Eileen Wilks - Ritual Magic

Stupid birds. They were used to not remembering much. For them, everything was now . They didn’t have much then. But she bet even a bird would be really sad if you took him out of his place and put him someplace else, a place where everything was strange and he didn’t know any of the other birds.

Somewhere a floorboard squeaked. She heard voices, but not clearly. Not enough to tell for sure if one of them was Mr. Turner, but probably so. This was his house.

Julia didn’t remember coming here, but Sam had told her she’d wake up at Mr. Turner’s house. She’d forgotten so much, but she remembered everything Sam told her, which was funny because it felt like she’d learned those things a long time ago. She knew it was just yesterday, but she felt as if months and months had passed. Sam had told her she would feel this way. She remembered that, too.

Most of what he’d told her was pretty awful.

Mama, I miss you so much. I wish you were here. I wish it a lot.

That thought was familiar, as if she’d had it thousands of times. The grief was familiar, too, like an old blanket worn thin by use and washing. So was the way her eyes leaked some of her sorrow. There was comfort in that familiarity, like knowing where the cracks were in the sidewalk she walked every day to go to school. Even when a path took you somewhere you didn’t much want to go, knowing where the cracks were made you feel a little better. But there’d be no more counting the sidewalk cracks for her, would there? No more school. At least she didn’t think so. She was fifty-seven years old, even if her memories were only twelve. They didn’t make fifty-seven-year-old women go to school, did they?

Someone turned on a radio or a stereo. Music, anyway. It was the classic kind of music her dad liked, so she pretended to like it, too. Not that it seemed to matter to him.

Why couldn’t it have been him who died, and not Mama?

Guilt bit hard. She sat up and started to throw back the covers, wanting to run, just run, until she didn’t feel so much of everything. And she saw Fluffy.

He’d been pink once. Now he was a dingy sort of no- color that just looked old. But the scrap of ribbon around his neck had held on to some of the pink, and his face and the insides of his ears were black—faded, but still black. Someone had left him here for her. Someone had put him on the bed next to her pillow. Julia grabbed the little stuffed lamb and hugged him tight.

She was way too old for stuffed animals. She didn’t care. Memories were stacked up in him, piled up in layers she could feel, weighty and dense, when she hugged him. She didn’t think, remember when. She held that memory, all sorts of memories, in the rough, tactile form of a scruffy stuffed lamb.

There was a TV table next to the bed. It held a flashlight and a glass of water. The flashlight made her eyes sting. It made her a little bit mad, too. That had to be Mequi’s idea. Mequi was the only one other than Mama who knew she’d slept with a flashlight until she was ten, but she wasn’t ten anymore. Either way you counted up her age, she was too old to need a flashlight to feel safe in the dark. Mequi shouldn’t have told anyone she needed a flashlight, and besides, she didn’t anymore.

But maybe Mequi didn’t remember exactly when Julia stopped needing a flashlight at bedtime. For her, that was a very long time ago.

Julia sniffed and scowled and reached for the glass of water because now that she thought about it, she was really thirsty. She drank most of the water and sighed. Now she’d have to find the bathroom.

She put Fluffy on her pillow and got all the way to the door before she realized she’d almost gone out of the room in her pajamas. In someone’s pajamas, anyway. They were white with little blue flowers, and they weren’t what she’d been wearing when she went to Sam’s lair, which meant someone had put them on her while she was asleep. That creeped her out.

She bit her lip, then put her ear up against the door, wanting to know who was out there. At first she didn’t hear much, but then someone spoke, and it was him. Mr. Turner. She couldn’t hear very well . . . mumble, mumble, few more minutes , mumble. Then someone else spoke. A woman. Her voice was familiar, but even if it hadn’t been, Julia knew who it had to be.

Miss Yu. Lily Yu. The FBI agent she’d met yesterday . . . no, not yesterday. Two days ago. Sam said he’d spent twenty-six hours fixing her, then she’d slept, and now it was morning. So it was two days since she found herself outside the restroom in the wrong body.

Miss Yu lived here, too. She was Mr. Turner’s fiancée.

Julia’s stomach felt sort of clenched and curious at the same time. Miss Yu was living in sin with Mr. Turner. He said people didn’t think of it that way anymore because the sexual revolution had changed things. Well, he hadn’t said those exact words, but she thought that’s what he meant. Julia’s mother had not approved of the sexual revolution. She said it was just a bunch of silly hippies who thought they’d invented sleeping around, when really people had been misbehaving that way for thousands of years only they didn’t talk about it all the time.

Miss Yu was trying to find the bad guys who’d hurt Julia, which meant Julia ought to like her. But she was going to marry Mr. Turner, which made Julia not like her very much, even though that was silly. Julia was either too old for Mr. Turner or too young, depending on if you went by her body’s age or her real age, so there was no point in being jealous. But that wasn’t what made her straighten away from the door, rubbing her stomach.

Miss Yu was supposed to be Julia’s daughter.

This body . . . this too-tall, too-old body . . . had had sex. Had borne children. Three of them, she’d been told. Three daughters. This body knew about those things and Julia didn’t, and when she thought about that her stomach felt weird, like it couldn’t make up its mind if it was sick or excited.

She wished she was still sleepy so she could go back to bed. But she wasn’t, not even a little bit. And she really did need to go to the bathroom. She might as well get dressed. She sighed and looked around the room.

It was small and clean and didn’t look finished. The bed she’d slept in was a double, and it had sheets and a blanket, but no bedspread. No rug on the scuffed wooden floor, either. No curtain on the window, and only that TV tray for a bed table, and no mirrors. She was glad of that. She didn’t like looking at herself.

There was a chest of drawers, though. With a bunch of stuff on top. Familiar stuff. Julia’s feet took her there without her even thinking about it.

There was her Magic 8 Ball and the little porcelain figure of a Chinese girl that her grandmother on her mother’s side had given her for her ninth birthday and the silver-plated mirror her grandmother on her father’s side had left to her when she died three years ago. Forty-eight years ago, now. Next to them were two books—the little-kid storybook her mother used to read to her, with stories about Peter Rabbit and the Little Red Hen, and The Secret Garden , which she’d read three times. On top of the books sat the white New Testament she’d been given when she was confirmed in the church, and below them were two photo albums.

When Julia was nine, her parents had given her a Polaroid camera for Christmas and a photo album. After Christmas, she and her mother had put the snapshots in the album together. That was the album on top, with a pink velvet cover. The other album was from their trip to Disneyland last year, or forty-six years ago, depending on how you counted. She’d bought that album with her own money and had embroidered “My Trip” on the green brocade cover ever so carefully, but she wasn’t very good at embroidery. The letters leaned all over the place.