A Fistful of Sky (19 page)

“I guess so,” I said, unnerved. “Hey, Dad, what did you do today?”

“I taught three classes and had office hours,” he said, and smiled. “I had lunch with Kingston. You remember him, Anise. He was at the faculty Christmas party last year.”

“The man with the long earlobes? I liked him.” “Pleasant day,” Dad said. “Jasper?”

Jasper checked his watch. “I’ve got band practice tonight,” he said. He had finished his dinner.

“Do you have to leave this minute?” Mama asked.

“No.”

“Anything new and good happen today?”

“I’ve been watching Gyp work. It gives me lots to think about.”

“Would you like to share?”

“Not until I’ve had some time to mull it over. Anyway, it’s exciting. Gyp, don’t worry. I bet you’re nothing like Aunt Meta.”

“Thanks.”

“May I please be excused?” Jasper said.

“You’re not staying for coffee and dessert?”

He checked his watch again.

“Oh, all right,” Mama said, a little cross.

“Thanks.” He refolded his napkin, clipped the clothespin on it, grabbed his empty plate, and headed for the kitchen.

“Beryl?” Mama stared at my little sister.

“I took my American history makeup, and I think I aced it. Now I’m on break until next year! Hah!”

“Oh yes. Break!” Mama said. “Miles, you go on break too, yes?”

“Tomorrow after school.”

“Gypsum?” “I’ve got one more shift at the Center, but I phoned in and left a message I’d be out sick tomorrow. I don’t want to curse at school.”

“Oh. Probably wise. Flint? What did you do today?” Her tone shifted, turned a tiny bit satiric. Flint usually reported things like “wandered around downtown” or “practiced guitar” or “rode my bike up in the mountains” or “went surfing.”

“I’m getting into baking. I love it! I’ve got a babysitting gig with the Foster twins tonight, and I’m taking them some of our brownies. Wait till you try ‘em, Mama. They’re outrageous.”

“Have you found your interest in life?” Mama’s tone was too intense.

Flint leaned back in his chair and beamed. “Naw. I’m interested in everything. You know that.”

Mama never growled, bur sometimes I was sure she wanted to, and this was one of the times. She smiled instead, more teeth than feeling. “Tobias? Did you have a good clay?”

“Yes, Anise, I did.” Tobias didn’t play “new and good” with the rest of us, and Mama couldn’t make him. She’d given up trying. “Excellent

dinner, Gyp.”

Everybody else chimed in, and I smiled, until my shoulders pinched me. Then I hunched. Tobias’s gaze sharpened. Beryl and I got up to clear and bring in the dessert and the coffee pot. I laid out the various kinds of brownies on a platter decorated with pictures of holly plants and berries, striving for a herringbone pattern—Mama loved a nice presentation. I set down the last one. An arrow of pain shot down my spine. I sucked in air.

“What? What’s wrong, Gyp?” Beryl asked.

“I’ve got to curse something right now.” I dropped the cookie tin and ran for the back door.

Curse something, yes. But what? And how? An image of a house eating itself flared through my mind as I pounded across the back porch. I had to get away from our house. I ran across the lawn to the orchard steps. Night and fog had fallen again. I tripped over something at the top of the stairs, and time shifted into slow motion.

Though the light was bad this far from the back porch, I still saw the steps, pale in the night with black cracks where one step stopped and the next began. Each step had a drooping lip. I was falling, falling toward them forever, though I knew at the end of my tumble I would smack down. I had time to think about that: about how I could crush my ribs, break my jaw, my neck, snap my legs against all those concrete edges. I could die from stupidity and hurry. Or I could just hurt myself really badly.

“Damn!” ,

A sun went nova in my chest. An ocean of white light opened below me. I heard hard, heavy cracks and snaps, and smelled scorching, melting, acrid stone.

“ALTRIA,” I whispered, falling. Someone laughed, and I fell, but instead of hitting all those angled edges I dropped into arms stretched out to catch me. She loomed over and around me, larger than an elephant, warm, smelling of ripe apricots and peaches and fresh-baked bread. For an instant she hugged me, and then she set me down and disappeared.

I was sitting in a scorched crater. Above me was the lip of the upper terrace, and to my right, the orchard spread out. Beside me was the upper terrace’s retaining wall that used to run beside the staircase. Burn marks

had etched a medusa mural, like the outline of fireworks smoke, into the wall.

The staircase had disappeared.

My clothes hadn’t survived the blast very well either. My shirt and most of my bra had burned away from my chest, though I still wore the sleeves, straps, and back. My jeans were mostly there, but streaked with smoke. I didn’t know what had happened to my slip-on shoes; they were gone. The bottom of the crater still steamed, I felt the heat rising from it. Somehow, the heat didn’t bother me, even though my bare feet were against hot stone. It was my own heat. Maybe it couldn’t hurt me.

“What!”

I pressed my palms against the bottom of the crater. Almost porcelain smooth; my curse had carved it out.

“Gyp! What!”

I looked up. My family, minus Jasper and Hermina, stood on the edge of the terrace, where the stairs used to start. I crossed my arms over my breasts, covered them as best I could with my hands. “I had an accident,” I said. Dad stripped out of his jacket and dropped it to me. “Thanks.” I turned my back on the family and put the jacket on backwards so it would cover my front. “Are you all right?” asked Dad when I turned to face them again.

I shifted my shoulders, bent my legs, flexed my ankles. No internal screams of pain. Nothing broken, maybe nothing bruised. How could that be? “Guess so.”

Definitely no tension left in my shoulders at all. Curseproof, for a couple hours at least.

“You destroyed the staircase?” Mama asked.

“I didn’t mean to. I fell. I cursed. It was a reflex.”

“You did this,” Dad said. “I did, Dad. It’s the new me. Walking disaster area.” I pulled myself to my feet. “Cursing sure is hard on the wardrobe.”

“You did this.”

I sighed. Maybe Dad was finally getting that I had changed. “Well,” said Mama, “maybe I can replace the old stair with something marble. Something really nice. It never did look good anyway.”

“Thanks, Mama.” She could have reacted a bunch of different ways. Deciding she wanted to replace the stair was the best way I could imagine.

“How do you feel?” Tobias asked me. “Completely relaxed.”

“This took quite a bit of power, Gyp.” He sounded worried.

“I noticed that.”

“Add it to your record. We need to do some math after dinner, maybe graph your output and frequency so we can plan ahead.”

“Personal math! My idea of heaven. I won’t be able to hurt anything else, so I guess I might as well do math. Did you guys try the brownies?”

“We didn’t have time before the explosion,” Beryl said. “You ready for dessert?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Flint knelt and held his hand out to me. I reached up and took it, and he lifted me up through the air. “We should both be there to watch when they take their first bites,”

He and I exchanged grins.

“That sounds ominous,” said Dad.

“Wow,” said Flint, “it does. I didn’t mean it to.”

We went back to the house. I ran upstairs to change into a new shirt while Beryl finally put dessert out. By the time I got back everyone had served themselves. I grabbed three different kinds of brownies on a small plate and sat down.

Silence.

I poured myself a glass of milk. I looked around the table. “What?”

“How many events have you had today?” Mama asked.

I thought it through, tapping my ringers as I went. Gloves. Grapefruit-Altria’s stone. Brownies. The staircase. “Five.” Plus unnumbered small “damn”s.

Mama looked at Tobias, then back at me. “That’s a lot,” she said.

I tried to remember everybody else’s transitions. We had gone through a lot of events. There had been days when we didn’t dare invite friends over because we didn’t know if we would all be walking on the ceiling, sprouting feathers, talking backwards, or struck mute. I didn’t remember us ever measuring somebody’s transition by how many power events happened in a day, though.

My shoulders tingled.

“Am I supposed to do something different? Please tell me. Tobias said if I didn’t use the power, I’d hurt myself. Is there a safe way not to use it?”

“No,” Mama said. She sighed. One of her better sighs. It made me feel extremely guilty.

A thread tightened across my shoulders.

“I’m sorry about messing up the grounds, I truly am. I know I’m lucky nobody’s gotten hurt yet.” When Flint transitioned, I had ended up with a broken leg. Beryl had had the itches so bad she scratched herself bloody, and Jasper had spent a couple days without vision. Since Jasper had powers, he had managed to compensate with extra senses. None of our problems were deliberate on Flint’s part. We all understood; settling in after transition was maybe the roughest time of a person’s life, barring personal tragedies and things beyond one’s control. Flint’s was the toughest transition we’d had in my generation, maybe because he had powers that nobody knew how to work, or maybe because he lacked personal discipline. It hadn’t bothered me a whole lot, despite the broken leg.

Transitions were bumpy. Everybody knew that. But I was being more inconvenient than the rest of them, waiting so late until everybody had settled into believing it would never happen. Mama didn’t like things that fell outside of patterns, or things that didn’t present well. She would have to tell Grandmere and Grandpere and her brothers and sisters about me sometime. They’d all had lots of kids, but none of our cousins had developed curse power, and all of them had transitioned. I was already a blot on Mama’s breeding record; was this new development better or worse than having no power at all?

What did Mama have to complain about? She had ended up with the fantastic family house and land in Santa Tekla, while everybody else had moved to L.A., San Francisco, or San Diego and had to start their own places for their broods. I wasn’t sure how Mama ended up with the house; maybe she had won it in a contest of wills or powers, siblings settling things among themselves, as Mama had taught us to do. When we were little, one of Mama’s younger sisters and her husband had lived in the guest house where Aunt Hermina lived now until they had had twins and the house, even though it had three bedrooms, had somehow gotten too small.

Maybe, I had thought back then when I was eight, it was because the babies were twins. Mama had never had twins.

I remembered liking them, Aunt Hazel and Uncle Doug. They were nice to have around. Sometimes they babysat us when Mama and Dad went out. Aunt Hazel had given me Jujubes on the sly once in a while.

They’d left Santa Tekla when I was eight, and moved to some town in Northern California that started with “Red.” I had only seen them once since, at a family gathering at Grandmere’s and Grandpere’s in L.A. We went to the grandparents’ every year in July to celebrate Grandpere’s birthday, and every year after Christmas to celebrate Christmas, and to fight and compete and compare notes with our cousins. Aunt Hazel and Uncle Doug lived too far away to come down every year. They did send Christmas cards; Mama put all the cards in a big bowl on the coffee table in the great hall after she had written answering cards, and I went through them sometimes.

I wondered how Doug and Hazel were doing. The twins, Amethyst and Chalcedony, would be twelve by now. I wondered what they were like.

“I hope you learn control by tomorrow,” Mama said.

“Gee, I hope I do, too.”

“Don’t take that tone with me. You’re no longer a child, Gypsum. You can be more responsible than the others were. You’re older, and you’ve had lots of practice.”

“What, I’m not allowed to fall apart like everybody else did?”

“You should be beyond that.”

“Anise,” said Dad.

Her wonderful eyes flashed at him. He lifted one eyebrow. She blinked. The temper she’d been building seeped out of her. She sighed again and looked at me. “Gypsum, I’m sorry. Of course you’ll make mistakes. Just—try to be careful, will you?”

“Of course I will.” I would try. I always tried. That didn’t mean I would succeed. I had a brief vision of our whole house going up in sorcerous smoke, and me saying, “Oops.”

“The brownies are delicious,” Mama said, and gave me and Flint an excellent smile.

WHEN I opened my eyes early Friday morning, I groaned. My shoulders ached. I needed to build myself a routine, a safe way of discharging the power I stored while I slept. But what could I automatically curse that wouldn’t hurt anybody?

I glanced at the clock. A little after six. I guessed I’d be waking up early until I figured out how to manage my power better; it was like needing to pee.

I pulled on my happi coat and some flip-flops and ran downstairs to the place by the backdoor where we kept the garbage cans. I opened all six cans. There was a satisfying trash buildup inside them, including lawn and bush clippings that Esteban was supposed to put in the compost heap. He hated the compost heap and often neglected it.

I rubbed my thumbs across my fingertips and focused. What’s inside the cans, and leave the cans alone. Maybe I better work them one at a time. I stood over the first one, wrinkled my nose against the reek of decaying kitchen trash. I pointed. “Damn.”

The metal inside of the trashcan gleamed. There was nothing left of its contents. Even the smell was gone.

I zapped each can in turn, then felt prickling at my neck, and glanced up.

Aunt Hermina, her white hair wild, her blue fish kimono tied closed with a piece of rope, stood on the stairs that led to the walk between the kitchen and the guest house, holding a wastebasket. Her mouth hung open.

“Is that for me?” I sensed only a tiny lessening of the tension in my shoulders. Damning our trash was not going to be enough to take the morning curse out of my system.