Petty Magic by Camille Deangelis Read Free Book Online Page A

town park on Saturday afternoons.
    When I said Goody Harbinger arranged her daughter’s disappearance, it is the oomph to which I refer. A beldame may willingly hand her power to another, for an hour or a week, and when this is done she falls into a dead sleep that lasts until her sister’s return. And in rare instances, as in the story of my ancestor, she may also hand it over for keeps.
    Morven has done this for me on occasion. Well, all right: in truth, she does it all the time. I have long since ceased to ask when I might reciprocate, and whenever I make even the slightest hint she responds with a knowing but good-natured sigh. I kiss her cheek and make other expressions of blithe gratitude as she eases herself into bed. She simply hasn’t a taste for boys or travel, which are really the only reasons one would need more oomph anyway.
    But she’s a great one for the needles. When a person knits, she frequently and inadvertently weaves stray strands of her own hair into her work. So Morven might knit a pair of pullovers for two old chums whose friendship is floundering, pick the strands from their brushes and weave them into one another’s sweaters, and their problems will prove surmountable. This sympathetic magic works on ordinary people, too. My sister and her friends spend much of their time knitting receiving blankets for preemies and pompom caps for cancer patients. Each stitch has its own therapeutic value: diamond stitch for immune deficiencies, brioche stitch for clinical depression, seed stitch for rheumatism, and so forth. They generally do prefer to knit for strangers, as the consequences of an imperfect garment can spark a feud that wears on for decades. Back around the time the Harveysville Inn started boasting of Washington’s apocryphal visit, young Lilith Peacock knit a pair of baby booties for one of the Jester girls. Poor Lilith dropped a stitch but never noticed her mistake, and when the baby died she was ostracized by most of the coven for well on forty years afterward. Grudges can form all too easily when you live as long as we do.
    But don’t go thinking we’re as heartless as all that. Honestly, most of the time we’re more Christian than the Christians. We believe in an omnipotent power, and the law of karma, and the innate goodness of humankind despite all the piles of evidence to the contrary. We believe in the immortality of the soul and in its frequent recycling. We go on, of this I am certain; but before we die we leave a little piece of ourselves in a certain object kept in the family home, so that the wisdom accrued over a long, long lifetime will never be lost.
    Well, perhaps not never . Hard-earned wisdom is like an old leather shoe—no matter how serviceable, it outlasts its usefulness eventually. After a hundred years or two—once her children and grandchildren are old enough to follow her—an ancestor generally decides she’s ready for a do-over. So she comes back, usually within the same family, though she’ll have no recollection of who she was before—just like an ordinary human.

The Warrens of New York City
    7.

    I LIVE IN an old tenement building on Cross Street, though you may not have heard of it since my block was torn down in 1898. On the Lower East Side there used to be three streets, Anthony, Cross, and Orange, that converged into the Five Points, and the folks who lived there called it Cat’s Hollow. Most of the old flophouses are gone now, in the ordinary world I mean, but our neighborhood is still called Cat’s Hollow—and we, unlike its original inhabitants, will never live in the shadow of eviction.
    This is precisely why we reside off the map. Rent control doesn’t exceed the century mark, see, so if you want to live on an ordinary street you’ll have to contend with your landlord asking pointedly after your health (and you will have to move in the end, lest the buzzard report you to the Feds). My bathtub’s in the kitchen, the floor slopes, and I