Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

“How do you know?” Harker asked. “And maybe, secretly, they want to do them.”

He touched her hair in that way he had. She loved it but nevertheless moved his fingers back to where they’d do more good.

It was time to try a few things. She took one of the poles she hadn’t sold from behind the couch and dragged it to the middle of the floor. She stared at it, thinking hard. The pole levitated a couple of inches. Not for long. Less than a minute.

“Impressive,” her elder son said. Serena started; she hadn’t heard him come in. It frightened her; what if one of the neighbours had snuck in? “But what is the point?” Blake asked. “It’s like bending spoons. What are you supposed to do with a bent spoon? All the same, try placing a spoon beside the pole, or on it, and send that thought.”

“The magic amplifies the power of the thought?” she asked. “Is that how you think the technology works?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, blowing his blonde bangs off his forehead. He went to the dark little kitchen at the end of the house and came back with a handful of spoons. They sat together on the fraying broadloom, examining their sorry excuse for cutlery. “In our house,” Blake said, “the challenge is finding a spoon that isn’t bent before the experiment even starts.”

“Indeed,” Serena said, accepting the spoon he offered. It was a nice straight one, sterling even and not plate. “Don’t tell Harker,” she added, watching the spoon she’d laid on top of the carved log float, eerily, a couple of inches into the air.

“I thought it was supposed to bend,” Blake said.

“Is that the thought you sent?” she asked.

“Isn’t it what you sent?” Blake asked.

She looked at him.

“Are we going to start arguing about whose thoughts are more powerful?” he asked, laughing. She wanted to hug Blake, and would have, except he was fifteen, an awkward stage. He thought his friends would snicker if they saw, and probably some of them would.

“Jake is ill,” Blake said, changing the subject. “We’re not sure what it is.”

“Bronchitis? Strep?”

“Pneumonia? Maybe all of them.” Blake gave his mother a look. It was imploring, like Harker’s look the time she hadn’t let him keep a pole. It was this pole, in fact, that she hadn’t let him keep. It was barely engraved at all, except for the little circles and sprinkles of leaves at one end.

Why hadn’t she let Harker keep the pole? It wasn’t too late. She could give it back to him. Or she’d sell it for him, if that was what he wanted.

“They’re like my leaves,” he’d said.

“Can I go see him?” she asked. Jake had always been tiny. She and the doctor hadn’t noticed during the years when the children had seemed uncountable on top of unmanageable, and they’d more or less expected Jake to be small because he was the youngest. She shouldn’t have ever asked him to go into the cold river, not Jake. And she wouldn’t have except he’d been pissing his life away, playing video games. As if theirs being the only working computer in the whole village wasn’t evidence enough of the pointlessness of the endeavour. But no, little Jake loved shooting things. She wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d shot the occasional real thing, a beaver or wild turkey they could eat as a change from Harker’s geese, which she’d stopped declining. Sadly, Jake only shot onscreen things, mostly bad guys, and, when he could, level bosses. He was smart and she’d have sent him to school so he could follow in his errant father’s footsteps but there weren’t many loans now, and she couldn’t afford medical school, even if she remortgaged the house. The sustainable building school was close by and not so pricey. Maybe she’d tucked enough money away selling poles for him to go to that.

“He’s staying at Sue’s,” Blake said. “He’s so sick I can’t move him.”

Serena sighed. “Take the pole,” she said. “Lay it beside him when he sleeps. Wish.”

“Is that enough?” Blake asked.

“Whose thoughts are more powerful, didn’t you ask? Make yours strong. Tell Jake to wish too. He can sleep holding it. It’s extremely powerful, the most powerful stick I have ever found.”

“There are no carvings,” Blake said. “I didn’t notice before. Why did you even bring it home? I thought the more carvings there were the more magic there was.”

“There are,” she said, showing Blake the leaves. “Just different. Harker picked it. It doesn’t matter that it’s not very carved. Look at the crud on it. The most magic ones are all covered with crud.” She brushed the wood lightly. “See, it’s hard to get off. And it’s not that the sand and leaves are damp, or the pole. It’s the magic. It’s a magnetic force of some sort, but it can also do things. Like levitate the poles.”

She was sure of it now; just spending time with the poles had been a way of learning about them, as if by osmosis. Just having them in her house had changed her. Serena wondered whether she had made a mistake in selling them.

“How much gold would you have gotten for this stick?” Blake asked.

She looked at him. “If I told you, would you sell it now or save your brother?”

Blake said, “It’s got to be worth a lot, or you wouldn’t have said that. My brother might die anyway. The stick might not save him.”

“Sell it after he dies, if you think that.” And she gave him the pole.

Would they come tonight or tomorrow night? What would she tell the cowled and hooded men? I have no more magic for you. What if no more poles came, ever? She had to keep the few she had left. Practise and learn.

She wondered what the buyers used them for. Magic imprinted so easily. Down the street, Sue and her parents and Blake would coax Jake to get up for a few moments. They would drink apple cider, one of the big bottles, not one of the small ones, and eat goose they’d bought from Harker.

When Blake had gone to Sue’s dragging the leafy pole behind him, Harker came back and led her to the bedroom. The house was empty, her sons out, the way both he and the buyers liked it best.

“I want things,” Harker said, removing the butcher’s apron stained with goose blood.

“Which things?” Serena asked.

“Many things,” he said, and she began them, running her hands through his lichen.

In the morning Harker was gone, which almost never happened. Serena put on her printed wrapper and went outside, thinking he might be on the porch smoking.

Between the houses and the fields lit by sunrise there was a row of poles, each sharpened to a point, and each sharp point protruding through a head. She retched, recognizing the impaled heads of her next door neighbours, and Harker’s head and Blake’s. She saw Concepción’s, her black hair in a twist around her neck. Perhaps they had found her on the road outside town, the first of the girls to make her way home.

Serena watched a group of men receding on the downland road. One of them turned as if to look at her. His face flickered even though he was nowhere near firelight.

Her youngest came and stood beside her. She took little Jake’s hand.

The pole that healed you was sent by the strangers to protect Harker, she thought but didn’t say. He knew it was his, maybe he even made it, but I didn’t let him keep it. Now I have you and not him or your sister and brother. What about Agatha and Mildred? Maybe it’s not too late to find them?

Serena recognized the poles she’d sold. Letting go of Jake’s hand, she dashed forward and plucked a leaf from Harker’s eyebrow. Like the leaves on the surrounding trees, it was starting to turn a russet shade. But that didn’t matter. Serena would still take it home and set it in a glass of water. She would put the glass beside his pole, and she would wish.