Page 43 of Our Crooked Hearts
Marion took out a wooden box the size of a matchbook, sliding it open and dusting her hands with white powder. When she blew the excess away it swirled up into a cloud, settling slowly on her shoulders and hair as she unwrapped the mirror, laying it on the stain before arranging a candle and the caged rabbit to her right. To her left she placed a cereal bowl full of salt poured from a Ziploc and the occultist’s book.
Usually spellwork made Marion stiffen up, like she was bracing for a blow. But tonight she moved nimbly on bare feet, chalking lines over the floor and adjusting our placement with impersonal hands before giving each of us a needle. I pinched mine tight.
“I’ll do most of the work.” Her voice broke the hush, sudden as a slap. “Stay where I put you, and when I tell you, you’re gonna draw the needle over your left hand from here to here.” She pointed at the bend of her thumb, then the base of her life line. “Deep enough that the blood comes up. When I say so, you’ll press your palm to the floor.”
My bare toes rubbed half-moons in the dust. Blood magic equals big blowback. But I knew there’d be a cost. Maybe Marion would pay for a hotel room where we could dry out after. Cheesy TV and takeout and Fee’s vinegar brew. It could be fun.
There are scenes in your life you replay like a movie, sitting in some darkened room inside yourself yelling,Get out, you idiot,run!The person in the movie looks like you, sounds like you. Like you, she does the things she shouldn’t, failing every time to save herself. Over time you can almost convince yourself she’s some anarchic stranger, malevolent in her ignorance.
Here’s a scene that still plays in my head. Not daily like it used to, not weekly anymore, but often enough, stealing over me at random like a carbon monoxide cloud.
Four figures stand barefoot in a circular room. The light is such that their shapes appear hazy, insubstantial. They vary in age but all are young, their hair red or black or pale, their posture predatorial and prepared. Who knows what lies in their hearts.
The girl with pale hair crouches before a stain on the floor. Beside her is a bowl of coarse salt, a book, a red candle, and a panting rabbit. A circle of mirror lies over the stain, its glass reflecting not the ceiling but a dirty sheep’s-wool circle of sky, unrelated to the night outside the windows.
Some spells are finicky down to the last detail. Some have small gaps inside them, left open to interpretation. The pale-haired witch lights her candle with a Bic shellacked in cutout magazine mouths, because the spell doesn’t care how the fire starts, just that it does. It’s a steady orange tongue of ordinary candlelight until she holds a hand over it and speaks the first words of the incantation. The flame crackles, then expands into a mellow blue globe.
The spell is stronger than the witch working it. This first success makes her bite her cheek against a triumphant smile.
The blue flame eats through the wax in triple time, meltingthe candle into a thin-sided saucer. Carefully the girl pours the wax onto the mirror, spiraling from center to edges like she’s making a crepe. She speaks in a language no one knows, not in this room or any other. Moving rapidly now, she unlatches the catch of the cage and drags out the rabbit. Placid to this point, now it’s kicking frantically, born to be a house pet but the fight it puts up is worthy of a wild thing. You want it towin, anyone would, but with the flash of a blade and a scream as pagan as anything else in that room it gives up the fight, its life dropping in a red rush over the swirled wax.
The witch doesn’t just slice its throat but beheads it completely, with a blade pulled from her clothes. See the enameled horses on its handle and remember a day at the beach when she used it to slice mangoes, handing them around on the blade like a mother with a paring knife.
She sets the dead animal down and takes a needle to the bloodied wax, inscribing letters in it from right to left, bottom to top. How she can still hold it, how she can see anything around the blood, isn’t clear. The other figures in the room are so still you might think it part of the magic, but there: the flicker of eyes, the flick of a tongue catching sweat.
The room is hot now and getting hotter.
When her inscription is done the witch stands, bowl in her bloody hands. She pours the salt in a circle that seals her in with the candle and the mirror and the stain, leaving the other three without. She moves with careful speed. Still incanting, she cracks the candle’s sides away, so the blue firelight rides atop a thin wax circle. This she holds over the mirror, tilting until the globe of fire rolls like a shooter marble onto the coated glass.The inscribed wax lights up all at once, turning the mirror into a porthole to Hell.
At this moment the witch is sure she’s done it. Her voice is victorious, her throat ripe with iron and smoke. Outside the circle the heat is receding. Inside it the pale witch sweats, hair lifted by a sudden wind. She puts up a hand.
“Now,” she says.
The faces of the three outside the circle are sluggish, featureless, as if watching through a scrim of sleep. In perfect somnambulists’ tandem they lift their silver needles and paint beading red lines over their palms, pressing them to the floor.
Two of them do. The third, black-haired, purple lips trembling, hesitates with her hand upheld. She stares at the flaming mirror.
“Now!” the pale witch repeats, face prickling all over with sweat.
“Qué carajo,” whispers the black-haired witch.
“Do it,” hisses the woman beside her, whose black hair is the bottled kind. “Are youtryingto get us killed?”
Then the other worker sees what her friend has seen.
I see it. I can’t stop myself now, I’m poured back into my body and I’mthere.Seeing what’s inside the circle of mirror, its wax burned away and its glass hazed with blue fire.
A woman’s face. Her face and her hands, pressed to the glass from below, as if she’s standing under the floor looking up. Nails sharp and fingertips callused, her forehead high as a child’s. Her hands pushed against the glass’s underside. They pushedthrough.
The surface of the memory is eroded now, taffy soft and crimped with overuse. Sometimes I think I heard the occultist’slaughter. Sometimes I think Ismelledher, Florida Water and a bilious tang. But always I remember this:
One reaching hand rising from the fiery circle, then the other, pressing into the stained wooden floor. Nails curved to grip, Astrid Washington dragged her body over the mirror’s edge.
First her head, crowned by a wet-looking cap of blonde hair. Then her face rose inch by merciless inch. The eyes that might’ve been brown once, tarnished by time to an unholy gold, the mouth too lush and red as a warning. She had her elbows up, she was out to the middle of her rib cage. Panting, determined, each gasp making ripples in the pooling blood. She hoisted herself higher.
That’s when Fee charged forward, shoes smudging the salt. As soon as she was over the line she pulled back, crying out. The moonlight was so bright I could see her reddened skin. Marion must’ve beenroastinginside that circle.
I stood frozen as Fee stuck a hand into her pocket, digging out a black-paper bundle. She shook free from it her mother’s crucifix.
