Manners

They had been around for as long as I, or anyone I knew, could remember. The oldest person in Lily Lake who still had her memory had never lived in Lily Lake without them, and as far as she knew, neither had her grandmother, or her grandmother’s grandmother. And it seemed that, just like the Folk themselves, manners had been around for as long as anyone could remember.

Once, when I was seven, I asked my ma, “What does manners mean?” Because even back then I could hear the difference between manners one uses to talk to folk, and manners one uses to talk to Folk.

Ma pursed her lips. She had lines around her mouth back then, thin as spidersilk, so that you couldn’t see she was aging unless you looked at her at the right angle. All my questions back then seemed to turn her around to the right angle. Her age glittered at me. “It’s means precautions,” she said, dabbing the kitchen windowsill with salt.

I knew all the stories, all the ones that were true and all the ones that weren’t. Lily Lake was full of trees, and so it was full of stories about things that lived in ‘em, and things that got dragged into them, and things that emerged from them. I was always looking at trees funny back then, like the ones in their sad wire boxes on the street were going to burst with Folk, or get up and walk into someone’s house, or start dancing. That was the worst bit. You couldn’t ever be sure of dancing. You couldn’t be sure who you were dancing with.

Lily Lake wasn’t known for dancing.

Ma’s advice for avoiding any tussles was to practice manners only when it was necessary, only when the first of her rules failed. Avoiding was her frst rule. But I fancied myself a rebel, or a troublemaker, and thought privately that there was something fancy about disobeying ma.

The Folk were always in the park. They jumped around in the flowers and ran after one another and sometimes it was for fun and sometimes it wasn’t. Most people in Lily Lake believed that, either way, it was best to leave them alone. Which is why, when I saw them clustering around the fountain, everyone else walked on past, not even looking. No one had any ounce of daring, not like I did.

I wandered up to the gentry. These ones were all wearing blue, for some reason. They looked newborn in a way, older than me, but also like they’d only just appeared in the world, and a little hungry for something more. I liked that about them. I said good afternoon to them.

“Hey cutie,” one of them said to me. He had hair like summer honey, and little things bloomed around us when he smiled. They like children and pretty things, and children like them. I thought we would get along well, then.

I knew it was bad manners to ask their names, but I didn’t want to offer mine up first. Or at all. I knew that was dangerous. Who knew what they could do with my name? “What are you doing?” I asked instead.

A lady clucked disapprovingly as she walked by. She hesitated and stopped, then turned a fierce eye on me, not bothering to hide it from the people in blue. “Where’s your mother at, kid? You shouldn’t be here.”

“I’m fine,” I told her. I felt perfectly brave, looking at her instead of the ones in blue.

It didn’t last long. Not when I noticed two of them had drifted behind me, like they were nothing but feathers. They looked ganglier than they had a minute ago, as though they’d all stretched and released some extra joints they’d just had sitting around. My bravery crawled into some hollow in me to hide.

“I don’t think you will be. Politely say your goodbye and I’ll walk you home.”

“You don’t know where my home is,” I replied.

She wouldn’t come take me from them herself. She wouldn’t risk it. I knew I could leave them myself, though. We were neither of us in each other’s places, me and the Folk. Pa called it “no man’s land”, when they didn’t come into our homes and we didn’t trudge on theirs, and I was still free.

I edged around them- best not to touch, or invite something you didn’t want to- and galloped over to the woman. She began to lead me away from the flowers. “You can tell me on the way there. What would your parents think of you mingling like this? You have any idea what you were just doing?”

I looked back at the people in blue, which I also knew you weren’t supposed to do, but I was feeling braver again outside their shadow. The one with honey hair held hands with one of the girls and they were dancing, or spinning, together. Blue fabric tornadoed around them as they got faster, their cheer getting more and more urgent.

Ma filled my pockets with extra salt the next morning, and put at least one iron button on each of my shirts.

There were more Catholic schools in Lily Lake than there were non-Catholic schools. Everyone’s manners (precautions) had them cramming their children into those sweating classrooms and portables. We went to Mass as often as we could, which was only three times a week. There were no Folk in school, and definitely no Folk in church. They couldn’t step on any holy ground, of course, which left lots of holy ground for us to trample.

“Why not? What happens if they come inside a church?” I asked Pa.

“They erupt like volcanoes,” he said. “No, I don’t really know. Ask Father Hare.”

I did ask Father Hare, who didn’t look pleased to be asked. He said it had something to do with what they were. I must’ve looked horrified then, because he said quickly that they were a sort of person without a soul. I should worry about them more than I worry about other people because they had no souls. I took this the wrong way. When he said worry, he was not talking about concern, but it’s hard to explain to a kid damnation beyond the basics.

“Does that mean there’s no gentry in heaven?” I asked him.

His lips made a shape like a lemon peel. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I’m fairly certain not.”

Everything I knew but the gentry could go to heaven. Even dogs could go to heaven, Ma told me, when our sheepdog passed on. I tried to imagine what a thing on the inside must look like that it couldn’t at all touch the pearly gates ever, even if it lived a peaceful life. Maybe on the inside they were all rot. “But why?”

Father Hare considered long and silent. He must have been trying to think of a kind way to say it to me. “They were made like us, in God’s image, but they are descended from those that were cast out of heaven. They denied His power, and so here they are, with us.”

It didn’t seem right to me that they couldn’t be allowed in a place where they’d already been. What was the point of keeping them out? Were they in trouble for leaving the first time?

I was a believer of empirical evidence, and only of the kind I found for myself. I went hunting for gentry, which isn’t much of a hunt, because sometimes they seemed to be everywhere, all the time, wet and shining in the river, or dusty and smooth beside roads, or lively and glittering in doorways. I asked one that was alone to come to the church with me. Not during mass, I added, when it looked like she was about to say no. I wanted to see what would happen. I hope she wouldn’t erupt into flame. I took her hand to bring her to the church, and even though I expected another knuckle or long fingers, or for the hand to yank me behind a tree somewhere, it was light and very warm.

“I’ve never been this way before,” she said.

“I thought you were all everywhere,” I said. That’s what I’d heard from ma and pa for ages, that the gentry were everywhere, and they were getting more everywhere by the day, and soon maybe there’d be more Folk than folk in Lily Lake. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t at least walked right up to the edge of the holy ground.

“Only where we’re welcome,” she said. “And sometimes wherever we want to go. I’ve been to school a few times.”

I didn’t remember seeing Folk in school, but then I wondered if I would have noticed. She didn’t look anything special. If she weren’t just a bit too light, and a bit too graceful, and if she didn’t sometimes had wings or long hands when I looked at her from the corner of my eye, then you couldn’t tell at all.

“What about church?” I asked her. “Mass is boring, and sometimes it goes on for ages. You could meet Him!”

“It’s against the rules,” she said. “I’m just supposed to avoid it. Could hurt.”

“'Cause you turn into a volcano? I think that’s just a story. You just got to be real good at sitting still for a long time.”

She grinned. Her lips looked like my ma’s when she wore lipstick. Dark and round as flowers, but cheerier. “What’s a volcano?”

I expected her to know what a volcano was, because she sounded human and ordinary. I had expected her to sound like an animal, and then I expected her to sound like me. Then I realized that she wasn’t either, and everyone of ma’s manners came back to me. There was no room in ‘em for holding hands. I let go quickly and put my hands over my ears as I ran. Just in case I’d offended her somehow. I didn’t want to hear how she’d make me pay for it.

There were other times I paid attention to the gentry. Once a group of them dragged a young member of their own kind, cussing and kicking, into the trees. The sounds were awful, but that was their business. The rest of us minded our own. A few strangers wandered into Lily Lake. Most of them made it out. Some didn’t. One of those some was a gentleman in a bar. No one had warned him that the Folk and folk mingled in these bars, and there was a reason Lily Lake never had bar fights. You never knew who your were brawling with. Once he threw the first insult, there was nothing to do but ask them to take it outside. The Folk were perfectly happy to.

Years passed by and I only noticed when I saw the momentum I thought I’d be taking to college was only running back into Lily Lake. Some people moved away, and some didn’t. The ones that didn’t because city councillors who decided on new buildings with exposed iron beams inside them. Every new apartment looked half-built, but if it meant keeping the gentry out, it was worth living in a place with visible foundations. There were still gruesome happenings in Lily Lake, but they were mostly in the trees now. Ma and pa realized I wasn’t going to college, and while we all mourned that, they also realized that the best way to get me out of their house was to buy me an apartment. It was old, no iron beams, and close to the trees, so there were a fair number of gruesome happenings near me. But a least I had a roof over my head.

They’d taken to reminding people they were the Good Ones. They got especially frisky and ripe in spring and fall, when the weather broke and the animals got rowdy with each other or frantic with preparation. They liked pranks more; they liked dancing and games and testing all our manners.

I didn’t wonder about the Good Ones in mass anymore. I didn’t have the same questions for them that I’d had when I was little. I don’t reckon I had any for a long time. I stepped around them and ignored their invitations. It was never any easier to tell which of them you could trust, or if you could trust any, and it was best to take ma’s advice and avoid them. Don’t make eye contact, and don’t offend them, and keep salt at your windowsill.

There were so many measures in Lily Lake. Everyone scrabbled to keep them out, just to get on with our lives.

But I worked a job at six in the morning, six days a week, and I didn’t have the time to spend on the Good Ones. I remembered my manners, the one time I needed them, when one of their kind came to me asking for food. I knew better than to turn them away. I lost my lunch for that day, but, as ma reminded me when I told her, I could have lost a number of other things. I thanked the lord I still had both my eyes, and I had enough wits not to ask for a favour in return.

But after that, it was harder to ignore the Folk.

It seemed like breaking that rule meant I could never follow it again.

It was fall, and summer was still on its way out, taking its sweet time dragging itself out the door. Green leaves and summer berries lingered in Lily Lake like fingers at the doorframe. Long nights dragged on like a guest’s goodbyes. School was starting again and there was a sudden lack of children out and about in the day. Every person I passed in Lily Lake in the daytime felt like a conspirator in a world without children and, as the Good Ones got restless again, in a world that looked away from them.

But here I was, in the park, walking past a patch of flowers that some landscaper had put down before they realized it was only going to become nesting ground for the Good Folk. There was just one today, which was strange. She lay down in the flowers like she’s been left there, like she’d never get up again. She had huge eyes, with huge pupils that didn’t get smaller even when she looked right into the sun. She moved her hands in the dirt like she’d dropped change in it.

I just looked down once as I passed. Lily Lake got colourful in the fall, so even with all the green trees, I was sure it was a leaf. Just a red leaf she’d taken off the one tree in Lily Lake that was already changing colours. Except the leaf was wet and deeply coloured and curled around her fingers like gloves. She wasn’t digging in the dirt, but just spreading the gore from her fingers around in it.

I stopped walking.

It was just the one, and I wouldn’t talk to her if she offered me anything.

“Good morning,” I said.

She blinked at me. “Hey there.”

The blood could have come from anywhere. It was only on her hand, so whatever it was couldn’t have been that messy. Still might have hurt. I said, “I’m going to a diner for breakfast. Do you want to come?”

We sat outside, so she could be in the sun, and so she wouldn’t be sick from the iron stove inside. She drank three different fruit juices and had a bowl of yogurt and honey. I drank a coffee that tasted like licking a carpet. It occurred to me I might be doing the sort of something Father Hare got confessions about.

“So what have you been doing?” she asked me. She was wearing blue, I noticed, and I remembered a day over a decade ago and many more of them in blue. “With just, all of this?”

I sipped my carpet. “This?”

She circled something in the air. “This. Your life. What are you doing to get through it faster?”

“Faster?” Most people I knew, even in Lily Lake, were gunning for slower. “Nothing? I’m working right now. I might go to school one day. I just get older, I guess?”

“Sounds boring. Do you feel older yet?” She sounded a bit like ma, like she’d already seen the future ma had seen for me. I’d known her for less than an hour and I could see by her mouth that she already knew everything about me she needed to.

“Every day. And not really ever,” I said. “Aren’t you getting older too?”

“Older,” she replied. “But only in years.” She finished one glass of juice all in one gulp. She managed to smile and drink at the same time.

“It’s not boring, either,” I said. I remembered the Folk dragging their own into the trees and the shrieking that came after. If that was what they did to pass the time, I was sure I’d rather be bored. “I’ve got lots to do.”

“You’re not worried you’ll run out of time?” She licked her lips. One of her hands was two shades of brown, because it had all dried now. “You all do. You should just give up now. We could go dancing, if you like?”

I said no, because ma had taught me manners and because I liked where I was right now, in Lily Lake, and I didn’t want to jump to a Lily Lake where half of what I knew was dust, including me.

She shrugged and told me she was going dancing that night. But maybe she’d see me later. I walked her to the edge of the park, where the gentry had started to collect like bees when the sun went down. I didn’t hear the music, but she started to dance down the path. I stopped as soon as she moved, then turned and went home. I thought I could feel myself getting older as I walked.

I invited her to church, just to see if her response would be different. She stepped up to the door and stuck her hand inside. No eruptions. No fire. She wandered inside, wrinkled her nose at the musty smell, and wandered outside again. She told me her skin prickled when she was inside, but it wasn’t much worse than iron.

“Well, maybe. I feel a lil’ sick,” she said, with a hand on her stomach.

She asked me why I chose to go to church, now that my parents didn’t even bother telling me to.

“To save my soul,” I said. I wondered for a moment if it were insensitive to talk about souls with someone who didn’t have one, but ma had never said. I don’t think ma had ever thought I’d be talking to the Good Folk about souls at all. “Because I don’t want to go to hell.”

“It would be terrible for you,” she agreed. “You don’t know how to get through life fast.”

“I’m not trying to. I’d rather stay around for a while.”

She smirked at me. I didn’t know we were friends enough for her to smirk at me. I didn’t know the gentry smirked. “How long is a while?”

I leaned heavily into manners, because I thought that her face meant maybe she was leading me to a place I’d need them. We had come to the edge of the park again. This time I could smell the flowers, more than I had all summer, even though they were wilting. She touched my hand. The gentry all danced together, and I couldn’t tell if I knew the beat of the music because I heard it, or because I imagined it in the way their feet moved.

“A while, for me, means the rest of my life,” I said.

“I’d like you to have the rest of your life too,” she said. “So you can enjoy it before you maybe go to hell. Or heaven. For however long.”

“It’s forever,” I told her. “Whatever’s after is forever.”

“Is that why you take so long to get there. Hey.” She led me closer to the dancing, but touched my face with one long finger. “What’re you cryin’ for?”

I danced all night, like I never had before.

I was wrong about the music. It was there, and I’d only not been listening. I’d been listening to Lily Lake instead. While we danced, she told me, “Our songs don’t stop, not like your songs. We’re good at that.” She pulled me close and didn’t ask anything of me, or offer me anything. She smiled like she’d known me all my life. I didn’t feel like I was getting older anymore.

I was taking my sweet time to get where I was going, I thought.

I danced and danced. 

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Spirits

Samhain was a trial. Because Samhain was really spirits.

Samhain had always been spirits and probably would be spirits forever. One had depended on the other and now they occupied the same space. Samhain without spirits was a recurring party people concocted and shared. Their version of it was celebratory and elaborate: Costumes of every day animals and people were worn, and costumes of imagined creatures and inanimate objects and fairy tale characters were worn. Strangers dispersed sweets to small masses, sometimes delicious and longed-for sweets, sometimes disappointing and stale ones. Pumpkins were forcibly removed from their homes and carved into, then stuffed with fire. Corn suddenly inhabited every grocery store and supermarket and kitchen counter and front step decoration. Wreaths of frothy corn stalk silk twisted around door knockers and on front gates. The favoured diet was mostly artifical flavours. Parents forgot school night curfews and set small monsters loose in the dark. It was like a traumatic re-enactment of an initial incident once a year.

Elijah liked almost all things about Samhain, and only a few things did he dislike enough to wish they could skip it.

Elijah’s family believed in Samhain. There were four of them to believe in it: his father, Zeke, his mother, Celeste, himself, the eldest child, and Kieran, his youngest brother, who was almost as charismatic as their father and would have been twice as much trouble if he’d been the same age. It was for the betterment of the world that Kieran lived and loved the life he had inside their family’s home, in a cottage in rural New York that hunkered down between ridges of clotted forest.

This family believed in spirits.   

Elijah knew all about spirits. Celeste had told him about them, and still told him about them, laughing in between telling, to banish his fear. She said, there’s another one today; it followed your father home when he temped it. You must keep it a secret. Who knows how many people would want one if they knew? The spirit would be a victim of disease, or of an accident, or of someone else, or of themselves. Sometimes, Elijah never found out what made them a spirit, and often he didn’t know. His father traipsed about with the spirit until he decided it was time to sell- and then he traipsed in the direction of the international market and the spirit, bound, traipsed with him until he found a buyer.

Time for the cleaning game. Celeste sometimes woke Elijah this way. Quickly, in the bedroom.

Then she would take Elijah to her bedroom that she shared with Zeke and he would see the dumping ground his father had made of it. Dozens of candles sounded by and ocean of matchstick packets, and then the upturned objects or the sheets twisted into different shapes that Zeke did not have the ability to create, or currents of cold air that fluttered book pages in very specific parts of the room. Zeke was stretched out or folded or curled in the middle of it sometimes, with the spirit’s fingers lingering on him, or sometimes in the middle of a shower, forgetting it all anyway.

Elijah did not believe it was a game, but he did help. Celeste liked to talk and sing and he would listen to her. When she was done talking or singing, and he was done listening, he felt no more uplifted than he had when they’d begun.

Don’t worry, Eli, my love, Celeste would say, and run a finger down his nose. There will be more fun games soon. It is nearly Samhain.

That only meant the games got more dangerous.

More dangerous for everyone, but mostly for Kieran.

Kieran was everything irritating and dazzling about Zeke, if it had been left in the oven a little longer and gotten darker and harder and smokier. He was condescending and curious, he was explosive and reserved, rapturous and vitriolic. Sometimes there was snow in May, in the woods, and it darkened the sky and weighed on the cottage and turned every pale woodland creature into its own ghost, and then the sun blazed over the hillocks and speared the trees and glazed every surface with fire.

Kieran was very much like May.

Kieran was just as involved with spirits as Zeke. Elijah had always known that this was why he was their parents’ favourite. The spirits that found him, that he found, that he discovered and called and caught, were more tragic or grand or hateful or glorious than Zeke’s, and most catastrophic.

So Elijah worried.

Sometimes the spirits frightened the strays Zeke brought home from others towns and set them to racing across the property in destructive frenzy. Sometimes the spirits drove the birds around them mad so the trees warbled and screamed. Sometimes hundreds of insets would drop dead in the garden and the grass would be crunchy for days. Kieran’s spirits were moved on quickly, and he rarely called them home. Kieran could go months without even seeing a candle, but sometimes he fell asleep with one when the power went out, or when Celeste forgot one on the kitchen table and Kieran napped in the next room over, or Zeke left a tea light in a lantern on the porch, where Kieran was resting. Or when they carved jack-o-lanterns for Samhain.

Elijah had known for a long time that it was the fault of the jack-o-lanterns, and he hated their smiling faces for it. The sight of candlelight shaped like a toothed grin made his skin prickle. He found the remains of their severed smiles and stuffed them back in just to stop the light, but it was not the light. Elijah wasn’t sure what difference the candles made, only that they made calling the spirits possible.

Celeste drew her own calendar to stick to the fridge and crossed off the days to Samhain, to show the boys how close it was.

Don’t worry, Kieran, she said often at this time. Your father will be home by Samhain. He would never miss it. Eli, where is your smile? Don’t worry. See, less than two weeks left.

Elijah saw. It was many nights for Kieran to summon a spirit. There was no smiling. The closer they got to Samhain, the heavier the skin the mushroomed beneath his eyes.

What treat do you want most for Samhain this year? Celeste asked as she separated a pumpkin’s innards.

Starbursts, Keiran said.

Sleep, Elijah thought.

The nights got tumultuous, and Elijah was certain there would be spirits. Elijah moved put the bowl streaked with pumpkin pie batter in the sink before Kieran got the chance to lick it and Kieran threw an incredible hissy fit over it.

I will have to make another one anyway, Celeste said. Soon, so it is fresher when your father comes home. Kieran, you can lick the bowl. This one we can all share, just the three of us. Why don’t you go outside? Adventure.

They went outside. They did not adventure. Kieran was thinking of what kind of adventure they could have in their sprawling woods (all of the woods were their woods, according to Kieran, because he said so). But Elijah did not want to spend time around his brother or spirits or both. He had been around his brother even when his brother was not awake, looking for candles that burned or had recently been burning, watching his brother in his first few hours of sleep to see if there would be spirits tonight.

Kieran had a tea light in his room that night when Elijah looked inside. Elijah blew it out, dumped the wick in water, and tossed the candle into the bin. Then Elijah found two more candles, one in the kitchen, and one in his mother’s bathroom, and tucked them into the garbage as well. There were no new spirits, but he watched Kieran for another hour before he considered sleep.

There was sun the next day, enough to melt the snow and make the boys squint. They shovelled the driveway and made snow angels in the middle of the road that ran through the wood. There was an unprecedented gathering of foxes far away, tumbling and mottled like a pile of autumn leaves. They did not immediately run when Kieran and Elijah shuffled toward them. They amended their wild ways to see who could get closest to the foxes before they were startled.

I want the white one, Kieran said.

The white one was insubstantial. Looking at it was complicated, because Elijah was not entirely sure it was there. It was there, but not all of it, as spirits were not all there at once. Elijah knew that if Kieran wanted it enough, then it was an entirely possible thing to acquire for him. He imagined what the house would look like with this spirit in it, and every other spirit that caught Kieran’s attention. He said, That’s the most boring one.

No it isn’t. All the others are red. You don’t know what boring is because you’re boring. Kieran burst out of hiding. The upset foxes darted away before the upset snow even settled. Kieran chased them until his blue coat was indistinguishable from the pale shapes of distant trees.

That night two candles burned in Kieran’s room, as though to make up for the candle Elijah had thrown away before. Elijah could see the beginnings of trouble on his brother’s pinched face and blew out the candles, then stamped on them until he ground wax into the rug. Then he shook Kieran awake, then tore away the duvet, to make sure. Kieran woke up shrieking.

Zeke appeared one day before Samhain. His car trampled the icy blue frost in the driveway, and the ruddy leaf litter under it. Elijah heard him before he saw him. His voice had taught the car’s engine how to rumble, and so they were both deep and loud. Zeke cursed the cold weather and the premature winter and called for the boys to help him unload the car. Elijah could tell some of them were Samhain presents, which were nice, but beside his father there were spirits, also bent over them, and the sight of them made him cross. Kieran’s joy, for he was always cheerful in their father’s presence, was much more attractive, and made Zeke love him more, and worsened Elijah’s mood. He watched Kieran show his father the hole a raccoon had made in the shed the week before, and he watched his mother hand Kieran the pumpkin pie bowl, and he watched Zeke introduce Kieran to the spirits from afar, and he watched terrible ideas occur to Kieran.

Celeste called Eli into the living room in the evening, after they’d made themselves heavy with pie. She’d set out cups of hot cocoa and tea and a coffee for Zeke. Kieran had unwrapped and played with and ranked every Samhain treat Zeke had brought home for them and was looking into a very strange one that Elijah had to squint at to see properly. It hurt his eyes a little. He saw a marble, mostly, but he had the impression that whatever it was was bullying him into seeing a marble. When he looked at it sideways it was the impression of a marble, and a book, and a boat, and Kieran looked at it with little discomfort and did not even mind the spirits that bent over him to touch it. For people like Kieran and Zeke, it was no discomfort at all at to look into it. It was a spirit thing.

Celeste handed Elijah a present that was not from Kieran’s pile. You can both have your gifts now, not just Kieran.

The gift was a set of chess pieces, more beautiful than any chess set he had seen before. Every piece looked like it had been made of ice and like breathing on it would destroy it. It was lovely and entirely what Elijah liked and he wanted to cry, and he wanted a sibling who did not sleep and call spirits who could look at this spirit thing and love it like he did. He did not have a sibling like this, so he took his present to his room and stayed under his blanket instead.

He’s tired, Zeke said to Celeste. Look at those eyes. We’ll leave him some pie.

Elijah woke up on the morning of Samhain.

His first thought was to find any lit candle and dispose of it. His second was to check on Kieran first, in case even more immediate action needed to be taken. His third thought, and the one that superseded the others, was about the black-pit feeling inside him, and about how much he did not want to look at Kieran’s face, and about what he’d wanted before he fell asleep. He did not get out of bed. He warred with himself in bed, and so he did not have to leave it.

Kieran might be sleeping and summoning a spirit right now. It might be dangerous. Too bad. It might hurt Kieran. Too bad. Kieran might realize that sleeping with lit candles was dangerous. Good.

Elijah pressed his ear into the pillow, but he did not sleep.

After another hour, he jerked out of his half-sleep state. The world was dark and dizzy with adrenaline. It was silent, and for a moment Elijah was sure he’d gone deaf. Then he pulled the duvet off his head and every muted sound returned.

There was one sound, less muted. It did not sound like Kieran, but Kieran was the closest and most disastrous source of most noise, and so the moment that followed the sound filled Elijah with the certainty that Kieran was hurt, required help, and that it only sounded strange because Kieran was in the primal state of experiencing pain or fear.

Hating everything about this night, Elijah got out of bed and went down the hall.

The brothers were not to enter one another’s rooms without permission, and Kieran hated when Elijah did, but Elijah hated when the spirits entered his room. He hated the spirits. He hated that he was afraid to open the door to one right now.

Elijah turned the light on.

Kieran had all the anatomical difficulties of a marionette. Joints looked improperly positioned, and bones assembled with poor instruction. He moved only slightly, fingers flapping as though he was trying to shake out what was in his head, or gesture at something else that was already there. Elijah did three checks of the room, then looked back to his brother. The damage must have already been done, but he could not see where it was. Kieran’s mouth parted and strained, as though he were in pain. He might have been. Elijah knew it happened sometimes. The ghostly ball Zeke had brought home with next to Kieran’s elbow.

Elijah nudged Kieran, who did not wake, and said, quietly, you did it again, Kieran.

The noise came again. It was not Kieran, and now that Elijah could see Kieran’s mouth not making the noise while it echoed in his ears, he felt foolish for thinking it might have been his brother. Sometimes the spirits wandered away, but Kieran could not tell why they did or didn’t. It was a guessing game. Sometimes he only saw what they left behind, but not the spirits themselves. He hoped that it was a secret, if he couldn’t see it, and that it would not wander so far Zeke could not find it, or that it might wander far enough that no one ever found it and the spirit never harmed a thing.

Elijah followed the noise out of Kieran’s room. He left the light on.

Which was why he could see Celeste so clearly, in the purple nightgown Zeke had bought her, looking very solid, and holding something that was not.

The child in her elbow was pale, as death, or china, and perfect as a doll. But Elijah knew that it was alive, and also knew that it was not the same kind of alive as himself or his mother. This was a new kind of alive, the kind he was sure only his brother or father could manage. Or maybe only his brother.

The child, who was already part of the family, smiled at Celeste, who cooed back.

Your brother, Eli, Celeste said. Elijah’s shock meant his brain caught up to his ears late. She was not talking about Kieran. He was furious for a second, that he had got his wish, and that it was not at all what he wanted. He had wanted someone like him.

Where’s your smile? Celeste put Elijah’s hand on his new brother’s face. The child did not feel like a spirit, but Elijah knew the truth. Don’t wake Kieran yet. He must be exhausted.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Good Intention

There’s no secret to voudun magic. This is all it is: bits of mud, smears of blood, spit, hair, fingernails, cornstalks. But also every day objects. Thimbles, needles, handkerchiefs, straps from backpacks, shoelaces, dried plants, scented candles. Objects have no power themselves, only what we give them. It all comes down to intention. Grandmere made them what they were, and sometimes made people what they were. But her clients made themselves victims.

This is what Grandmere says.

Voudoo can be terrible work. What I do, at least, and I dislike it on the best days. There are things in Grandmere’s world that are terrible company, that I can hardly stand to be near, to associate with, and there are things required of voudoo magic that I often wish I did not have to do. Grandmere refers to the things I do as reinforcement of the capitalist monopoly on voudoo. It’s a necessary monopoly, she reminds me. Voudoo pays the bills. Voudoo puts food in my mouth. So I make do, and I try to care for those that I can.

The mud could be reused. Magic stuck to clay in a way it did not with mud, and so the mud because something new. It was shapeless except for one leg. I rolled it between my hands and stretched it gently. It needed a hipbone, and another leg to keep it company. I held the image in my head of a faceless man. I was not to know what person it would become- only Grandmere would know.

The magic had to know what it was, and Grandmere had to know what it was and who it was. When I was younger, I likened her to a funnel. Channeling the magic into one place. Rather, she was a pen, I’d realized eventually. I shaped the mud as vaguely as I could and wished good fortune into it. All the good fortune would not stop Grandmere if she took to the mud doll herself, but good fortune might make them reconsider before they spoke against her, or pause for breath before they said something they would quickly regret.

Or it might do no good, and I was only giving Grandmere the instrument of their pain.

I had finished both legs, hipbones not included, when Grandmere’s client screeched down the driveway. The driveway was really just a long piece of land that had been cleared of only the most disruptive flora. The tired still bit over small, savage bushes. The car he drove said he did not have time for this rubbish, or any rubbish, and he would be taken to speak to the manager. When he pulled to a sudden stop a few feet from me, throwing dust over my hands and the doll, he climbed out of his car. He slammed the door as though a good slam would be just good enough to solve all his problems. His white shirt said he’d like to know how I could make it up to him, and his expression said he wasn’t leaving until he could speak to the most important member of staff because didn’t we know who he was?

His name was probably Greg, or James, or Harold or something. I couldn’t remember all of Grandmere’s clients, but I knew more or less why he was here.

“There’s a tree over there,” I said as he squinted at the house. He was pacing a very short distance, craning his neck to see around the sides of the house, looking over me as though I might have an armada in my back pocket. I didn’t need one. If he’d come to argue with Grandmere, he’d already lost. I clarified, “You can park in the shade. S’cooler.”

Probably-Greg patted his pockets. He didn’t seem to have heard me, though I’m sure he did. He pulled out a packet of smokes and a lighter, then barked in his throat and replaced them in his pockets. I wasn’t sure yet exactly what he wanted, or how I was to help him, if I was. I was sure he wouldn’t listen, anyway, so I waited for him to tell me. I began work on an arm, where I always wanted to describe the inside of an elbow, or the dip in a bicep, as though I were someone specific. I refused my hands and rolled out the most generic forearm I could muster. Sometimes this made no difference. Grandmere had once whispered the common cold over another doll, and it hadn’t mattered that the doll was a woman. It was a man that was admitted to the hospital that night with terrible cold symptoms.

Probably-Greg, who might have been an entrepeneur of some sort, or, I imagined, a bank manager, gave up and rounded both corners of the house, though he didn’t go far. His posture became increasingly dissatisfied.

His shoes were polished, I noticed. I didn’t know anyone in this town who kept their shoes polished unless they also kept them under plastic. A wide face, I thought, as I flattened out the round ball of the head. I’d tried skinny before, and the doll had become recognizable. His rings were polished too. I wrapped some weed around the stomach of the doll. It had recently been living, which was good enough for Grandmere.

“That’s barbaric,” probably-Greg said suddenly.

I glanced at him, then returned to my task. Grandmere would know if I were slowing down, though I would not tell her. I only had so much time. I wondered if it were for the man before me. But she’d warned me he would be by later. Timing was not her strongest suit.  “What is?”

He pointed at the mud doll. It was as recognizable as a brick wall. I could not think of the antonym of distinction, but I held the idea in my head as I molded and rolled. “That. Becoming an accessory to murder or- or torture. Suffering.”

Knowing Grandmere, and knowing her clients, it was unlikely he’d never done anything to cause harm or suffering to someone else. His naivete was nice, though. I always enjoyed, maybe a little cruelly, the way Grandmere’s clients organized the world in their minds before they worked it out. I didn’t respond. I had a doll to finish, and he’d come early. If it was supposed to be for him, Grandmere would be wanting it finished soon.

Mercy, I wished for the doll. Turn back. Leave.

I was not allowed to say these things to clients. I could feel probably-Greg’s eyes on the top of my head as I worked. Fingers neck, and a mouth. I put the shape of probably-Greg’s mouth out of my head so I did not accidentally condemn him. He was probably already condemned, but it was always worth trying. That was what the warning was for. And because Grandmere would have rather had the money than the ruined doll.

“Don’t you know what those are for?” probably-Greg said. It was filled with disgust. I could imagine he probably used the same tone when his secretary misremembered his coffee order. “How can you make those?”

Very easily. I’d been making them a long time and I was quite good. Possibly better than Grandmere. “If I don’t, she will. You haven’t paid her, by the way. You have to.”

“Pay? Not until she fixes it.” He grit his teeth. His nostrils flared. This level of aggression was unfamiliar to him. Grandmere could do that- bring out the worst in people. She said that really, they brought out the worst in themselves. They tied themselves into knots until they frayed and you could see rot in the fibers. “I wanted her to want me. Not to follow me around like a fucking dog!”

Grandmere’s clients never cared whom they were talking to when they were in this kind of mood. “She provided exactly the service you asked for. If you wanted something else, you should have asked for something else,” I told him. It wasn’t his fault entirely. He just should have been smarter. He should have asked for an antidote, something to fall out of love. “You’ll regret it if you don’t pay. She’s being generous allowing this warning.”

One hand of fingers was finished, but as if a storm had rolled over the house, I felt something crackling on the back of my neck. My stomach twisted. Grandmere’s eyes saw much farther than you’d think. She would know before probably-Greg got into his car that he’d refused to give her what she was owed.

“Your payment was due two days ago,” I said. This was my last attempt, and saying it, I knew probably-Greg would not hear it. Finishing the doll seemed to happen in fast forward. There had been a breeze a minute ago and it died down so abruptly it was as if someone had pressed pause. I looked at the shadows under the doll’s brow. There were no eyes there, but the point was there could be. If Grandmere knew who it was, then all the client could hope for was that the mud might melt quickly and end their punishment. This doll was not for probably-Greg, but that only mean Grandmere already had one for him. In my mind’s eye a familiar narrative played out: Grandmere held her sewing needle over a candle flame until it was hot enough to sear, and then carefully drew a line of pricks down a doll’s back.

Probably-Greg looked suddenly dismayed by the finished doll in my hands, though he was still angry. He kicked the rim of one of his tires. There was a layer of dust and beneath that, a mirror finish. I saw my face distorted in it briefly. There was mud on my cheek and a bit of cornstalk in my hair, and some silky fluff on the front of my shirt. I looked a little tired, but mostly like I didn’t care. The doll in my hand flopped.

“What’s she going to do?” probably-Greg asked. He held onto his anger desperately. I saw it as the final wall between himself and the fear. “If she isn’t going to fix it, I want a refund.”

The feeling of ozone around us increased. I couldn’t be sure probably-Greg felt it, but I knew what Grandmere’s gaze felt like. She was probably in bed, nowhere near a window. She didn’t need to be to know exactly what was happening. I carefully drew a circle in the dust, all the way around myself, with a knuckle. The magic was precise and this was just small protection in case it did not know where to go. Grandmere always said it was no business of the magic to determine who was innocent, and that I must protect myself.

“Madame does not do refunds,” I said, finishing up the circle. My knees and back were beginning to hurt from kneeling here so long. “She gave you the fix you asked for. If you want another solution, she will require more payment.”

Probably-Greg bristled. For a moment, greed and his innate sense of justice overpowered his instincts of self-preservation. “She sold me a terrible solution the first time- I am unsatisfied. I want to know how she’s going to make up for it. I am owed recompense-“

This, Grandmere heard. I knew probably-Greg would not make it inside his car before the punishment was upon him. I had failed to hustle, again. The magic rose, like a tide coming in suddenly and powerfully. It was at Grandmere’s bidding, and happy to do as she asked. I had probably also willed mercy into the doll she was holding, but it was not enough. I put my doll down. I’d been unsuccessful again.

Probably-Greg looked down at his legs. The doll in my hand was going to melt soon. Only the fine layer of dust on it was keeping it dry enough not to stick to my hand. The underside of my fingernails was brown. Probably-Greg slapped one of his legs. When that did not work, he slapped the other. Over and over, his hands cracked against his thighs. His knees were beginning to quiver. His back hunched as it realized his legs would not be supporting him long.

Probably-Greg leaned heavily against his shiny car. He looked a little ill. His eyes searched the doll quickly to see what had been done to it, but again he was not quick enough to grasp what was happening.

“What has she done to me?” he demanded.

He squeezed his hands into fists so tight his knuckles looked like a spine.

“You won’t be able to walk soon,” I guessed. Grandmere had a cruel sense of humour. “You will never be able to run away from the woman you’ve made love you, ever again.” He would forever need her help, and she would forever love him. At least, part of her would, the part Grandmere’s magic could reach. Not that one part that belonged only to her. He and she would forever be stuck with one another.

This fate swept over probably-Greg’s face swiftly and catastrophically. I was pricked with familiar guilt. I felt I was never not-guilty, there were only days when I forgot how much of a role I played. This was my eternity, though, trying to warn Grandmere’s unreliable clientele away from their own eternities. If I could only stop failing.

Probably-Greg lurched toward his car. He probably had a couple minutes to make it inside before he could no longer hold himself up. Grandmere would leave his feet functional for as long as it took him to accelerate out of here. Then he was his own problem.

I stood up and followed probably-Greg to the driver’s side. I knew he would not let me help him into it, so I shut the door after him. I left a muddy streak on the door handle. Probably-Greg sweated and shook as he jammed his keys into the ignition.

“Fuck you. Fuck the both of you,” probably-Greg spat. “Witches.”

If only it were both of us. The power was all Grandmere’s. I had nothing but good intention. 

Art by Jenna Barton

Text by Lucie MacAulay