Sarah McCarry - All Our Pretty Songs

In the winter I love my work. All the out-of-towners flee the eternal damp. We have to wear sweaters and wool hats to keep out the cold, and we drink coffee until we’re cracked-out and speedy. The cobblestoned streets are wet and foggy, the low mournful sound of the ferry horn carries across the water, and all the afternoons are dreamy and quiet. I work after school and on weekends, and it’s always a relief to come here after the crowded halls and bells marking every hour, pop quizzes on nothing, lunch in the white-tiled cafeteria that reeks of old meatballs. I’d rather be at the market, where the salt smells from the fish stand mingle with the salt smell of the air, and seagulls squawk overhead, and the goth girls at the pierogi stand trade us steaming dumplings for apples and pears.

The lower levels are a maze of high-ceilinged hallways and big windows that look out over the bay. Creaking wooden floorboards, smells of incense and baking and cedar. Tiny shops tucked away around blind corners and in odd nooks. The Egyptian import store, where Aurora and I used to buy silver ankhs and wadjet eyes as Tutankhamun-obsessed girls. The bead store, where we spent hours sifting through wooden trays of colored glass, late-afternoon sun glinting red and blue and green among the beads. And our favorite then, our favorite still: the witch store. Walls of bookshelves to the left of the door, with titles like Goddess Divination and Magickal Herbcraft and Following the Moon . On the right, shelves and shelves of vitamins and tinctures and incenses and mysterious potions. The light in that shop has a quality to it that is thicker and richer than ordinary light, oozing across the glass bottles and casting shadows among the incense boxes. Cass took me there to buy my first tarot deck, from the long counter with a glass case that runs half the length of the store, full of cards: the Rider Waite and the Crowley Thoth deck, the Osho Zen Tarot, the Russian tarot and the Medieval tarot, goddess tarots, moon tarots, all laid out on swatches of velvet. The counter is cluttered with china bowls filled with beaded bracelets and more incense, pentacle charms, stones with special powers. Jars of rose petals and salts, ceramic Buddhas garlanded with jade, bundles of sage.

I used to be in love with the girl who worked at the witch store when I was a kid. She was elfin but not at all frail, and piled her crow-colored hair on top of her head in complicated knots. Her arms were inky with tattoos, sigils and runes and old woodcut illustrations running from her shoulders to her wrists. She always wore black: black lace dresses cut short and ragged, faded black concert shirts peppered with holes and tight black jeans, black boots or black canvas sneakers. Silver rings on every finger and silver pendants on silver chains.

When Aurora and I were young it was our greatest ambition to someday be the witch-store girl. We spent whole afternoons poking among the boxes of incenses, sneaking glances at her and imagining her life: her apartment filled with altars and candles and tapestries, her bed strewn with crushed-velvet pillows and bits of herbs, her collection of Dead Can Dance and Siouxsie and Clan of Xymox and This Mortal Coil on vinyl. Probably her boyfriend was one of the other people who worked in the market, one of the fruit-stand boys, equally cool-eyed and mysterious and beautiful. When we bought our vanilla oil and Nag Champa the witch-store girl would ignore us until the last possible minute, ignore even radiant, otherworldly Aurora; she would look out the window with one finger holding her place in her book, which was always a book of spells. I’d stand there twisting one foot behind the other, wanting to ask her if it was possible to move into her life, or even what that life looked like, what she did after work, what she thought about, who she loved, could she tell our fortunes from the pack of tarot cards she kept in her bag with her pot and her clove cigarettes.

These days the witch-store girl is a different girl. I do work in the market, and that life has lost some of its luster now that I’m the one hauling compost after the fruit stand closes, or bantering with the fish-stall boys who love to flirt with everyone, or half freezing to death on the long winter afternoons. Aurora still meets me after work sometimes, though, and we go to the witch store and rummage through books about Wicca and handfasting, or uncap the brown bottles of essential oil and hold them up to each other’s noses. The witch-store girl still ignores us.

Summer in the market is hell. Summer is so many tourists you have to kick at them to get anywhere; they gape at everything, take pictures of themselves wearing stupid hats or holding up cups of coffee, like coffee is something they can’t get where they are from. They ask you directions to places you’ve never heard of, or where they should eat dinner, or where they should stay, or if their car will be okay where they left it, while their sticky-faced children knock apples off the displays and wail in hellish chorus. In the summers I work full-time, and sometimes by the end of the day I never want to see another human being again.

Today has been a long day full of tourists palming peaches in their meaty hands, and I’m tired. I’m working with Raoul, who is my favorite. He’s a poet and he’s even meaner than me. He makes fun of the tourists to their faces and they love it, not realizing he’s serious. He lives in a studio apartment down the street from the market, and after work he lets me come over and smoke pot out of his hookah and fall asleep on his couch with his cat. His cat is named Oscar Wilde and its fur is the color and softness of dandelions gone to seed. Behind me I can hear the fish-stall boys yelling and chanting. The tourists cheer as they hurl fish back and forth.

“The peaches here come highly recommended,” someone says. I look up, ready to make a smart-aleck remark, and it’s Jack. I want to reach across the fruit and touch him, see if he’s real.

“You,” I say, and he smiles.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. I close it again.

“Are you doing anything after work?”

“I get off in half an hour.”

“Can I come and get you?”

“Yeah,” I say. Trying not to squeak. He grins at me, tips an imaginary cap. Vanishes back into the crowd.

“Who was that, ” Raoul says.

“Some boy I met at one of Aurora’s parties.”

“My goodness,” Raoul says. “Next time, invite me.”

I drop an entire flat of plums before I leave, and Raoul laughs at me. When I pick up my backpack at the end of my shift my hands are shaking. Jack’s waiting for me down the street, leaning against a wall, one booted foot tucked behind the other. I hold up a bag of peaches and he smiles. People turn their heads to look at him as they walk past. He leads me to a motorcycle parked down the block and hands me a helmet. “Do you have to be anywhere?” he says.

“No.”

“Good. Have you ever ridden on one of these?” I shake my head. “Just hold on.” He throws one long leg over the back of the bike. I put the helmet on. My body fits neatly behind his. He takes both my wrists and pulls my arms tight around his waist. I can feel the muscles of his back moving against my chest. The bike roars to life, and for a moment I can see the possibility of my entire life, the story waiting to be written.

We drive for a long time, through the city and through miles of suburbs with their identical streets cluttered with identical houses and identical stores selling identical objects, out onto the long country roads that wind through farmland and sun-dappled woods. Overhead the green-leaved branches meet to make a latticework ceiling as we hurtle westward. I can feel every movement of his body. The wind tears merrily at my clothes, fluttering my shirt against my ribcage. At last the trees thin and ahead I can see a line of blue-grey. He’s taken us all the way to the Pacific.