The Enchanted Writes Book One (26 page)

“A bath? How am I going to make anything
grow if I'm standing on enamel and ceramic? You need to be
connected to the ground.” Mary latched her hands onto her muddy
pants, placing her sandwich down for a second, and pulled them up
as she danced on the kitchen floor, splashing dirt everywhere. “You
should know that. It's in the details,” she brought up a finger and
pointed it at me again, “every single little detail. If you want to
learn how to influence the world through magic, you must be ever
sensitive to everything around you. Gather facts, my dear witch,
and you will gather power.”

I nodded my head, even though what I really
wanted to do was roll my eyes. I had to keep reminding myself that
while my once powerful grandmother was now heading full force
towards dementia, I still owed her respect. Because underneath she
was still the same woman, just at a different stage of life.

“Anyhow, enough lessons, they do so tire me.
How was your day at work, my dear?” She grabbed up her sandwich and
went back to cramming it in her mouth.

I brought up a hand and tucked my hair
behind my ears as I tried to do a quick mental calculation of how
much time it would take me to clean the kitchen of all this blasted
mud and dirt. “Fine, I guess,” I said distractedly.

“It can't be that fine; you sound as if you
have been forced to endure the trials of Hercules himself. Has
anyone been making you fight water monsters? Have you had to steal
magical apples from the gods?”

I smiled pleasantly, if you call pleasant
thin-lipped, stiff, and entirely unhappy. “Just the same old
business.”

Though I was technically a witch, and I
wasn't a particularly bad one, it didn't pay all the bills.
Especially when you lived in an enormous house that was crying out
for repairs and had to keep on buying hundreds of dollars of
groceries a week to keep your grandmother fed.

One of these days, if it were ever possible,
I would love to live off my magic alone, but I doubted it would
ever arise. There wasn't that much call for witches these days, not
because people didn't like magic, but because they didn't know
about it. It was particularly hard to make a living off something
that was entirely secret, that you couldn't advertise, and that you
couldn't tell anyone about unless they already knew it existed.

It hadn’t been like this hundreds upon
hundreds of years ago, or so I had been told. When magic had been
more widely practiced, accepted, and known about, many witches had
lived off their trade alone. Then the dark ages had come along, or
something like that, witch hunts and whatnot, I wasn't really that
up on the history, all I could tell you was that in the
21
^st
century it was practically
impossible to get along only being a witch.

“You should open your heart to the
possibilities of magic. It can be practiced at every single moment
in the day. A true witch understands the power of context and
influence,” my grandmother reminded me for about the thousandth
time.

I knew that lesson, but it wasn't one I
required repeating today. What I really needed was for my
grandmother to clean up this mess, have a bath, and maybe, just
once, not trash the house while I was out at work.

“I don't suppose we had any requests today?”
I asked as I walked over to the kitchen table, frowning at the
dirty dishes.

How they had un-cleaned themselves, taken
themselves out of the cupboard, and stacked themselves back on the
table, I didn't know, and I didn't want to ask. Probably some
ridiculous spell my grandmother had attempted.

“Unfortunately not, my dear, but my new
herbs arrive tomorrow, and I'm very excited about it. I imagine the
love potions I'll be able to make from these, and the special
healing tonics, will be quite fantastic.”

I listened to my grandmother with half an
ear as I stacked the dishes and took them over to the dishwasher,
making sure to frown their way, as if that would help.

“You have signed your custom papers this
time, right?” I turned over my shoulder to face her.

“Of course I have.”

I nodded my head. At least one thing was
going right. Because I really didn't need a knock on the door from
the police ready to drag my grandmother away for importing God
knows what into the country. She did so love her herbs, and I
understood how important they were to magic, but in modern times a
lot of the substances she wanted for her spells were ... to
put it mildly ... absolutely freaking illegal. We’re not just
talking dried lizards that could bring in various bacteria and
viruses, we’re talking freaking narcotics. The kind of thing that
would get you in a great deal of trouble, and the kind of thing I
really didn't need to deal with on top of all of the other hassles
that were already assailing my life.

Last time my grandmother had tried to import
her latest bunch of new herbs, I'd spent almost two hours down at
the customs office, trying to get them to understand that she was
old, and she didn't really understand it was illegal to import
sleeping pills en masse from South America.

To my grandmother, they contained a
substance that was absolutely necessary for various nocturnal
enchantments; to the police it looked like she was trying to set up
her own illegal pharmacy.

Pressing my fingers into my brow, I soon
finished stacking the dishwasher. Loading in the soap and turning
it on, I patted it several times as if in warning. I really didn't
need the dishes to unstack themselves and wind up on the table
again.

“Patting it won't do any good, but a chain
would,” my grandmother commented. “I think there's a lock somewhere
out in the shed, and you remember that old ship’s anchor we dredged
up one day from the bay? You could put it on top, I'm sure it would
get the impression then,” Mary pointed through the window towards
the shed.

Chaining up a dishwasher, locking it up, and
popping a ship’s anchor on top to weigh it down so it didn't
unstack itself was not something that ordinary people had to deal
with.

Well welcome to the extraordinary. Yes, it's
full of magic, but I can't exactly claim it's full of fun.

“I'm going upstairs to have a shower. Please
do me a favor and hop in the downstairs bath?”

Granny appeared to consider my words for a
moment, then she clearly got distracted as she watched a flock of
birds fly past the window above the kitchen sink. “My oh my,
they're practicing weather magic. Rain is on the way,” she brought
up a hand and waved at them.

Birds practicing weather magic. If we
weren’t both witches, such a statement would lead me to conclude
that my grandmother's slip into dementia had turned into a
landslide. But I understood, I understood perfectly.

We looked at the world in a different way.
Magic made you do that. If you practiced it, it completely changed
your perspective. It wasn't just witches and wizards that could do
potions, spells, and enchantments; anybody and anything that
followed the correct steps practiced magic as well.

The squirrel that hoarded nuts, dug them
into the ground, and left them there for the winter, practiced a
type of growth magic. The butterfly that flapped its wings over the
Amazon, was practicing a kind of chaos magic. The giant blue whale
that swum through the ocean, breaching to the surface only to swim
back down again was practicing a type of wave magic.

Everywhere, everything was engaged in some
kind of spell. You just had to know what to look for.

Flicking my eyes up at the flock of birds as
they flew out of view, I scratched my neck. I wasn't so angry at my
grandmother and the mess that she had created to forget that I was
a witch. And I could clearly see the exact path the birds flew
through the sky, the speed, the angle, everything, and I understood
what it meant.

Rain. I didn't have to look up the weather
report to confirm that fact. I just understood it.

It was instinctive.

It also made me rub my brow even harder.
Rain meant more mud. Because no doubt the moment I left for work
tomorrow morning, my grandmother would trot out to the shed, pluck
up the spade, dig holes in the garden, and get up to more mischief.
And even though I didn't particularly care about the state of the
yard, I didn't want mud everywhere.

Deciding it was thoroughly time to give up,
I waved a hand at my grandmother, walked out of the kitchen, up the
stairs, and to the shower.

I was lucky enough that our house was so
large that I practically had an entire level to myself. A level
where my grandmother hardly ever went, and one I could keep just as
clean as I liked it. It was beautifully decorated too, a testament
to all of the lovely objects that I had collected over my life;
silk cushions from India, paintings and prints from Paris, carved
statues from Thailand, and mahogany furniture from Britain.

It was my oasis away from the crazy, the
mud, and the purple-rinse curls.

By the time I made it into the shower, I was
finally calming down. I was sure to let the water practice its
magic. It had a unique way of washing over you, collecting not just
the mud and grime, but the sorrows and sadness and troubles, and
flushing them down the drain.

It wouldn't last forever; I lived in a
rundown mansion with a perpetually crazy grandmother, and we were
both witches. Trouble had a way of stalking me.

But for those few minutes I was happy.

The end of Magical Influence Book One.

The rest of this book is currently
available.