A Fistful of Sky (14 page)

I woke up later that afternoon with my notebook on my chest. My fountain pen had leaked blue ink on my T-shirt and sheets. “Damn,” I said.

The pen shriveled and cindered into dust. Its apotheosis burned my fingers.

Suddenly I was wide awake.

One word could do that. Destroy some innocent thing that just happened to be nearby, had followed its own nature and done something I didn’t like.

This power was real.

My burnt fingers throbbed. My eyes leaked.

House-eating plants, a man-eating grapefruit, somehow those things had felt like a game. Maybe a really bad video game. Total destruction of my favorite pen with one careless word? Somehow more serious and scary.

I remembered the shield Tobias had thrown up just because I was mad and glared at him. He understood.

Tension rode my shoulders. I glanced at the clock. One-thirty in the afternoon. I’d slept for about four hours; I had had time to build up a big charge. What was going to happen when I managed to sleep eight hours in a row, if I ever did again? What kind of charge would that give me?

I got my wastebasket and studied the litter in it. The basket was half full of crumpled drafts of an anthropology paper, used Kleenex, candy wrappers, empty ink cartridges, magazines I’d finished reading minus the pictures and articles I had ripped out to save in my information morgue, and other miscellany. Slated to go out with the garbage unless I had a recycling moment and sorted the papers from the other stuff.

I set the wastebasket on the floor. I licked the tip of my index finger. I thought it through; the waste, not the basket. I pointed. “Damn!”

A flash, a spiral of smoke, a few sparks. The litter was gone. The inside of my wastebasket bore scorch marks.

My shoulders felt incredibly tense, still. Maybe there was a fraction of ease.

But hot dog! Something constructive to do. I could fry all the garbage in the house. Maybe that would bleed off some of this power. After that, I could visit Dumpsters and trash cans all around town, maybe the landfill out in the salt slough near the university, burn off power by cursing waste into oblivion. Something! Something safe.

I went to the closet and looked for regular clothes. As I flipped through my shirts, I glanced up at the chalk box. No heat came from it. I took it down and looked inside. It was still full of chalk, but the colors had faded, and some special nuance of the way the chalk had looked while it was cursed had gone.

I took a pink piece and drew a small, simple five-petaled flower on the closet wall. I waited a minute. It stayed a scribble.

Whew.

I should be writing this down to show to Tobias later.

Instead I found a blue blouse and a pair of jeans. I changed, put on tennis shoes, and dropped my inksplotched sleeping T into the laundry.

I was about to leave the room when I noticed the protection stone Jasper had given me eight years earlier. Now that I didn’t use it and Flint had stopped hiding it from me, I kept it on my desk. Sometimes when I was working on a paper for a class and I got stuck, I’d hold it until my mind settled. It had become a friend.

I picked it up. There wouldn’t be a charge in it now. When Jasper had charged it, he had to do it pretty often; the stone wasn’t a natural holder of power. I didn’t sense any special energy in it. It was just a pretty green sea stone.

Maybe if he charged it, I could carry it around with me and hand it to people before I cursed them. What would happen then?

I tucked it in my pocket, then snuck downstairs and out the porch door.

I went down to the orchard.

On the upper terrace just south of the house below the back porch, there was the pool, the lawn with one big orange tree in the center, Mama’s rose garden, and a retaining wall. The wall was broad; you could sit on it and look out to the sea.

About ten feet below the upper terrace was the orchard, a wild place not as maintained as the lawn and pool grounds above. Nobody mowed the orchard; native grasses grew knee high around all the fruit trues. We had lemon trees, plum trees, orange trees, apricot trees, even a grapefruit tree in the orchard, but the centerpiece was a big loquat tree, very tall and scraggly with shiny dark green leaves and millions of clusters of pale yellow fruit that turned almost apricot when they were ripe. Eating loquats was a lot of work; first you had to peel the skin, then you could eat the thin layer of flesh, sweet and fine-textured, but not much food before you hit the big glossy seeds in the center.

In the eastern half of the orchard just below the pool yard lay a small plot of land that Dad had had rototilled. For a while when we were kids, we each raised some kind of vegetable or fruit in that plot. I raised carrots one year, and corn another. The others raised radishes and zucchini and tomatoes, green beans, bell peppers, strawberries, watermelon. We had to

learn how to take care of our plants. I had hated thinning carrots. It was hard to pull up something already alive that I had planted, though I didn’t have much sympathy for weeds.

Jasper had a year when he raised pumpkins. He even milk-fed a couple so he would have giant pumpkins for Halloween, but their skin turned pale, so they looked wrong.

We each tended our own crop, put the Burpee packet on a green-stained bamboo stick at the end of our rows to weather and fade as the season progressed. I remembered how excited I was the first time I ate a carrot I had actually grown.

I wandered over to the plot where we had had our vegetables. Weeds choked it now, though there were traces of the old rows and the squash and bean mounds. When had we stopped planting things? I squatted next to the plot. Maybe the year Opal and Jasper went through transition; everything had changed after that. As though they had turned into other people, and everybody and everything had had to adjust to it. We had lost track of some of our family rituals and started others.

I picked up a stick, stuck it in the ground, and pointed at it. “Damn!” The stick vanished in a flash of light and a puff of smoke.

Three damns down, and I still felt awfully tense.

I wished I had brought the notebook and a pen with me. I should be keeping track of all this data. Tobias was right, even though it made me grumpy.

How would curse power answer if I actually wished aloud for my notebook and pen?

No time like now to try it, and better here, where I was alone in a big open space, than somewhere inside the potentially fragile house, close to loved ones.

“I wish I had my curse notebook and a pen from my backpack,” I said. A small dart of heat stroked my breastbone on its way out of me. An instant later, my notebook dropped out of the sky into my lap, and a Bic pen thumped down on top of it.

Clean and simple. Huh.

I opened the notebook.

Every page was covered with black ink scribbles, none of them legible.

I found a little space near the top of one page and tried the pen. No ink.

I sighed. I was glad I had just started the notebook this morning; there

wasn’t much lost work I would have to reconstruct.

I cleared a patch of earth in the garden plot and used the pen to draw three lines in the dirt, one for each of my experimental “damns.” I cleared another section, wrote W at the top, and wrote one line below it for my first wish of this session.

After that I wandered through the orchard, picking up small objects, bringing them back to the plot, and damning them. I zapped loquats, rocks, oranges, twigs, a really big stick, a beer can—which left a little dribble of melted metal; now, that was scary—and a faded hula hoop I found in some tall grass, so old it must have been left behind by children a couple generations before us. The ancient plastic vaporized without leaving a trace.

I had crosshatched fifteen “damns” in the dirt and my shoulders still felt tense when Beryl showed up.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked from behind me.

I jumped a foot. Then I whirled. “Don’t sneak up on me, Beryl!”

“Sneak? I was just wandering around.”

“Don’t even come neat me, okay? Or, I know, has Tobias taught you how to shield yet?”

“Shield?” She looked bewildered. “I need a shield with you now?”

I sucked on my lower lip. “Watch this.”

I grabbed a big stick I had been saving and stuck it in the ground. It stood as tall as I did. I pointed at it. “Damn!” I said.

A brief thumbprint of heat at my chest. Light outlined the stick, then it turned black, then vanished. A small drift of acrid smoke, a flashmark on the ground were all that remained.

Beryl gasped. Her face went pale.

“I don’t even have to mean it,” I said. “I could do this by mistake. I’ve never had to guard my words before. I’ll do the best I can, but until everybody in the house is shielded, I think I better stay outside.”

She blinked a couple of times. “I’ll go tell them this is what you’re doing,” she said after a minute. “I’ll tell them about the shields.”

“Thanks.”

“You hungry?”

I checked in with myself. “Starving. Is the grapefruit still in charge of

the kitchen?”

“Yep. I’ve got a box of granola bars in my room—” Her eyebrows lowered and she looked inward. A box appeared in her hand. Wish power! She handed me the box. She frowned again and materialized a bottle of water, handed it to me. It was cold, straight from the refrigerator.

“Thanks. Thanks, little sister.”

“Hang in there.”

I nodded. She left, pushing through the high grass of the orchard, burrs catching at the hem of her dress.

I ate a couple of granola bars and drank some water, then realized I was delaying the inevitable.

My shoulders felt stiff and tight. Damns didn’t seem to do it as far as discharging curse energy; I would have to curse something else soon or suffer lockjaw or something worse.

I hesitated, then pulled my protection stone out of my pocket. Maybe it could protect itself. I cupped it in my hands. I couldn’t sense any energy in it, but then, before my transition I hadn’t been able to sense magical energy. Maybe now I could only sense my own. I was going to think this through. I was! But words dropped out of my mouth. “Stone, be bone. Be within muscle and skin. Be own. Be kin.”

At last I felt real heat gather. From my toes and fingers and the top of my head, from all my outer edges, heat streaked toward my center. This’ll do it, I thought, cast off curse energy for at least a little while. The heat swooped out of me, leaving cool behind, and traveled into the rock.

Within my hands the rock’s surface changed from hard and cold to smooth, warm, pliant. The rock swelled and shifted, stretched and spread. It grew limbs and a head— at first as generic as the body of a gingerbread boy, a cookie cutter shape of a small human. The curse energy kept working on it, spinning across its skin in pearly drifts, drawing details to the surface. It sprouted hair and features and selfhood. Finally it opened large black eyes and looked up at me.

Someone alien and old lived inside those eyes.

It was the size of a three-year-old child, much larger than the rock had been, but it had the shape of a grownup. Its hair was wavy and dark brown, like mine. As I watched, color bled into its eyes until they were hazel, like mine. It had a belly on it, like mine, and breasts like mine too. She looked like a miniature me. I had never enjoyed looking at myself, and

I wasn’t happy looking at her, either, but I knew she was mine and I should do what I could for her. A child of my curse. What had I done?

“Sister,” she said.

“Hi.” She could talk. She had a mind, could draw conclusions and voice them. She wasn’t chalk to use or ignore.

What was she?

I had turned a rock into a person. I couldn’t remember any of my siblings doing that.

She was a product of curse energy. How unpleasant was this going to be?

She pushed up, got to her feet. She stood about two and a half feet tall. She looked me over, frowned.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“That’s a question.” She bent her arm at the elbow, watched as her forearm waved. She made her other arm do the same trick. “I’m small.”

“Yes. I made you from a rock.”

“You made me.” She tossed me a look with attitude: Yeah, right.

“I didn’t make you?”

She kicked one leg, then the other. “Perhaps you made this body. People don’t make spirits.”

“So you’re really someone.”

She smiled. A dimple showed in her cheek, just like the one I had when I smiled. I thought with surprise that she looked cute.

“Have you ever thought about doing something different with your hair?” she asked.

“What?”

She ran her hands through her hair, and I felt hot fingers moving through my own hair, pressing from the front to the back of my head. When she lifted her hands away, her hair was a mass of short black curls streaked with auburn.

I felt my head. My hair, fine, flyaway, short, and brown, had changed, felt thicker and more tightly curled. I tugged one of the curls, but couldn’t pull it out far enough for me to see what color it was. I had my suspicions. “How did you do that?”

She stood with her hands on her hips and stared up at me, her head

cocked to one side. “That’s one look,” she said. “I like it. But let’s try something else.” She put her hands to the side of her head and pulled on her hair. The curls straightened, grew; cascades of silky black hair poured from her head, from my head, until we sat in sleek black capes of our own hair. I bunched some of it in my hands. Thick and smooth and heavy.

I had always dreamed of long hair, but I’d never been able to grow mine past my shoulders; it was so fine it split and broke before growing longer. I pulled some of the new hair forward over my shoulder and looked at it wonderingly. True, I was getting a headache from the weight of it, but wasn’t it beautiful? I separated it into three strands and started braiding. I had braided Beryl’s hair and Opal’s hair, but never my own.

“Or blonde?” said the other. The hair in my hands changed to platinum blonde.

I looked at her to see what the effect was. The blonde washed out her skin color. She looked sallow.