A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

shifting his weight from foot to foot, willing her to move. A meadowlark sounded from down the alley. The ribbon danced briefly and fell. Finally, he peeled off his shirt, spread it on the lawn and sat down with his back to the sun, precisely, so that his shadow fell true to the line of his body.
    Lucy did not move. He stared at the side of her head.
    “Sure is hot,” he said, plucking a blade of grass. He thought maybe she twitched, just a little, so he repeated himself, louder, and added conversationally, “Hotter’n a cat’s snatch.”
    She rolled her head slowly toward him, opened one blue eye. For some reason, he had known she would have blue eyes, cool and transparent as rainwater.
    “Where’d you hear that?” she drawled.
    Her voice startled him a little. “Nowhere. I can just tell. It’s hot, isn’t it?”
    “I mean ‘cat’s snatch.’ Where’d you hear that?”
    He shrugged, looked down at the grass. Something in her tone made him wish he had not come over after all.
    “You shouldn’t say that.” She shifted her hips on the blanket. “It’s not nice.” She opened the other eye and peered at him sharply. “I bet you don’t even know what that is.”
    Owen squinted up at a thick band of clouds ballooning toward them across the sky. Who cared if he didn’t? He knew a lot of things. He knew it had not rained in forty-seven days. He kept track on a calendar his mother got from the bar. It had pictures of prairie scenes to match the seasons. Lucy humphed at his silence, but gently, like the sound a sleeping seal might make. Like the sound of those clouds moving. Fat with rain. Where did it go, that rain? If not here, where?
    He knew by the rustle of her head brushing the silver blanket that she’d turned away again.
    “It’s hot anyways,” he said after a while. He looked back at her, noticing how the sun lit the fine yellow hairs at the base of her head, how it left bluish shadows, like caves, behind her shoulders, under her arms. From the wall, he had longed to tickle her there, but now he could see this would not be possible. “I’m getting a new bike,” he said, then felt foolish. Why would she care? “For my birthday,” he added, but without conviction now. “Maybe.”
    He sighed and looked around the yard. There were three patches of petunias, purple and white, along the back of the house, and a big lilac tree with the blooms already gone to seed. There was a small aluminum shed, the kind people used to store lawn mowers and snow shovels and red plastic jerry cans. There was a garden hose curled through the dusty grass like a garter snake and a clay pot with three pink geraniums and, wedged far back under the steps, a cardboard box of glass bottles. There was a potato chip bag blown up against the cotoneaster hedge, but so low you couldn’t see it unless you were sitting on the ground. There was a clothesline. And under the big shushing cottonwood at the back, there was a small table and two lawn chairs, the kind you could stretch out on. Beyond that, he knew, there was nothing. A few more houses, fields. The highway. And then the Sand Hills, barely visible. He often walked out to the eastern edge of town, just as far as the highway, and stared. People passing in cars and trucks stared back. Sometimes they waved.
    “This morning,” he began tentatively, “there were mirages on the highway.”
    Lucy squinted back at him, scowling.
    “You know,” he said, “like when you’re driving down the highway and you see those big puddles of water, like the road is flooded out? But they disappear before you get there? That’s a mirage.”
    “Yeah?” she said flatly.
    “It’s an optical illusion. Because the ground is hotter than the air. It’s just the reflection of the sky getting
refracted.”
He stressed the word, knowing he was showing off. Why not? “Refracted by the hot air on the ground. That’s why it looks blue.”
    “Mmm.” She turned her face away, toward the