Josh Emmons - The Loss of Leon Meed

“Take care now,” said the fisherman when she got up to disembark.

At home her sister Maria was on the phone and she had to wait two hours before being able to check her messages: Tina and Franklin and still no Sam and this was the absolutely last day she would accept him so he was throwing away a chance at immense happiness. Whatthefuckever. Tina was waitressing at the Red Lion Inn lounge when Lillith called her house and got into the stupid nitpicking conversation with Tina’s brother about when she was going to give him free stuff at McDonald’s. Then she called Franklin, who told her that he and she and Tina needed to talk about the Wiccan convocation from the night before, that she wasn’t going to believe what had happened. Twenty minutes later he picked her up and they drove to the Red Lion Inn with the car almost dying at every stoplight, Franklin putting his hand on the dashboard in a faith healing gesture.

They walked in and Tina waved at them from where she stood distributing beers to a table of six white-shirted guys near a television broadcasting the prize fight out of Las Vegas. The television was muted with closed-caption subtitles for the hearing impaired. The white-shirted guys studiously read the black-outlined words scrolling across the bottom of the screen, their faces like stock traders’ in the Pit when the markets rumble, and then shouted their agreement or disagreement or bafflement at how the commentators could say something so stupid about such a clear punch, and then went back to reading and beer drinking.

“Who are those people?” asked Lillith when Tina came over on a two-minute break to sit with her and Franklin.

“The kitchen staff of Shanghai-Lo. They come for pay-per-view stuff.”

“None of them are Chinese.”

“Shanghai-Lo isn’t so authentic. They get all their recipes from a 1960’s edition of The Joy of Oriental Cooking . I’d never go again if I didn’t love their fried wontons.”

“Those are good,” said Lillith.

“So what are you guys doing here?”

Franklin said, “I have to tell you about last night’s convocation.”

“He’s being mysterious about it,” said Lillith. “On the ride over he didn’t say anything. And I begged.”

“You didn’t offer me a blow job.”

“There’d have to be something for me to blow.”

Franklin smirked and tapped his thumbs together and said, “So we start off at the convocation talking about the RenFair next month and this ayurvedic bookstore opening in Arcata and how there’ve been more attacks on neopagans in Kansas, and then Kathy stands up and she’s in full effect with the sequin gown and the sapphire rings and the head wrap and she looks, you know, the complete sorceress, like she’s ready to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms out of a glass of water, and she makes this speech about how a local guy named Leon Meed is on the Astral Plane right now, as in at this very second he’s over there with the Goddess and the Horned Consort and all the spirits.”

“What do you mean on the Astral Plane?” asked Tina. “A live person?”

“She says he’s been there for a week.”

“How would a live person get to the Astral Plane?”

“Kathy thinks the Horned Consort took him. The guy is a burl sculptor, and she says the Horned Consort fell in love with his statues and kidnapped him. She says she doesn’t know for sure how it happened. But what’s even more bogus is that Kathy thinks the guy is going back and forth between here and the Astral Plane. Then she challenges us to come up with a spell to bring him back. She gives it to us as an assignment, like we’re her students or something.”

“And then someone put her in a straitjacket?” asked Tina.

“You know how people never confront Kathy. And the thing is, a guy named Leon Meed really did go missing last week—there’s a police investigation—and people have reported seeing him since then, which according to Kathy is proof positive.”

“She gives witches a bad name.”

“We just sat there when she was done explaining it. She wants to have a special meeting on Sunday to talk about our strategy for rescuing this guy.”

Tina waved at her manager, who was pointing a finger at his watch from behind the bar, and mouthed “I know I know ” and said, “I’ve got to get back to work. Maybe we should find a way to excommunicate her, if she’s going to keep saying such dumb things.”

“It’s not dumb,” said Lillith quietly.

“What?” said Tina.

“It’s not dumb. I’ve seen him.”

“Seen who?” said Franklin.

“The guy who disappeared, Leon Meed. At a show at the Fricatash last Friday. He was talking to that girl Eve you know she’s going out with Ryan Burghese? and then he disappeared.” As Lillith said this she looked at the table in front of her and saw an ampersand crack in the table’s surface.

Tina waved her white dish towel at her manager like a peace offering and stood up. “Very funny. I’ll see you later.”

Lillith didn’t indicate in any way that she was joking, and when Tina left Franklin said, “You’re not serious.”

“I am. You can not believe me but I saw him. And if other neopagans are saying that Leon’s on the Astral Plane, then that makes sense to me.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before now?”

“I thought it was because I was drinking. I thought, I don’t know what I thought. But the point is we’ve got to help bring him back if that’s what Kathy’s saying. We’ve got to cast the spell.”

“You’re becoming a Wicca fundamentalist.”

“No, I’m not.”

Franklin said, “Hmm.”

Lillith said, “Hmm.”

Then they smiled and they’d been best friends since they were five-year-olds and there were some things that they instantly forgave in each other.

“Jim!” said Shane. The third annual Boys in the Wood racquetball tournament was in midcontest at CalCourts, where Shane Larson and Jim Sturges stood next to each other in line to get shower towels from the front desk. Broad-bottomed women in stretch pants and sports bras strode purposefully to their aerobics workouts and weight-diminishing sauna sessions. Their thighs and hair were massive. Televisions tuned to different twenty-four-hour sports channels perched on all four walls like bird nests, a permanent squawk, competing for the attention of exercisers and exercise-hangers-on standing below, where the semifinals of the racquetball C division were about to begin on courts 3, 4, and 5, and the judges were being asked over the PA system to take their positions in the observation areas. “Man,” said Shane, raising his voice a chirpy octave, “it’s been forever. Where are you living these days? I’m married, did you know that?”