The Flower Bowl Spell (3 page)

Auntie Tess was the smallest woman there
(easy to pick out in the crowd if you set your gaze lower than
usual) and the only Asian face among the others (not including
yours truly), which were predominantly white. There was a black
woman from Cuba too, but that’s as far as our coven’s diversity
diversified.

As I mentioned, I was bored. Bored with
making daisy chains, bored with the other coven kids, bored with
Tess. I leaned against her, her dark silk kimono slippery and cool
under my cheek. She had sewn it shut so that she could slide it
over her head.

“Auntie Tess,” I whispered.

“Shhh.” She opened one eye, which glinted
down at me.

“I want to be Dorothy for Halloween.”
Wizard of Oz
Dorothy, of course. “When are we getting my
costume?”

“Tomorrow, Memphis, I promise. Now sing or be
quiet.”

I watched the other women. Some smiled
through their song, earnest and blissed-out. Some undulated. Others
mouthed the words, but not Tess. With my ear pressed to her side, I
could feel her strong voice, her heartbeat, the gurgling of her
supper digesting. I pressed harder until she stumbled a little, and
got a frown for my hug.

In the center of the circle, the candles in
their hurricane lanterns and jelly jars burned, illuminating a
bouquet of flowers. The shadows flowed over the dolls, which made
it seem like they were dancing and grinning. I blinked and peered
closer and realized that they actually
were
dancing, all on
their own. One tossed off his sombrero and led the others in a
Mexican hat dance. Faintly, I could make out their voices, a
discordant cheering through the women’s singing. You might expect
them to sound like cartoon chipmunks, but their voices, though
faint, sounded quite robust.

As they cha-cha’ed by, they saluted me. And I
saluted back. I tugged on Tess’s brocade sleeve.

The thing is, I realized in the instant she
turned to look down at me that it was hopeless. Her face was full
of annoyance, and there was an absence of something I couldn’t name
at the time, but I thought of it as a light. She was missing the
light that makes magick visible.

“Do you see them?” I whispered, not ready to
give up hope.

“What?”

“They’re dancing.”

I felt Auntie Tess’s sides going in and out.
“Who?”

“The skeletons.”

Despite herself, Auntie Tess looked into the
center of the circle, and I looked with her. But the dolls were
still. One had fallen on its face. One had lost its hat. One was
getting its leg chewed by a gopher that was craftily dragging the
doll down its hole.

“It’s just gophers, lamb. See?”

I looked again. I did see. But I also saw
what she couldn’t. One of the gophers and one of the skeleton dolls
were now engaged in a lively conversation. They both turned to me
and waved. I blinked. And the dolls lay helter-skelter just as they
had been, in tiny, colorful heaps.

The women finished singing and Gru, our high
priestess, spoke. Like the other kids, I rarely paid attention to
what she said. When she was done, everyone sat on the ground,
avoiding the dog crap, some better than others. At least one person
always went home with a soiled robe after a Sabbat.

I folded my hands in my lap and looked
around. Everyone’s eyes were closed. Each person was speaking to
her dead. Beforehand, the grownups had told us kids that we too
could talk to the dearly departed. The adults called out. Cymbeline
Pitts asked for William Shakespeare. Sadie LeBrun Murray hailed her
twin brother Isaac, bringing tears to the high priestess’s eyes.
Tess made her call in poorly pronounced Chinese (second generation,
American-born—not a whole lot of opportunities for the native
speak), which made the others shift, wondering what she said.

I had trouble thinking of anyone dead to
call, so I silently asked for my father. He wasn’t dead—and still
is very much alive—but he was far away at the time, and to me it
was the same thing.

When everyone was done, Gru gave the nod for
cakes to be served. Bright Vixen, Gru’s second in command, had made
blueberry muffins from a mix. “I was in a software design meeting
all day,” she explained, handing out the pale little muffins. “No
time for much else.” I didn’t care, and I devoured my share.

“Happy New Year. Happy Samhain,” the women
murmured to each other and hugged, their arms reaching and
enfolding. We kids imitated the grownups, squeezing each other too
hard as we giggled. “Oh, Happy New Year,
darling
. Happy
Sow-Wayne
.”

Gru gave each of us a hug. Even then, she
seemed aged and ageless, her long silver hair plaited down her
back, her skin soft and lined, her blue eyes icy bright. As she
embraced me, she whispered in my ear, “I saw the skeletons and
gophers. I saw them say hello to you.” She pulled away from our hug
and gazed into my eyes. I didn’t know what to say. I smiled a
little and looked away.

“Don’t worry, Memphis,” she said. “This is a
wonderful gift. A powerful one.”

I nodded, afraid she would tell Auntie Tess,
or worse, my parents.

“I won’t,” she said. And I knew she had read
my thoughts. She was on my side. And for years, she helped me
figure out how far I could go with this powerful gift. Until I
decided it wasn’t a gift at all.

I remember leaving the fog-laden park in
Auntie Tess’s neon yellow Chevy Nova, wondering what the gopher and
the little skeleton were up to down below. I had just as much
curiosity about the availability of Dorothy costumes. Fifteen years
later, I still don’t know why magick decided to show itself to me
that night. And I still have trouble figuring out what to wear.

****

Auntie Tess takes her time answering the
buzzer. I’m beginning to suspect she’s a little hard of hearing,
even though she’s not that old.

“Hi, lamb,” she says with a quick, hard hug.
She has a soft roundness to her, but her arms and shoulders are
bony. She doesn’t really go for sweets, which is why I’m surprised
to see the tub of cheap supermarket ice cream on the living room
sideboard.

“Some dinner,” I say. Cooper and I had our
sunset picnic—prosciutto panini and salads with a good pinot noir
from A. G. Ferrari. Atop Billy Goat Hill we watched another
Columbus Day bite the dust.

Auntie Tess looks balefully at the ice cream,
and I regret my words. She’s very good at extracting regret from
me.

“Well, I needed a little something,” she
says.

I open the refrigerator door. A bottle of
hoisin sauce, a bag of rotting mustard greens. Tess nudges me out
of the way and puts the soggy ice cream carton back in the
freezer.

“So, what’s up? What did you want to talk
about?”

She washes her hands in the sink. “There’s
something going on at work.”


“Office romance? Has that guy in design been
hitting on you again?”

“Memphis!” She scowls while drying her hands
on a dishtowel. “He knows I’m married.”

She isn’t, actually. She just wears a wedding
band to ward off advances. Not that she’s had any lately. I kind of
wish she did as I glance around the small one-bedroom condo. It
belongs to my parents and she rents it from them. There’s none of
their energy lurking in this space—they are long gone, my father
with his teaching, my mother in London, last I heard. There’s only
Auntie Tess’s frenetic force. She wears rings on every finger and
even a couple on her toes that were clamped on by a Bangladeshi
woman in the Tenderloin.

“I think Gil wants to fire me.” Gil is Tess’s
boss, an assistant veep of operations at Ana & Co., one of the
biggest clothing chains in the world. Everyone on six continents
owns at least one pair of their jeans, a logo tee, or a knock-off.
I do. It’s a really cute logo. Palindromes are visually fab.

“Why?” I say.

“I accidentally forwarded an email from the
legal department to the ACLU.”

Uh oh. “What about?” I ask.

“Accusations from some civil rights groups
that we’re using sweat shop labor.”

“Okay. Is it true?”

She throws up her hands. “I don’t know! But
he yelled at me. He put me on mandatory leave.”

“With or without pay?”

She shrugs. “With.”

“Well, that’s good! You know, maybe you
should take a break. When’s the last time you went on
vacation?”

“Stonehenge.”

“Exactly. That was two years ago, right? This
time, you should go somewhere tropical. Hawaii maybe.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Auntie Tess, what is it?”

Her eyes seem sad, and a deep maroon glow—her
aura (I can’t seem to stop seeing those damn things)—radiates from
her like soft-focus lighting around the star of a romantic
comedy.

She walks out of the kitchen and into the
living room. Her altar is set up under the window, facing north.
Between the neighboring apartment buildings, you can see the fog
rolling in, illuminated orange by streetlights.

“Nothing, Memphis. Don’t worry about it.
Bring me the matches, will you? I need some answers.”

I pull a matchbook out of a kitchen drawer
and hand it to her.

“Let’s do the ceremony,” she says. “And I
think I’ll use sage. This space could use a little smudging.
There’s too much negative energy.”

I don’t sense any of that, but I say
nothing.

“Did you bring the candles?” she asks. I hand
her the plastic Target bag.

“Thanks. I need to go up to Gru’s and get
some more of the good kind.” She pauses, a box of cheap white
votives in hand. “It’s rather strange. I haven’t heard from her in
a while. Not since the last time I visited, and that was around the
May Pole. It’s not like her to not call.” She waves the box at me.
“You could come too.”

“Where?” I say, feigning spaciness.

“You know where.”

“I haven’t been up there in forever. It would
be weird.”

“She misses you, you know.” Tess frowns and
begins picking through her magickal cabinet. “Where did I leave
that bottle of lavender?”

Her distraction saves me from having to say
more. Ah, Gru. Gru is the one who told me about the origin of
fairies. She’s seen them too. She taught Tess and me everything we
know about magick: spells, rituals, charms, meditation, conversing
with the dearly departed as well as deities, Wiccan history, and
philosophy. She told me I had a natural gift but not a whole lot of
discipline, which is more than my parents said to me about anything
I ever tried, whether it was schoolwork or ballet.

When our coven disbanded, Gru retreated to
her place in Mendocino. She runs a pagan emporium, and Auntie Tess
gets most of her magickal supplies there. When I was younger, she
took me up there all the time. We’d spend the night or sometimes a
few. I’d listen to them do their midnight rituals outside under the
redwoods while I supposedly slept in Gru’s loft. They liked to go
skyclad. I haven’t been to her place nor spoken to her since I met
Cooper. I don’t even know if she knows that I’m attached. But Tess
would have told her. Gru doesn’t let anything slip by.

“Tess,” I say, as my auntie takes out her
birch-handle broom and begins to sweep a clockwise circle around
her altar, a table from Ikea draped with an antique silk shawl.
“Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary lately?”

“Hm?” She doesn’t look up from her
sweeping.

“You know, in the community? Heard anything?
Anything afoot?”
Any fairy sightings?
But I’m not ready to
ask her that.

She stops sweeping and squints up at the
ceiling. “More cats are disappearing, but that always happens near
Halloween. And someone stole that carved elephant tusk out of the
Emperor of Ceylon lobby in Chinatown.” She closes her eyes while I
ponder this. I recall Ned’s assignment to Howie today—the Chinese
foot-binding shoes that were stolen. Maybe there’s an Asian art
smuggling thing going on.

One of Tess’s eyelids pops open again. “Well,
Memphis? Are we going to do this or not?” She shuts the eye
again.

Even though I haven’t been practicing magick
for the past couple of years, I still keep Tess company during her
rituals. But tonight, I intend to really get down to business. I
let my eyes close too, hoping to find not just answers, but the
right questions to ask.

Chapter Four

Indian summer bakes San Francisco. The heat
is always expected yet always surprising. Women exiting
air-conditioned office buildings remove their cardigans, exposing
their sun-sensitive shoulders. Men roll up their shirtsleeves. I
catch snatches of conversation on the busy downtown sidewalks—golf
scores, stock market fluctuations, a new SOMA bistro debut—and
filter through the hum on my way to an interview. The lead singer
of the third-tier band awaits, yet my mind is full of fairies.

Fairies used to be a favorite subject of
mine.
Lore
is a word I can’t help but use. Fairy lore. There
was a time when I sucked it up like sugar.

Because fairies keep to themselves so well,
their culture has been obscured by troubadours and fabulists. What
is true history—the Innis War of 913 A.D., the rise of matrilineal
monarchies on the Great Plains, the slaying of the last pearl
dragon by the great Chinese warrior fairy Cai Lao Yi—has become the
stuff of myth and fiction. Fairy tales. Or, the fairy stories have
simply disappeared along with their populace.

Before giving up my fairy lore studies, along
with most of my magickal ways, I had a theory—nothing proven. It
goes something like this: Fairies don’t like humans very much, but
they are tied to us in some way, and that’s why they show
themselves now and then. Some even live among us, the size of
regular people, but with powers that exceed our own. How are they
tied to us? I haven’t yet figured that out, and maybe I never will.
Thems are the breaks.