VenCo(19)

“Cereal. Look at this!” She held up an orange-and-brown flower-patterned muumuu. “I really went for the Mrs. Roper look back then.” She dropped it in a pool of garish fabric, and the cat curled up on top. “Jinx likes it.”

Lucky turned on the oven, then went back to the fridge. “Do you want salad?”

“No. Hey, look at this.” She removed a small shoebox from a larger Tupperware container and held it up. “I don’t remember this.” She read the side. “Size nine. Who the hell wears nines?”

“My mom did,” Lucky replied, digging through the crisper. She’d make salad anyway. Drowned in enough dressing that she could probably get Stella to eat some. “Do we have cheese somewhere? We really need to organize the fridge better. It’s a shit show in here.”

“Was this little doll yours?”

Lucky looked up. Stella held a plastic ballerina by the scrap of netting that made her skirt.

“Holy shit! I remember that.” She closed the fridge door and went into the living room, sitting down beside Stella in the rubble of their past lives. “It was from Arnya’s jewelry box. When you opened the lid, she danced.” She took the doll from Stella and slowly turned it, imitating its childhood magic.

Stella was already on to the next thing, an old Superman comic book where someone, probably Lucky’s dad, had circled all the boobs. “Christ, this is pervy.”

Lucky kept digging through the shoebox, then remembered the night of her mother’s black eye. The night Arnya told her to put anything valuable she held out of sight, safely buried. An old brooch with fake gems in an abstract pattern caught her eye. She picked it up and slipped it into her pocket, where it clinked against the spoon.





7

Dig




Freya had called to report back on the meeting. She told Meena it had got off to a bumpy start: that girl was spicy. But she’d set the hook. And she’d also managed to slip a little sachet of herbs, meant to open the mind, into the girl’s messenger bag so that Meena could do some extra convincing while she slept. It felt like the girl was already on the brink of change. Sometimes the spoon did that to a person. More often than not, life did it. But they didn’t have the luxury of time; they needed to reel her in, and fast.

After dinner with Wendy, Meena slipped off on her own and ran herself a bath, as hot as she could stand. Before she got in, she poured in the oils that would scent the steam and fill her head. By the time she was finished soaking, she was ready to sleep and feeling very sensitive. Then she crawled between the high-thread-count sheets, under the weighted duvet, and said, “See you soon, Lucky.”



Meena was in a garden. It wasn’t full of evergreens and vines like her own backyard but sliced through with bright birch and crowded with white trilliums. The air was heavy with leaves and the smell of soil. She wore a long pink dress with tight sheer sleeves that ended in the middle of her palms, and a high lace collar. She was a stroke of oil paint on a watercolour canvas. She closed her eyes and listened.

Crickets, gathered in a symphony.

Frogs chirping through the hiccupping of a nearby creek.

A low hum of movement like pressure against the landscape. That was the sound she followed.

She tried not to crush the flowers, but there were too many of them. They felt like velvet under her bare feet. Here and there a cluster of mushrooms bloomed like fat fingers, reminding her of how her wife found her spoon. She smiled. She liked the way memories followed her into dreams, especially when they were ones of Wendy.

She had to push her arms ahead to carve a path through the birch. She was amused by this. You never knew what the dream would demand. Apparently, in Lucky’s dreams, she had slowed time so that movement had to be forced.

Through the trees was a clearing carpeted with violets like small eyes that squinted at her approach. There was Lucky, with her back to Meena, engaged in a conversation with someone mostly hidden by the billows of Lucky’s massive gown, deep oxblood red and layered like a delicate pastry.

Meena paused to eavesdrop.

“I feel like I’m drowning,” Lucky said, “like the world is so much heavier than me.”

Meena couldn’t make out the response, but something about the purring lilt of the other person’s voice told her it was feminine.

“Which way am I supposed to go?” Lucky lifted her arms and pointed in opposite directions. “I’m stuck.” She dropped her arms and lifted the hem of her gown, and, sure enough, she was rooted in the ground—a couture tree in a haunted forest.

She flexed her knees and pushed up, but her feet stayed fast.

More purring.

“I am trying!” Lucky squatted and tried to jump, but the soil would not let go.

She screamed, “I do want it! I know I have to go.”

A murder of crows, the biggest grouping Meena had ever seen, swirled into the sky. And whoever had been counseling Lucky was gone.

“No, wait! I’m sorry! Come back! Mom!” Lucky was yanking at her feet, trying to tear them free, the kind of violent movement that meant she was tossing around in her bed. Meena had to move now, before the girl woke herself up.

She took a step onto the flower carpet. Somehow the violets were sharp and stuck into the soles of her bare feet. Nice! Such protection was a witch move if she’d ever seen one. She reminded herself that her feet weren’t really being cut, that the pain was only an illusion. But it was a good one—the next step hurt just as much.