by Michelle Tea
“I don’t want to know who my father is!” Sophie screamed at the flock. “I like not having a father; it’s too weird to have one all of a sudden! I don’t want to know anything else about my family!”
Sophie remembered the secret she felt bobbing inside Angel, something about Andrea, her mother. She thought about the twin baby pictures in Hennie’s copper locket. Maybe for a moment she’d wanted to know more, but Sophie had changed her mind. She wanted Andrea to remain Andrea—cranky, overworked. As Andrea had tended to ignore her daughter, so had Sophie learned to tune out her mom. She didn’t want to tune in now, with so much sad, spooky information spinning around her. “I don’t want to know everything, okay?” she shouted. A dog howled at the sound of her voice, another animal able to move in the time-stop. Her grandfather.
Giddy lifted herself from the wire and flew down to Sophie’s hot shoulder. She fluttered and cooed, still smelling sweet from her bath.
“If I had a mouth I would give you a kiss,” she said. She brushed Sophie’s face with her wing. “Maybe you should apologize to Hennie.”
“I’ve been here forever. I have to go home.”
“Time’s stopped,” Arthur butted in. “No one’s even conscious right now but us and Hennie. And Kishka.” He shuddered, his feathers puffed up as if a wind had hit them.
“And my grandfather, the German Shepherd,” Sophie said. “I’m going home.” She turned on her heel and headed down Heard Street.
She passed the gang of boys who commonly terrorized her, frozen on a front porch. Their bicycles were heaped on the sidewalk, and it occurred to Sophie that she could just take one. It occurred to her that she could go right up to the biggest one, the bullyingest one, and give him a smack, a punch, a kick. He stood with one hand low on his hip, the other gesturing outward; he had been in the midst of a story when the zagavory hit. If she knocked him over would he retain his pose, like a department store mannequin?
Sophie walked up onto the porch. She slid between the boys—one half-bent in laughter, one leaning back against the wall, scratchy with peeling paint. Another had a cigarette stuck in the v of his fingers, burned down to the filter, a long ash arcing precariously. Sophie bumped his arm, shocked at the feel of his skin. The ash crumbled.
“What are you doing, Sophie?” Livia said. The bird sounded scared. “Leave the people alone.”
But it was mesmerizing to be here, in a lion’s den of sorts, and to be unafraid, safe for the moment, so close to the boys who bothered her. Not that Sophie could be sure that these were the boys who hounded her, trailed her on their bicycles, hollered names at her, suggested they would like to grab her and bring her to the train tracks, if only she wasn’t so ugly, such a dog, and how they barked as they menaced her, howling and bow-wowing, ruff-ruffing. Sophie kept her head down and so never really saw the boys as anything more than a pack, a cloud, a blur of striped athletic shirts, the silver spinning of bicycle wheels. This largest boy might not be the bully. Sophie tried to get a read on him, pushing into his space, but it was like static on a television set, no picture, no nothing. She placed her hand flat on the muscle of his arm. It was warm the way living people are warm. She brushed his hair out of his eyes. His hair was damp with humidity and sweat.
“Sophie,” Livia continued nervously. “Hennie could break the spell any minute. Then you’re here with all these boys, with a bunch of pigeons. Sophie, it would be terrible. Please, let’s go.”
Sophie imagined what would happen if the boys all came to with her standing there, twirling their hair. Partly it was hilarious, but also, horrifying. She stomped off the porch, extra hard, wondering if the stomp of her feet would jar them like sleeping people but of course it didn’t. “This is totally weird,” Sophie breathed. Her crying had stopped, her sadness distracted by the strange world she suddenly occupied.
* * *
THE STOPPING OF time didn’t really make Sophie’s house feel very different. Andrea slept in her darkened room, the shade drawn against the heat of the day, making the place a cave. Sophie thought she should get her mother more water, in case the time-stop stopped and she awoke extra thirsty in her fever. She moved toward her mother’s night table, reaching for the empty glass. Andrea started, rolling over in her bed, cracking her puffy eyes in alarm. Sophie screamed.
“What? What?” Andrea scrambled up in her bed, kicking sweaty sheets down her legs. “Oh my god, what? What are you doing? Why are you screaming?”
Sophie felt a bit of her mind flex, and the water glass was in her hand, broken. A crack had loosened a shard, and the shard lay in Sophie’s palm.
“The—the glass broke,” she said quickly, flooded with gratitude for her instinctive magic. Hennie was right, she could just do it. Sophie knew there was simple magic-mind tricks—and bigger magic that required stuff from her magic pouch and the howl of her zawolanie. How would she know the difference? She just would. It was part of her overall knowing.
“Oh my god, you scared me,” Andrea said. “Are you okay? Is there glass on the floor? Did you go to Goldstein’s?”
Sophie nodded, patting her purse.
“I have everything, juice, soup, all of it. The glass—it’s—I’m fine, it’s okay.” Why was Andrea awake? Because she was Kishka’s daughter. Because she was Sophie’s mother. Because somewhere inside her lay a dormant gene for magic, and it made her immune to the stoppage of time.
“Bring me some water,” Andrea said. “And throw that glass away. And make yourself some soup or something. I’m not going to be able to cook for you tonight.” Andrea collapsed back onto her pillows before Sophie could say something smart about tonight being just like any other night. Why did she have to be so mean to her mom? Was it a piece of Kishka’s cruel magic inside her? She bent low and gave her mom a kiss on her sweaty forehead. Andrea batted her away.
“Are you crazy?” she asked groggily. “Do you want to get yourself sick?”
* * *
WITH HER MOM conked out on cold medicine, Sophie rummaged half-heartedly through the fridge. There wasn’t much to eat, but she wasn’t really hungry. She was distracted, bunched up inside. What was she supposed to do now? Where were the pigeons? Sophie moved to the kitchen window and spotted them huddling and cooing by their bowls of water. And what else she saw sent goosebumps rising up her arms like a mountain range: Laurie LeClair, standing in her backyard. Like a skull-faced ghost with her pale skin, black-rimmed eyes, and flat white hair. She looked into the window, staring into Sophie’s face with her blank and hollow gaze. “Laurie?” Sophie stuttered.
“What?” Andrea mumbled from her bedroom.
“Nothing, Ma!” Sophie yelled back, not taking her eyes off Laurie’s, empty and haunted at once. She wore black jeans, tight on her skinny legs, and black sneakers, and a black t-shirt revealing long white arms spotted with bruises. Her child was with her, a toddler with amber curls, in wrinkly shorts and a t-shirt. One hand clutched Laurie’s, the other held a plastic shovel. When Laurie let go and moved toward Sophie the child’s hand stayed raised, her fingers curled in an empty grip. The child had been stunned by the time-stop, but not Laurie. Laurie glanced at the baby, made sure she was stable, and walked stiffly across the yard. The pigeons parted to accommodate her, and Sophie ran from her kitchen, dashing out the back door to intercept her.
“Laurie, Laurie, Laurie,” Sophie gasped, putting her arms in front of her, touching the girl’s shoulders. “How are you awake? Time is stopped. Are you magic, too?”
Sophie stared deep into Laurie’s dead eyes. The only magic she could possibly have was the unnatural reanimation of a zombie. Sophie glanced over at the child, posed like a doll at the back of the yard. She looked like one of the lawn ornaments cluttering the yard of the woman up the street. She should be holding a lantern, not a toy shovel, or wearing a pointed red hat like a gnome.
Laurie’s chapped mouth cracked open to speak. When Laurie spoke Sophie didn’t only hear the words, she felt them, and the feeling was bad.
“I am the Dola,” Laurie spoke. There was a life in her eyes, a strange flicker. “I am not Laurie right now.”
Sophie wished the thing would never talk again. Every word seared into her, leaving in its wake a regret that seeped into her bones. Oh no, Sophie thought, and the phrase began a loop she was powerless to stop. Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.
“Come here, let’s talk back here.” Sophie pulled Laurie back to the rear of the yard, where the pigeons had assembled themselves around the baby. “Will you guys make some noise?” she requested, and a choir of cooing started up. “Thank you.” Sophie looked at the little girl, her steady breathing, her rigid pose. The sun blasted down on her. “She’s going to get a sunburn,” Sophie said, worried.
“You can move her,” said the Dola.
Sophie lifted the girl under his arms. She was light and smelled like a baby, sort of sour. She was grimy, her hair full of dust, her clothing limp from being worn and re-worn. It was strange, placing her down in the shade like a statue. She wobbled, but stayed upright. “How old is she?” Sophie asked.
The Dola considered, reaching backward into Laurie’s consciousness. “Almost two.” Sophie nodded. She leaned her back against the chainlink fence, which sagged gently like a hammock beneath her weight. The Dola stood stiff before her, watching her with Laurie’s face.
“Why are you Laurie LeClair?” Sophie asked.
“She was easy to get into,” the Dola said. “She takes drugs, it makes it very simple to slip in. She doesn’t really know herself, so she doesn’t know if an entity takes over. She just thinks it’s the drugs.”
This made Sophie feel bad, and it wasn’t just the Dola’s voice spurring doom and gloom inside her body. The Dola was a creep. “That seems… unethical,” Sophie said in a smart voice.
“There is no such thing as ethics,” the Dola said. “There is only destiny, and much of it is bad. Nonetheless, it is such, it is destiny. It is the rule, and it must be obeyed.” The Dola turned her face to the sun. “The destiny of every person is inside me,” she said, her scary eyes closed. “I feel it. When it goes off track I feel that, too. You have gone off track.”
“I have?” Sophie didn’t want to talk about herself, she was fully sick of thinking about herself. She would rather engage the Dola in existential debates that made her feel smart. “Isn’t it my destiny then, to get off track with my destiny?”
The Dola opened her eyes and rolled them. “Yes. It is your destiny to have done this. And it is my destiny to come here and bring you back to your destiny.”
“You want me to go back to Hennie’s, don’t you?” Sophie sulked, fighting back a rain of tears. Every time the Dola spoke it was an injury upon her heart. The muscle grew heavier with every word, a solid rock in her chest.
“Yes.” The Dola nodded Laurie LeClair’s head. “You were meant to learn more from that woman. You need to go back to her.”
“Is she ever going to put time back on?” Sophie whined. “Is she waiting for me to come back or something?”
The Dola shrugged. “I don’t know, time doesn’t have a destiny. It’s time. I know nothing about it.”
“And if I don’t go back to Hennie’s what happens? You keep hanging around?”
The Dola nodded. “Yes. I will be around you always.”
“That’s going to be really weird,” Sophie pouted. “It’s going to be really weird to have Laurie LeClair just hanging around all the time. Especially when the time spell is broken and that baby starts crying.” They both turned back to look at the frozen child. A fly had landed on her cheek. Were flies magic? How come they got to buzz around? “Livia, will you make sure bugs aren’t crawling on that baby?”
“Oh, of course.” Livia set about to brushing the baby off with her feathers, cooing all the while.
“If you’re just hanging around like Laurie LeClair,” Sophie continued, “being creepy, people are going to call the cops or something. Or someone who knows Laurie will take her to the hospital. Then what are you gonna do?”
“Then I jump into another’s body,” the Dola said, simply.
“Really.”
“Oh, yes. It can go on for all eternity. If I am forced to leave Laurie, I am thinking I will occupy your mother.”
“No!” Sophie cried.
“Yes. She is very weakened; she would be easy to slip into.”
“You are really evil,” Sophie spat. “I don’t know how you can live with yourself.”
“It helps that there is no such thing as evil,” the Dola said. “If I believed in it, I would probably have a hard time.”
“I thought there was evil,” Sophie said. “I thought my grandmother was evil.”
“The concept of evil serves its purpose for humans,” the Dola granted. “But where I exist, there is no such thing. There is only destiny.”
“Well, I wish you would go back there,” Sophie grumbled.
“If you return to your destiny, I will,” the Dola said. “I would love a day off. I was haunting Laurie in the form of her drug dealer earlier this week. She was going to let that child die, and that is not their destiny. After she’d salted her, she was meant to bring her to the hospital, and instead she did her drugs and fell into a stupor. I was very concerned she wouldn’t respond to my haunting, and that the child would die.”
“And then what?” Sophie asked. “You’d haunt her forever?”
“No, the child would,” the Dola explained. “She would become a Naw, a spirit cast out of their bodies against their destiny. It would have been tragic for everyone. Naws are eternally unhappy, and Laurie would have been driven mad. So, good work last week. Now this week, I have you.”
Inside her home, Sophie checked in on her sleeping mom. Andrea snored a light snore, undisturbed by the drama in the backyard. Satisfied, Sophie made a cup of instant soup and sat at her kitchen table eating it, having a staring contest with the Dola out the window. As the sun slid across the sky, Sophie periodically returned to the yard to move the little girl into a shady place. “This is crazy,” Sophie said.
“Yes,” the Dola agreed.
Sophie went back into her house and grabbed her magic pouch from her mother’s purse and returned to the yard. The Dola watched her, solemnly. Occasionally the being said, “You should return to Hennie,” and the words ran down Sophie’s spine, pure guilt. She ignored it.
Sophie stuffed her hand into the pouch. How was she supposed to know what grainy grain or sharp rock or smooth rock or sandy sand or pigeon bone was the magic ingredient she needed? She let her hand hang open inside the bag, and felt it pulled toward something. The grainy bits. She harvested them from the bag, felt the pile of it cool and heavy in her hand. Did she need fire? Hennie had used fire. Andrea didn’t smoke, there were never any matches around. Supposedly Sophie was able to just make things with her mind; surely fire, so elemental, would be simple. And it was. A tuft of flames ignited on a patch of dirt in her backyard. Sophie quickly yanked a few dry sprouts of weeds that hung too close. She took a breath. The pigeons stirred.
If Sophie was as powerful as everyone was acting, she should be able to do—or undo—any zagavory Hennie could do. She found the piece of herself that was her zawolanie and flexed it, let the perfect sound fly from her lips. She hurled the grainy grains into the fire, extinguishing it. A glass bowl holding water for the pigeons cracked, wetting the dirt. Sophie heard the snap of her mother’s water glass breaking on her nightstand inside the house. Laurie LeClair’s baby burst into tears, flapping its arms against itself like a grounded bird. The pigeon’s coos became alarmed as they dodged blind baby-stomps. She screamed and howled, waving her plastic shovel. The Dola turned to her with an annoyed sigh.
“Sophie!” Sophie could hear her mother shouting for her inside the house. The crazy racket, the strange electrical surge of time reactivated, had awoken her. The baby continued to cry. The Dola stared at it blankly.
“It’s a baby,” Sophie snapped at her. “Just be sweet to it. Do Dolas h
ave, like, no maternal instinct?”
“No, we don’t,” the Dola said. “I actually don’t even know what you mean by maternal instinct. That’s a human thing. I’m more of a concept.” She walked to the baby and petted its head awkwardly. The child looked up at her mother and, not finding her, screamed louder.
“Sophie!” Andrea’s head poked out the kitchen window, then was gone. Soon she was on the back porch, her puffy, sickly eyes widening at what she saw. Andrea’s head teetered back and forth between her daughter and Laurie LeClair, with an occasional dip to take in Laurie LeClair’s screaming baby. The pigeons, Sophie noted, had flown away. Time was running smoothly. Her zagavory had worked. She’d kept control of her zawolanie, and it had done less damage. Sophie would have liked to bask in this victory, but the ruckus in her backyard prevented it.
“I’m sorry—Laurie? Laurie LeClair?”
The Dola looked at Andrea blankly.
“Can’t you just play along?” Sophie hissed. “Act normal?”
“I don’t care about the consequences you will face in your life as a result of not following your destiny,” the Dola said. “As far as I’m concerned, the more problems for you, the better.” The Dola fixed its steely, empty stare on Andrea, who shuddered.
“Sophie, what is going on? What is she doing here?”
“Uh, I was out in the yard, and she passed by and we just started talking,” Sophie said dumbly. She could see her mother deciding whether to believe her. “I’m so bored with being grounded!” She affected a whine. “I just wanted someone to hang out with!”
“Really?” Andrea raised an eyebrow. “Laurie LeClair?” The baby continued to howl. Laurie stood motionless beside it, unaffected. “What are you on?” Andrea demanded of the girl. “Huh? What’s wrong with your baby? Will you—do something, will you hold it or something? Sophie, really, what is going on!”
