VenCo(35)



“Nope. All yours, M,” Gabriel said, head buried in his comic.

“Whatever. Someone help me carry it to the back.”



Perched on a high metal stool with a cup of milky tea, Morticia was almost glad she’d drawn the short straw. She’d put the radio on NPR and closed the door, and the room, crowded with wavering floor-to-ceiling stacks of old paper, was almost cozy.

The banker’s box sat on the wooden table in front of her. Good signs—the corners were dry and the loopy cursive writing on the side wasn’t smudged or spotted. “‘Mrs. L. Shipton,’” she read. “Okay, Mrs. L. Shipton, let’s hope you aren’t dropping off earwigs with your romance novels.”

She took the lid off and lowered it onto the floor beside her. No pungent reek of damp. And more than the absence of decay was the presence of something else, something she couldn’t really define but that brought up a childhood memory of sitting in front of the small fiber-optic Christmas tree her mother kept on the dining room table.

Morticia pulled the box closer and lifted out the first two hardcovers. They were volumes on plants and herbology, old, but not old enough to have that elusive antique value.

“Not bad,” she muttered. After a quick flip-through for rips and dog-ears, she used a red pencil to write $8.99 on the first page of each. Next, she pulled out a dictionary with a crumbling spine and tossed it in the recycle pile. A second hardcover in better shape: Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches.

“Oh snap, no way!”

Morticia collected Hammers. She had six of them on the shelf in her studio apartment. But hers were all paperback, one in French, one in German, the other four in English. This one was leather-bound, with gold lettering. She opened it to the copyright page—it was the 1928 edition.

“Almost ninety years old, not bad.”

She flipped through the pages, which were thick and textured, the best kind. “At least two fifty. Let’s say . . . two sixty-five.”

She readied her red pencil but paused, her hand hovering above the open front cover. No one else knew about this. Which meant no one would miss it. She closed the cover and checked the spine. Not even one crack.

“Prepayment of the inevitable severance,” she told herself, and got up to slip the volume into her tote bag, which she’d left by the back door. With the new condo development grabbing up half the street, by the end of the year the store was probably going to be closed, and there sure as fuck wouldn’t be any golden parachute for a retail clerk.

Back on the stool and feeling a little less morose, she continued digging through the box. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, an early copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . . . all good. “Damn, L. Shipton, you were alright.”

She tipped the box onto its side to get at the layer of newspaper pages jammed in the bottom. They were crunchy with age, yellowed and seemingly random, some torn at the edges, others whole sections of the New York Times. They dated from the 1930s to 2002. Morticia laid them out on the desk like they were puzzle pieces.

1974: “Apartment Fire Claims Four Women”

1962: “Fatal Automobile Accident—Town Mourns Beloved Mother and Volunteer”

1959: “Homosexual Perverts Arrested at Local ‘Women’s Bar’”





Every article was a death notice or an obituary or some kind of arrest involving women, from all over the country.

“You had some morbid interests there, Mrs. S,” Morticia mumbled, shuffling the newspaper into a pile beside the discarded dictionary. She picked up the empty box to drop it on the floor, and something shifted. She looked inside and saw a small rectangular box, navy blue and faded around the edges, the kind good jewelry came in. In the centre was a company stamp. She reached in and pulled it out: low & company, salem, ma.

She placed it on the table in front of her. “Let’s see what we have here . . .”

The case was stiff to open. When it creaked back enough for the springs to snap, she lost her grip, and it skidded away from her. She grabbed it back. Something important was in this box, something precious and rare, even. Something that was going to mean something in her life . . . She just knew it. Her heart was beating fast and hard. She took a deep breath and wrenched the case open.

Nestled inside was a small souvenir spoon, the kind a grandmother would hang in a decorative rack beside dozens more just like it. There was some tarnishing of the bowl, nothing a polish wouldn’t fix. The silver was dark around the markings, too, but they were clear enough. She slid it out from the molded silk lining and turned it over. God, her fingers were shaking. But it was just a spoon. There was nothing on the back. Nothing else in the box. Just this spoon with an engraving of a little witch hovering over two straight pins crossed like a pirate’s skull and bones, and up the handle the word SALEM.

Later, sitting at the bar with Bo, with the spoon tucked into her bag, Morticia felt better. Bo attributed it to the drinks and music, and congratulated himself on being such a supportive friend. But she knew it was because, somehow, things had shifted. She knew, somehow, she was going to be okay. Better than okay, because she would never be Pat ever again.





14

Hex the Patriarchy




“Oh, Tish, you went next?” Meena said, carrying a dusty bottle of merlot to the table. “Wasn’t it Wendy’s turn? She got her spoon after me.”

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