I wanted to remember Boone’s lonesome whistle and the way Cleo’s cigarette smoke curled so elegantly, so gracefully up toward the sky. I wanted to remember the way Mama kept looking up toward the clouds, smiling at the birds swooping through the treetops. I never wanted to forget all the ways we were connected that day: By our shadows and sunlight. By pounding hearts and a starry maybe.

  By the nearly silent flutter of our broken wings.

  “Poets and paupers,” Jonah said. He was glancing down at the words I’d just penciled in the blue book.

  Day Grissom’s bus had dropped us off on Main Street at Dr. Zook’s Dreamery Creamery, the only ice-cream shop in the world that had all of Dr. Zook’s 45 Mysterious Flavors. Jonah said Zook’s was the most swankified place to get some work done. His Beedle work consisted of (1) scheming up nice things to do for people and (2) helping me plan for the Duel. Which he was still convinced was my key to convincing Mama we should stay in Midnight Gulch.

  My work was to get inspired enough to write my poems for dueling day. Also, my work was figuring out how to deliver that talent without barfing all over the stage.

  “That’s why I brought you here,” Jonah said. “Because ice cream is wholly inspirational.”

  But I thought he meant Holy Inspirational.

  So I said, “Amen!”

  And Jonah shrugged his shoulders and said, “Hallelujah!”

  And he bought two pints for us to split.

  “Poets and paupers.” I nodded toward the window. I reached for the pint of Uncle Duane’s Sublime Key Lime Pie. “Those are the words I see across the street at the pie shop.”

  “No way!” Jonah’s green eyes glittered sparkly wild. “That’s what that building used to be called. Way back before it was Ponder’s Pie Shop, it was a pub called The Poet & Pauper. That’s one of the oldest buildings in the whole state.”

  Jonah leaned across the table toward me. He had a secret-telling look on his face. So I leaned in real close to listen. I liked keeping his secrets.

  “You’ve met Ponder, who owns the pie shop? Well, she’s kin to the Smiths. And the Smith magic had to do with cooking.”

  “How so?” I took a last bite of key lime deliciousness and pushed the pint across the table to Jonah.

  “Back during the Civil War,” Jonah began, as he nudged his pint of Erin’s Peach Pecan across the table to me, “Nancy Smith worked at that shop making spy pies. Soldiers would walk in there and tell Nancy certain secret information. And, somehow, Nancy Smith could bake that information into the pie. There were no slips of paper. No number codes. No tangible pieces of evidence. It was the secret she baked in. Soldiers could taste those pies and know all sorts of important things. The whole war might have turned out different if it hadn’t been for Nancy Smith.”

  “Spindiddly!” I said.

  Jonah grinned as he leaned back in his seat. “People claim Ponder’s pies still have a snicker of magic.”

  “A snicker?”

  “That’s magic leftover,” Jonah explained. “Not good for much, not as fancy as it used to be — but enough to make it special.”

  I leaned across the table and whispered, “Do you think your know-how is a snicker of magic?”

  “Maybe.” He shrugged. And then he cocked his head at me. “I think your word collecting is a snicker of magic.”

  “Word collecting’s not magic,” I argued. “It’s just a quirk, just how I am.”

  Jonah twirled his pen through his fingers. “The Brothers Threadbare probably thought that way. Until the day they saw what their music did to people, how it made them dance. Made them happy.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten, the Brothers Threadbare wrecked this town.”

  “Not at first,” Jonah countered.

  Oliver’s story of the Threadbare curse had stuck with me. I’d written the words in my blue book, but I might as well have written them inside my head and inside my heart and in the air all around me. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about them. And I didn’t know why.

  The Brothers Threadbare were dead and gone.

  They had nothing to do with me.

  And anyway, the only magic I was interested in was the kind that would make Mama stay put. I’d give anything to find a snicker of magic like that. I looked back across the street at the words poets and paupers still fluttering over Ponder’s door. “Is there a snicker of magic in Ponder’s pies?”

  Jonah shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe. She doesn’t bake secret spy stuff anymore, of course. But they say her blackberry pie makes people fall in love. And her apple pie makes people feel brave. All I know for sure is that she makes pies that are spindiddly delicious.”

  “What does that guy do?” I pointed to the scrawny man dancing down the sidewalk across the street. Since Jonah and I had arrived at Dr. Zook’s, I’d watched the man set up a huge radio near Ponder’s Pie Shop. Then he plugged a microphone into the radio. And now he was singing so loud and hard his face was red. Explosive red. “Does he have a snicker of magic?”

  “That’s Elvis Phillips,” Jonah said. “He stands on Main Street and sings songs by Elvis Presley. No magic there. He figures since his name is Elvis, he’s got a similar calling as the King.”

  “Is he crazy?” I asked.

  Elvis Phillips closed his eyes and leaned back. Then he clinched his fist, kicked his scrawny leg out, and howled the final lyric of “Jailhouse Rock.”

  “He’s no crazier than anybody else in Midnight Gulch.” Jonah smiled.

  “This Duel’s making me crazy.” I looked down at the mostly empty page of my blue book. “I could use a slice of Brave Apple Pie. A gargantuan slice.”

  Jonah asked me exactly how many poems I’d written for the Duel, and I told him the truth, that I’d written exactly zero-zilch-nothing-nada.

  “Flea!” Jonah hollered. “We have less than one week left!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It’d be easier to break that stupid curse than compete in the Duel.”

  Jonah shook his head. “Something good is going to happen at the Duel.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Then start believing me!” He leaned closer to me and whispered, “Beedle intuition is always spot-on.”

  “No matter how many words I write, they’re still just words. Words aren’t the same as talent.”

  With a carton of ice cream in one hand and a spoon clutched tight in the other, Jonah looked as determined as I’d ever seen him. “Your words are talent. And I’m going to help you see it.”

  “I’m grateful for all the ways you’re helping me,” I sighed. “But when the Duel’s over, it won’t matter if I win or lose. It won’t matter if I say something smart or stupid. In the end, I still have to leave.”

  Jonah must have seen the panic in my face, because his voice drifted back to peaceful-easy as he said, “Don’t
worry about your poems yet.” He reached across the table and turned to a blank page in the blue book. “Just make a list of random facts. That’ll get your pen moving and your imagination running.”

  Jonah opened his newspaper and started circling and plotting and planning good deeds. I glanced all around me, trying to find some inspiration. I saw an old couple with matching sun visors. They were eating ice-cream cones full of rainbow-colored scoops. I watched a girl with red hair hold a novel in one hand and a waffle cone in the other. She was mumbling the words of her story, so happy to be reading that she didn’t notice the pink dollop of ice cream on her chin. I watched little kids stand on their tiptoes and stare at all the bright flavors kept safe behind the glass.

  I wondered if any of those people had blue books, too. Did anybody else in the world see words the same way I did? Was word collecting a kind of magic, like singing at the clouds and baking spy pies? Maybe my words were only a snicker of magic. Maybe they were nothing. But they were still mine.

  I concentrated on my blue book again. I decided I might as well write about myself.

  I glanced across the table at Jonah. I looked back down at my book. I wrote:

  The only perk of my impending Dueldom was spending more time with Jonah. Hanging out with my family was fabulous, but my time with Jonah was a different kind of wonderful. Jonah Pickett was like snow days, field trips, candy stores, and Christmas Eve all blended into one big swoosh of a feeling.

  “Felicity,” Jonah drawled.

  My face tingled red because I realized I’d been staring at him for way too long.

  I shifted my eyes back to the blue book and cleared my throat. “Yep?”

  “Is Boone staying at Cleo’s apartment, too?”

  I nodded. “Cleo says we’re packed in tight as sardines. Me and Frannie Jo and Biscuit sleep in the craft room. Mama sleeps on the couch. Uncle Boone sleeps in a sleeping bag in front of the laundry closet.

  “Last night, Aunt Cleo forgot he was there and she tripped and fell over him. And her lit cigarette caught the edge of his sleeping bag on fire. Cleo tried to beat out the fire with her house slipper while Boone tried to wriggle out of the sleeping bag, but the zipper was stuck. I don’t know if it was the hollering or the smell of smoke that woke up Mama, but she got the fire extinguisher. Then she barreled down the hall, spraying the fire extinguisher like a wild woman. Ruined Cleo’s carpet.”

  Jonah laughed. “We gotta figure out something really good to do for Cleo.”

  He scribbled a few notes in the corner of the newspaper. Then he reached down into his backpack.

  “I picked these up for your uncle.”

  Jonah passed me a box of new banjo strings.

  “Spindiddly!” I said. “But how are you going to get them to him? Boone barely leaves the apartment. He’s too sad over the Nashville floozy.”

  Jonah pulled a roll of red ribbon from his backpack and tossed that across the table, too.

  “I figured you could do it.” He smiled at me. “Just write something clever on the box and sign it …” Jonah mouthed the Beedle.

  My heart felt heavy in a good way, holding me steady in a moment I needed to be sure and remember.

  I leaned across the table and whispered, “I get to be … pumpernickel?”

  “Is that all right? I was thinking the other day, when Oliver talked about Eldee Mae helping him out all those years, that it’d be nice to have an accomplice. Only if you want to, of course.”

  “I want to!”

  “Spindiddly.” Jonah smiled. And we both looked out the window just in time to see Elvis Phillips do the split.

  The wind-chime wind chose that exact moment to make its way down Main Street. And this time, the wind brought a creepy-cold feeling along with it. At first, I pushed the ice-cream carton away from me because I figured the cold was a delayed case of brain freeze.

  But then I heard the chimes: soft, quiet, caught in the wrinkles of the autumn air. I hated that sound.

  Jonah sat up straighter at exactly that moment and I was about to ask him if he heard it, too, if he felt as bone-cold as I did.

  But Jonah looked out the window and smiled. “Right on time,” he said as he pushed away from the table.

  “Pack up the blue book, Felicity!” said Jonah. “There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  The wind-chime wind had faded out by the time Jonah led me down Main Street.

  I thought about Miss Divinity Lawson’s words. “Every place has a story,” she’d said. So I imagined how Main Street looked one hundred years ago when the Brothers Threadbare played here. Miss Lawson said that the music was so wonderful, so loud and wild and strange, that the trees caught the songs and wouldn’t turn them loose. People could always hear the music, she’d said, “even when the Brothers Threadbare were out of town.”

  I thought about people dancing down that very same street I was walking down. Maybe the street looked different then. Maybe people dressed different back then. But I’ll bet their hearts sang out yes-yes-yes when they danced up the dust of this road.

  Nobody was dancing here now. Nobody except Elvis Phillips. And I was fairly certain that’s not the sort of dancing Miss Lawson had in mind.

  Elvis stopped howling long enough to say hello to Jonah when we passed by. Next, we both said hello to Ponder Waller. She was busy sweeping the sidewalk around her storefront, a polka-dot apron cinched tight around her waist.

  Made from scratch

  Ready to rise

  “Bring your mama and sister back and let me feed y’all!” she reminded me. And I promised I would. The door to her shop was propped open with an old book. Smells of sugar and caramel apples drifted into the street, enveloping us in a warm haze of pure delight.

  “Bet that’s what heaven smells like,” Jonah said.

  “Amen,” I said.

  “Hallelujah,” Jonah agreed.

  I pulled out my blue book to collect the words Ponder was sweeping up alongside all the dust and dirt and feathers around her door:

  Whimsy

  Wonder

  Celebration

  Sorrow

  “We’re turning here, Felicity,” Jonah said. And it’s a good thing he told me, because I was concentrating so hard on my words that I might have kept on going.

  As we turned onto Second Street, I could hear the river gurgling somewhere close by. And if I could hear the river, that meant we were close to the bridge that brought me into Midnight Gulch.

  “The Gallery’s right up ahead,” Jonah said. “Have you seen it up close yet?”

  “No,” I answered. My heart ached as we walked toward the old building. “But it looks even sadder up close than it did from far off.”

  The paint was mostly chipped off the Gallery wall, but not enough for me to tell what Stone Weatherly had painted there one hundred years ago. His painting was probably faded by now anyway. Time fades every picture, no matter how bright it is to start.

  The spray-painted words on the Gallery still trembled and shivered, like they didn’t belong there. But today, the words weren’t the only thing that looked out of place.

  A skinny woman sat on the sidewalk, her back against the Gallery wall. She kept her knees pulled up against her chest and her eyes cast down. She kept an old canvas bag slumped on the ground beside her.

  I couldn’t tell much about her face right then because all I could see was her hair: dark black and long, with yellow ribbons twisted through the braids closest to her face. She held a cigarette loosely between her skinny fingers. Smoke curled off the tip and rose up into the most extraordinary words:

  Magnolia

  Star root

  Dragon

  Luminous

  Memory

  The silver bracelets along her arm jingled pretty as she lifted the cigarette to her mouth. That’s when I first saw her face; it was as strange and pretty as her words had been. She was spellbinding.

  She must have noticed us right then, too. She smiled, star
ry white.

  “Jonah Pickett,” she rasped. “How’d you know I’d be out here, Honeybee?”

  “Florentine calls me Honeybee because my hair is blond and prickly,” Jonah said.

  “And because you’re so sweet!” said the woman, who looked about the same age as my mama. They were both too young to have so much sadness caught in their eyes. “How’d you know I was sitting here hoping for company?”

  Jonah wheeled up beside Florentine. He pulled an icy pint of Blackberry Sunrise from his backpack. He grinned as he handed her the ice-cream carton and a plastic spoon. “The Beedle knows everything.”

  Florentine glanced at me. She glanced back at Jonah and raised an eyebrow. “Pumpernickel?” she asked.

  Jonah nodded. “She knows.”

  “Does she now?” Florentine drawled. “This girl must be something special.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jonah smiled at me. “She sure is.”

  The tips of my ears burned so hot I thought about running off to dunk my head in the river. Instead, I sat down on the sidewalk across from the starry-smiled stranger.

  “You better tell me more about her, then,” said Florentine. “Better tell me more about this pretty little girl you done told your pumpernickel secrets to.”

  “She’s my best friend, Felicity Pickle,” Jonah said.

  Best friend. Not just a friend, a best friend. The friend word fluttered around between us, still squirmy and bug-legged. Now it had a set of golden wings.

  Jonah said to me, “I wanted you to meet Florentine because she’s a poet.”

  A poet. No wonder she was a strange and starry-smiled kind of pretty. No wonder she was beautiful. Poets always are.

  “I’ve been many other things, too,” Florentine said. “I’ve been a laundry folder and a bread baker. I worked at a fish market on the Georgia coast. I flicked scales off them fish for so long that I still see words that way, shiny as scales, brittle as bones. And somehow, someday, somewhere along the way” — she shrugged her shoulders — “I became a poet.”

  “Felicity’s a poet, too,” Jonah said softly.