Magic for Beginners: Stories (14 page)

She sewed up the rip in the catskin bag, and Small put the gold
crowns in the bag, and it was nearly as heavy as it had been
before. The Witch’s Revenge carried the bag, and Small took the
greased string, holding it in his teeth, so the three cats were
forced to run along behind him as they left the house of the witch
Lack.

Small strikes a match, and he lights the house of the dead
witch, Lack, on fire, as they leave. But shit burns slowly, if at
all, and that house might be burning still, if someone hasn’t gone
and put it out. And maybe, someday, someone will go fishing in the
river near that house, and hook their line on a bag full of princes
and princesses, wet and sorry and wriggling in their catsuit
skins—that’s one way to catch a husband or a wife.

Small and The Witch’s Revenge walked without stopping and the
three cats came behind them. They walked until they reached a
little village very near where the witch Small’s mother had lived
and there they settled down in a room The Witch’s Revenge rented
from a butcher. They cut the greased string, and bought a cage and
hung it from a hook in the kitchen. They kept the three cats in it,
but Small bought collars and leashes, and sometimes he put one of
the cats on a leash and took it for a walk around the town.

Sometimes he wore his own catsuit and went out prowling, but The
Witch’s Revenge used to scold him if she caught him dressed like
that. There are country manners and there are town manners and
Small was a boy about town now.

The Witch’s Revenge kept house. She cleaned and she cooked and
she made Small’s bed in the morning. Like all of the witch’s cats,
she was always busy. She melted down the gold crowns in a stewpot,
and minted them into coins.

The Witch’s Revenge wore a silk dress and gloves and a heavy
veil, and ran her errands in a fine carriage, Small at her side.
She opened an account in a bank, and she enrolled Small in a
private academy. She bought a piece of land to build a house on,
and she sent Small off to school every morning, no matter how he
cried. But at night she took off her clothes and slept on his
pillow and he combed her red and white fur.

Sometimes at night she twitched and moaned, and when he asked
her what she was dreaming, she said, “There are ants! Can’t you
comb them out? Be quick and catch them, if you love me.”

But there were never any ants.

One day when Small came home, the little cat with the white
front paws was gone. When he asked The Witch’s Revenge, she said
that the little cat had fallen out of the cage and through the open
window and into the garden and before The Witch’s Revenge could
think what to do, a crow had swooped down and carried the little
cat off.

They moved into their new house a few months later, and Small
was always very careful when he went in and out the doorway,
imagining the little cat, down there in the dark, under the
doorstep, under his foot.

Small got bigger. He didn’t make any friends in the village, or
at his school, but when you’re big enough, you don’t need
friends.

One day while he and The Witch’s Revenge were eating their
dinner, there was a knock at the door. When Small opened the door,
there stood Flora and Jack. Flora was wearing a drab, thrift-store
coat, and Jack looked more than ever like a bundle of sticks.

“Small!” said Flora. “How tall you’ve become!” She burst into
tears, and wrung her beautiful hands. Jack said, looking at The
Witch’s Revenge, “And who are you?”

The Witch’s Revenge said to Jack, “Who am I? I’m your mother’s
cat, and you’re a handful of dry sticks in a suit two sizes too
large. But I won’t tell anyone if you won’t tell, either.”

Jack snorted at this, and Flora stopped crying. She began to
look around the house, which was sunny and large and well
appointed.

“There’s room enough for both of you,” said The Witch’s Revenge,
“if Small doesn’t mind.”

Small thought his heart would burst with happiness to have his
family back again. He showed Flora to one bedroom and Jack to
another. Then they went downstairs and had a second dinner, and
Small and The Witch’s Revenge listened, and the cats in their
hanging cage listened, while Flora and Jack recounted their
adventures.

A pickpocket had taken Flora’s purse, and they’d sold the
witch’s automobile, and lost the money in a game of cards. Flora
found her parents, but they were a pair of old scoundrels who had
no use for her. (She was too old to sell again. She would have
realized what they were up to.) She’d gone to work in a department
store, and Jack had sold tickets in a movie theater. They’d
quarreled and made up, and then fallen in love with other people,
and had many disappointments. At last they had decided to go home
to the witch’s house and see if it would do for a squat, or if
there was anything left, to carry away and sell.

But the house, of course, had burned down. As they argued about
what to do next, Jack had smelled Small, his brother, down in the
village. So here they were.

“You’ll live here, with us,” Small said.

Jack and Flora said they could not do that. They had ambitions,
they said. They had plans. They would stay for a week, or two
weeks, and then they would be off again. The Witch’s Revenge nodded
and said that this was sensible.

Every day Small came home from school and went out again, with
Flora, on a bicycle built for two. Or he stayed home and Jack
taught him how to hold a coin between two fingers, and how to
follow the egg, as it moved from cup to cup. The Witch’s Revenge
taught them to play bridge, although Flora and Jack couldn’t be
partners. They quarreled with each other as if they were husband
and wife.

“What do you want?” Small asked Flora one day. He was leaning
against her, wishing he were still a cat, and could sit in her lap.
She smelled of secrets. “Why do you have to go away again?”

Flora patted Small on the head. She said, “What do I want?
That’s easy enough! To never have to worry about money. I want to
marry a man and know that he’ll never cheat on me, or leave me.”
She looked at Jack as she said this.

Jack said, “I want a rich wife who won’t talk back, who doesn’t
lie in bed all day, with the covers pulled up over her head,
weeping and calling me a bundle of twigs.” And he looked at Flora
when he said this.

The Witch’s Revenge put down the sweater that she was knitting
for Small. She looked at Flora and she looked at Jack and then she
looked at Small.

Small went into the kitchen and opened the door of the hanging
cage. He lifted out the two cats and brought them to Flora and
Jack. “Here,” he said. “A husband for you, Flora, and a wife for
Jack. A prince and a princess, and both of them beautiful, and well
brought up, and wealthy, no doubt.”

Flora picked up the little tomcat and said, “Don’t tease at me,
Small! Who ever heard of marrying a cat!”

The Witch’s Revenge said, “The trick is to keep their catskins
in a safe hiding place. And if they sulk, or treat you badly, sew
them back into their catskin and put them into a bag and throw them
in the river.”

Then she took her claw and slit the skin of the tabby-colored
cat suit, and Flora was holding a naked man. Flora shrieked and
dropped him on the ground. He was a handsome man, well made, and he
had a princely manner. He was not a man that anyone would ever
mistake for a cat. He stood up and made a bow, very elegant, for
all that he was naked. Flora blushed, but she looked pleased.

“Go fetch some clothes for the Prince and the Princess,” The
Witch’s Revenge said to Small. When he got back, there was a naked
princess hiding behind the sofa, and Jack was leering at her.

A few weeks after that, there were two weddings, and then Flora
left with her new husband, and Jack went off with his new princess.
Perhaps they lived happily ever after.

The Witch’s Revenge said to Small, “We have no wife for
you.”

Small shrugged. “I’m still too young,” he said.

But try as hard as he can, Small is getting older now. The
catskin barely fits across his shoulders. The buttons strain when
he fastens them. His grown-up fur—his people fur—is coming in. At
night he dreams.

The witch his mother’s Spanish heel beats against the pane of
glass. The princess hangs in the briar. She’s holding up her dress,
so he can see the catfur down there. Now she’s under the house. She
wants to marry him, but the house will fall down if he kisses her.
He and Flora are children again, in the witch’s house. Flora lifts
up her skirt and says, see my pussy? There’s a cat down there,
peeking out at him, but it doesn’t look like any cat he’s ever
seen. He says to Flora, I have a pussy too. But his isn’t the
same.

At last he knows what happened to the little, starving, naked
thing in the forest, where it went. It crawled into his catskin,
while he was asleep, and then it climbed right inside him, his
Small skin, and now it is huddled in his chest, still cold and sad
and hungry. It is eating him from the inside, and getting bigger,
and one day there will be no Small left at all, only that nameless,
hungry child, wearing a Small skin.

Small moans in his sleep.

There are ants in The Witch’s Revenge’s skin, leaking out of her
seams, and they march down into the sheets and pinch at him, down
under his arms, and between his legs where his fur is growing in,
and it hurts, it aches and aches. He dreams that The Witch’s
Revenge wakes now, and comes and licks him all over, until the pain
melts. The pane of glass melts. The ants march away again on their
long, greased thread.

“What do you want?” says The Witch’s Revenge.

Small is no longer dreaming. He says, “I want my mother!”

Light from the moon comes down through the window over their
bed. The Witch’s Revenge is very beautiful—she looks like a Queen,
like a knife, like a burning house, a cat—in the moonlight. Her fur
shines. Her whiskers stand out like pulled stitches, wax and
thread. The Witch’s Revenge says, “Your mother is dead.”

“Take off your skin,” Small says. He’s crying and The Witch’s
Revenge licks his tears away. Small’s skin pricks all over, and
down under the house, something small wails and wails. “Give me
back my mother,” he says.

“Oh, my darling,” says his mother, the witch, The Witch’s
Revenge, “I can’t do that. I’m full of ants. Take off my skin, and
all the ants will spill out, and there will be nothing left of
me.”

Small says, “Why have you left me all alone?”

His mother the witch says, “I’ve never left you alone, not even
for a minute. I sewed up my death in a catskin so I could stay with
you.”

“Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says. He pulls at the sheet
on the bed, as if it were his mother’s catskin.

The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head. She trembles and beats her
tail back and forth. She says, “How can you ask me for such a
thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking
me for? Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night.”

And Small has to be satisfied with that. All night long, Small
combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in
her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her
mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel
himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so
small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up
the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for
an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he’ll creep inside her
mouth, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If
he can, he’ll help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can
get out again and come and live in the world with him, and if she
won’t come out, then he won’t, either. He’ll live there, the way
that sailors learn to live, inside the belly of fish who have eaten
them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her
skin.

This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to
kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have
to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such
thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits.
They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live
that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all
of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of
it?

This is a story about being lost in the woods.

This guy Soap is at a party out in the suburbs. The thing you
need to know about Soap is that he keeps a small framed oil
painting in the trunk of his car. The painting is about the size of
a paperback novel. Wherever Soap goes, this oil painting goes with
him. But he leaves the painting in the trunk of his car, because
you don’t walk around a party carrying a painting. People will
think you’re weird.

Soap doesn’t know anyone here. He’s crashed the party, which is
what he does now, when he feels lonely. On weekends, he just drives
around the suburbs until he finds one of those summer twilight
parties that are so big that they spill out onto the yard.

Kids are out on the lawn of a two-story house, lying on the damp
grass and drinking beer out of plastic cups. Soap has brought along
a six-pack. It’s the least he can do. He walks through the house,
past four black guys sitting all over a couch. They’re watching a
football game and there’s some music on the stereo. The television
is on mute. Over by the TV, a white girl is dancing by herself.
When she gets too close to it, the guys on the couch start
complaining.

Soap finds the kitchen. There’s one of those big professional
ovens and a lot of expensive-looking knives stuck to a magnetic
strip on the wall. It’s funny, Soap thinks, how expensive stuff
always looks more dangerous, and also safer, both of these things
at the same time. He pokes around in the fridge and finds some
pre-sliced cheese and English muffins. He grabs three slices of
cheese, the muffins, and puts the beer in the fridge. There’s also
a couple of steaks, and so he takes one out, heats up the
broiler.

A girl wanders into the kitchen. She’s black and her hair goes
up and up and on top are these sturdy, springy curls like little
waves. Toe to top of her architectural haircut, she’s as tall as
Soap. She has eyes the color of iceberg lettuce. There’s a
heart-shaped rhinestone under one green eye. The rhinestone winks
at Soap like it knows him. She’s gorgeous, but Soap knows better
than to fool around with girls who aren’t out of high school yet,
maybe. “What are you doing?” she says.

“Cooking a steak,” Soap says. “Want one?”

“No,” she says. “I already ate.”

She sits up on the counter beside the sink and swings her legs.
She’s wearing a bikini top, pink shorts, and no shoes. “Who are
you?” she says.

“Will,” Soap says, although Will isn’t his name. Soap isn’t his
real name, either.

“I’m Carly,” she says. “You want a beer?”

“There’s beer in the fridge,” Will says, and Carly says, “I know
there is.”

Will opens and closes drawers and cabinet doors until he’s found
a plate, a fork and a knife, and garlic salt. He takes his steak
out of the oven.

“You go to State?” Carly says. She pops off the beer top against
the lip of the kitchen counter, and Will knows she’s showing
off.

“No,” Will says. He sits down at the kitchen table and cuts off
a piece of steak. He’s been lonely ever since he and his friend
Mike got out of prison and Mike went out to Seattle. It’s nice to
sit in a kitchen and talk to a girl.

“So what do you do?” Carly says. She sits down at the table,
across from him. She lifts her arms up and stretches until her back
cracks. She’s got nice tits.

“Telemarketing,” Will says, and Carly makes a face.

“That sucks,” she says.

“Yeah,” Will says. “No, it isn’t too bad. I like talking to
people. I just got out of prison.” He takes another big bite of
steak.

“No way,” Carly says. “What did you do?”

Will chews. He swallows. “I don’t want to talk about it right
now.”

“Okay,” Carly says.

“Do you like museums?” Will says. She looks like a girl who goes
to museums.

Some drunk white kid wanders into the kitchen. He says hey to
Will and then he lies down on the floor with his head under Carly’s
chair. “Carly, Carly, Carly,” he says. “I am so in love with you
right now. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world. And you
don’t even know my name. That’s hurtful.”

“Museums are okay,” Carly says. “I like concerts. Jazz.
Improvisational comedy. I like stuff that isn’t the same every time
you look at it.”

“How about zombies?” Will says. No more steak. He mops up meat
juice with one of the muffins. Maybe he could eat another one of
those steaks. The kid with his head under Carly’s chair says,
“Carly? Carly? Carly? I like it when you sit on my face,
Carly.”

“You mean like horror movies?” Carly says.

“The living dead,” says the kid under the chair. “The walking
dead. Why do the dead walk everywhere? Why don’t they just catch
the bus?”

“You still hungry?” Carly says to Will. “I could make you some
cinnamon toast. Or some soup.”

“They could carpool,” the kid under the chair says. “Hey y’all,
I don’t know why they call carpools
carpools.
It’s not
like there are cars with swimming pools in them. Because people
might drown on their way to school. What a weird word. Carpool.
Carpool. Carly’s pool. There are naked people in Carly’s pool, but
Carly isn’t naked in Carly’s pool.”

“Is there a phone around here?” Will says. “I was thinking I
should call my dad. He’s having open-heart surgery tomorrow.”

It’s not his name, but let’s call him Soap. That’s what they
called him in prison, although not for the reasons you’re thinking.
When he was a kid, he’d read a book about a boy named Soap. So he
didn’t mind the nickname. It was better than Oatmeal, which is what
one guy ended up getting called. You don’t want to know why Oatmeal
got called Oatmeal. It would put you off oatmeal.

Soap was in prison for six months. In some ways, six months
isn’t a long time. You spend longer inside your mother. But six
months in prison is enough time to think about things and all
around you, everyone else is thinking too. It can make you go
crazy, wondering what other people are thinking about. Some guys
thought about their families, and other guys thought about revenge,
or how they were going to get rich. Some guys took correspondence
courses or fell in love because of what one of the volunteer art
instructors said about one of their watercolors. Soap didn’t take
an art course, but he thought about art. Art was why Soap was in
prison. This sounded romantic, but really, it was just stupid.

Even before Soap and his friend Mike went to prison, Soap was
sure that he’d had opinions about art, even though he hadn’t known
much about art. It was the same with prison. Art and prison were
the kind of things that you had opinions about, even if you didn’t
know anything about them. Soap still didn’t know much about art.
These were some of the things that he had known about art before
prison:

He knew what he liked when he saw it. As it had turned out, he
knew what he liked, even when he couldn’t see it.

Museums gave him hiccups. He had hiccups a lot of the time while
he was in prison too.

These were some of the things Soap figured out about art while
he was in prison.

Great art came out of great suffering. Soap had gone through a
lot of shit because of art.

There was a difference between art, which you just looked at,
and things like soap, which you used. Even if the soap smelled so
good that you didn’t want to use it, only smell it. This was why
people got so pissed off about art. Because you didn’t eat it, and
you didn’t sleep on it, and you couldn’t put it up your nose. A lot
of people said things like “That’s not art” when whatever they were
talking about could clearly not have been anything else, except
art.

When Soap got tired of thinking about art, he thought about
zombies. He worked on his zombie contingency plan. Thinking about
zombies was less tiring than thinking about art. Here’s what Soap
knew about zombies:

Zombies were not about sex.

Zombies were not interested in art.

Zombies weren’t complicated. It wasn’t like werewolves or ghosts
or vampires. Vampires, for example, were the middle/upper-middle
management of the supernatural world. Some people thought of
vampires as rock stars, but really they were more like Martha
Stewart. Vampires were prissy. They had to follow rules. They had
to look good. Zombies weren’t like that. You couldn’t exorcise
zombies. You didn’t need luxury items like silver bullets or
crucifixes or holy water. You just shot zombies in the head, or set
fire to them, or hit them over the head really hard. There were
some guys in the prison who knew about that. There were guys in the
prison who knew about anything you might want to know about. There
were guys who knew things that you didn’t want to know. It was like
a library, except it wasn’t.

Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far
as zombies were concerned. And anyone could
be
a zombie.
You didn’t have to be special, or good at sports, or good-looking.
You didn’t have to smell good, or wear the right kind of clothes,
or listen to the right kind of music. You just had to be slow.

Soap liked this about zombies.

There is never just one zombie.

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies.
(Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you
want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a
little nervous. There’s the pallor and the cakey mortician-style
makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably
malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in
those little, crammed cars. Zombies weren’t much of anything. They
didn’t carry musical instruments and they didn’t care whether or
not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.)
Given a choice, Soap would take zombies over clowns any day. There
was a white guy in the prison who had been a clown. Nobody was sure
why he was in prison.

It turned out that everyone in the prison had a zombie
contingency plan, once you asked them, just like everyone in prison
had a prison escape plan, only nobody talked about those. Soap
tried not to dwell on escape plans, although sometimes he dreamed
that he was escaping. Then the zombies would show up. They always
showed up in his escape dreams. You could escape prison, but you
couldn’t escape zombies. This was true in Soap’s dreams, just the
way it was true in the movies. You couldn’t get any more true than
that.

According to Soap’s friend Mike, who was also in prison, people
worried too much about zombies and not enough about icebergs. Even
though icebergs were real. Mike pointed out that icebergs were
slow, like zombies. Maybe you could adapt zombie contingency plans
to cope with icebergs. Mike asked Soap to start thinking about
icebergs. No one else was. Somebody had to plan for icebergs,
according to Mike.

Even after Soap got out of prison, when it was much too late, he
still dreamed about escaping from prison.

“So whose house is this, anyway?” Will asks Carly. She’s walking
up the stairs in front of him. If he reached out just one hand, he
could untie her bikini top. It would just fall off.

“This girl,” Carly says, and proceeds to relate a long, sad
story. “A friend of mine. Her parents took her to France for this
bicycle tour. They’re into Amway. This trip is some kind of bonus.
Like, her father sold a bunch of water filters and so now everyone
has to go to France and build their own bicycles. In Marseilles.
Isn’t that lame? She can’t even speak French. She’s a
Francophilophobe. She’s a klutz. Her parents don’t even like her.
If they could have, they would have left her at home. Or maybe
they’ll leave her somewhere in France. Shit, would I love to see
her try and ride a bike in France. She’ll probably fall right over
the Alps. I hate her. We were going to have this party and then she
said I should go ahead and have it without her. She’s really pissed
off at her parents.”

“Is this a bathroom?” Will says. “Hold on a minute.”

He goes in and takes a piss. He flushes and when he goes to wash
his hands, he sees that the people who own this house have put some
chunk of fancy soap beside the sink. He sniffs the soap. Then he
opens up the door. Carly is standing there talking to some Asian
girl wearing a strapless dress with little shiny fake plastic
flowers all over it. It’s too big for her in the bust, so she’s
holding the front out like she’s waiting for someone to come along
and drop a weasel in it. Will wonders who the dress belongs to, and
why this girl would want to wear an ugly dress like that,
anyway.

He holds out the soap. “Smell this,” he says to Carly and she
does. “What does it smell like?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Marmalade?”

“Lemongrass,” Will says. He marches back into the bathroom and
opens up the window. There’s a swimming pool down there with people
in it. He throws the soap out the window and some guy in the pool
yells, “Hey!”

“Why’d he do that?” the girl in the hall says. Carly starts
laughing.

Soap’s friend Mike had a girlfriend named Jenny. Jenny never
came to see Mike in prison. Soap felt bad about this.

Soap’s dad was living in New Zealand and every once in a while
Soap got a postcard.

Soap’s mom, who lived in California out near Manhattan Beach,
was too busy and too pissed off with Soap to visit him in prison.
Soap’s mom didn’t tolerate stupidity or bad luck.

Soap’s older sister, Becka, was the only family member who ever
came to visit him in prison. Becka was an actress-waitress who had
once been in a low-budget zombie movie. Soap had watched it once
and wasn’t sure which was stranger: seeing your sister naked, or
seeing your naked sister get eaten by zombies. Becka was almost
good looking enough to be on a reality dating show, but not funny
looking or sad enough to be on one of the makeover shows. Becka was
always giving notice. So then their mom would buy Becka a
round-trip ticket to go visit Soap. Soap figured he was supposed to
be an example to Becka: find a good job and keep it, or you’ll end
up in prison like your brother.