Cooling (Continued)
by Elizabeth Genco
"Well, well, well," said Anna as she opened the door. "If it isn't more proof of my psychic powers."
"Nice to see you too," I smiled, stepping past her into the kitchen. A heavy glass flask, its narrow top plugged with clay but for a single hole, smoldered on the stove. A thick brown paste gurgled inside.
"No, really, I was just thinking about you." Then she noticed my shirt. "Girl, what have you been up to? You're soaked."
"It's raining," I said. "Got anything to eat?"
"In the fridge. Help yourself," said Anna. She scooped up stacks of books from the two chairs at the kitchen table then sank into one.
Anna doesn't call herself a witch. She doesn't call herself an alchemist, either. But I think if someone lost (besides me, of course) stumbled on Anna's place and let themselves in when nobody was home, they might take one look at the dried herbs along the counter and the tools all neatly lined up near the kitchen sink and turn around again. Or they might take one whiff of the smell — high grade sulfur laced with compost and cigarettes — hanging in the air and decide that there was nothing in the refrigerator that they wanted to eat and that they really weren't all that hungry after all. By now, I barely noticed.
I opened the cabinet marked "For Human Consumption Only" and leafed through Anna's meager collection of dishes, looking for the red clay bowl expressly reserved for my snacks. Anna rarely ate anything; when she did, it was always takeout. The bowl lurked behind canning jars and Anna's beat up old silver flask. "My emergency quicksilver," she claimed. She never let me have any.
I dumped the nearly full carton of coleslaw from the fridge into my bowl. Anna lit a fresh cigarette.
"So the rain must be getting to you," she said, blowing smoke towards the ceiling. I knew what she meant, and she knew that I knew that she knew.
"It's okay." Anna knew that burning my mother's house down wasn't right, but she understood why I had to do it and didn't give me flack for it. I doubted that even she would understand Old Man Hibbs' shed.
"Everything all right at home?"
"Same old, same old."
"Well, just as long as you're not killing each other. Any news?"
I wanted to tell Anna about the boy, but I didn't know where to begin. Anna understood a lot of things; she knew me better than anyone. But I wasn't sure that she'd understand boys who kissed me for no reason at all before literally melting into a puddle. I didn't understand those things, and I didn't like it when people understood things involving me before I did.
"Same shit, different day," I said, taking a bite.
"You sure about that?" Anna took another drag and looked at me out of narrowed eyes that made me wonder if I was made of cellophane. "C'mon, girl, something's not right here. My spider sense is tingling. You can always talk to me, you know that."
"There's nothing to talk about." I said coldly. "I'm fine." What did she expect me to say? Anna, I'll be okay once I find some wood that catches, but there's this guy — okay, hot guy — who shows up at the crucial moment, and then it mysteriously rains, and oh, by the way, he's a great kisser and I've never been kissed before, so I can't even be all mad at this. The words hung on my lips like a firecracker with the wick running down.
"Remember I said I was thinking about you? This new deck came in the mail today. You up for it?"
When I was in juvie, Anna would visit me once a week, like clockwork. And she would always bring her cards. Technically it's against the rules to read cards for a dozen girls when you visit a juvenile detention center, but Anna has a way with security guards. She read for them, too. Instead of giving me a hard time after she left, they'd ask me when she was coming back.
Anna's readings were always dead–on, but they always uncovered more than I bargained for, too. "I guess," I said.
"Try to contain your excitement." Anna smiled and reached around me to grab a box that lay on top of the day's mail. She handed the box to me to check out while she unwrapped the cards. It sported a picture of a man stripped to the waist and blindfolded, with a jeweled cup in his hands, the sinewy muscles of his chest rippling. It should have made me laugh, but it made me blush instead.
"Got your question ready?" asked Anna, over the buzz of the riffle shuffle.
My mind went blank. "I don't really have one."
"You know you don't have to tell me. Now, just think about it."
I closed my eyes and thought of the boy: his sand-colored hair, his goofy smile, his mismatched eyes, his soft, cool mouth. Who was he? What was he? What did he want with me? So many questions, and the playing field was so wide open. The cards probably wouldn't give me away this time. But could they tell me anything useful?
Anna shuffled three more times, then set the deck in front of me. "Left hand, please."
I cut the cards. Anna pulled four out and laid them out in a line, then turned them over, one by one. Ace of Wands, Two of Cups, The Tower, Ace of Cups.
"Girrrl," she purred, "you've been holding out on me."
* * * * *
I made some more excuses, but it was clear that dodging the question was useless. I told her the whole story. I mean, almost. Anna leaned forward with her chin on her hand and her cigarette dangling and made the face she always made when she was listening carefully, the one that reminded me of that famous statue of the guy thinking.
"And I'm almost sure that he made it rain," I said.
"What were you doing when he found you?"
It was exactly the question I'd hoped to avoid, but there was no sense in even trying to get around it. "I had some matches." Blood pooled hot in my cheeks.
Anna raised her eyebrow and shot me a pinched glance, then stubbed out what remained of her smoke. I braced myself for a lecture.
"I'm an old woman, Glory, so help me out. The four elements. What are they?"
Anna would never reveal her real age, not even to me, but I'd bet the last swipe of an empty lighter that she wasn't a day over thirty. Nonetheless, I knew that she felt old because she always said so. Sometimes I wondered what else she took besides her quicksilver, and what it might be doing to her.
"Fire," I said. "Earth. Air and water. Right?"
"Right. Did we talk about elementals?"
"I don't think so."
Anna pulled her chair around and straddled it so she faced the chair back. Her eyes danced and gleamed, as they would whenever she was about to explain something that she thought was Really Important. "Okay, this is gonna sound kookier than normal. Elementals, they're beings. Physical beings embodying the four elements."
"This sounds kookier than normal," I said, smiling at her.
"Shut up!" Anna reached out and tousled my hair. "Traditionally, they take certain forms. Sylphs are creatures of air. For fire, they're usually salamanders — not like the ones we know, mind you. For earth, you have gnomes. Water elementals are undines — sometimes they're called nymphs."
"Nymphs? I thought nymphs were made of wood."
Anna waved her hand impatiently. "Never mind. The important thing here is, well, sometimes they take on the form of humans."
"No, wait — a nymph, that's like a merman or something, right?" This was officially off the deep end. The guy had two legs. I'd seen him walk. I'd touched — kissed — him, too. No, he had kissed me. Whatever. He was definitely human. "Anna, I think I'd know if the guy was a merman."
"He's not a merman," she said, exasperated.
"So what is he, then?"
"An elemental. He's an elemental, which is to say, he is the essence of his element. Glory, he doesn't live in water, he is water."
"He's a guy!" I cried. "He's human, just like me. I felt him. Meanwhile, you. . . you haven't even seen him."
"Oh, I've seen him, girl. Believe me, I've seen him."
My jaw dropped. Anna looked like she was sincerely trying not to laugh, as if running into a water being masquerading as a hot teenage guy was an everyday occurrence. "It's not hard to see elementals, once you know how. And if they want you to see them, you will. They fall in lust, just like everybody else. Especially water elementals. They go wherever there's a storm, or, in your case, a blaze. You attracted him without even trying."
"What's that supposed to mean? You're not even making sense now."
"Just stop and think, girl! It means that there's the tide churning around inside of you that he's picking up on. You don't feel it because you've stuffed it away. And it means," Anna paused and looked me right in the eye. Her next words were slow and deliberate. "It means that you're going to have to deal with your little fixation."
"What are you talking about? What fixation?" The heat in my stomach started to rise.
"Oh, Glory, come on."
"No. Don't talk to me like that, like I've got some kind of problem. I don't have a problem. You're the one with the problem, sitting in here in this big smelly kitchen playing with all this crap all day." Anna's face fell.
I wasn't about to apologize. Maybe Anna didn’t understand as well as I’d thought.
The room went quiet for a few seconds. I took a deep breath. "Okay. Tell me how you found him."
"Well, I don't know if your guy is the same as my guy, if you know what I mean," said Anna. "But they're both water elementals, I'm sure of it."
I paused, waiting for her to go on. "I'd been dating someone. Seriously. We broke up. The anger inside me. . . it just blocked out all the other feelings. I was numb, you know? And I didn't want to feel numb. I wanted to feel what I felt when my lover was with me. I decided that I was going to get that feeling, all by myself. I was going to make it come to me."
I tried not to look as confused as I really felt. Anna continued. "Each of the four elementals presides over aspects of the human condition. Earth is all about the physical, the tangible. Air is about thinking and intellectual things. Fire is passion, will, creation. . . and destruction. And Water, water is all about feelings and emotions. What's the number one feeling we humans crave? Love."
I thought about my own feelings. Most of them, I couldn't put into words. They didn't feel cool, like water. They felt like the insides of a cauldron, burning and bubbling. The boy conjured other feelings. Only they didn't mix well with what was there.
"So you did, like, a love spell," I concluded, to bring it back to Anna.
"No, it was much stronger than that. I did a ritual to call the water elemental to me. So I could control it."
Anna fiddled with her cigarette pack, her voice low. "Girl, I wanted one, so bad. I'd heard about water elementals. About how sexy they were, the things they could do to you. I wanted to make that mine."
This was starting to get interesting. The boy or the being, whatever he was, was deliberately trying to get in the way of my fire. That drove me crazy, for sure. But what she said about water elementals, how they made you feel, was eerily familiar. "What was the ritual?" I asked, trying to sound casual.
Anna just smiled and shook her head. "Not a chance, sugar, not a chance. This guy's up in your belly now, and with everything else that's shifting around in there, that's the absolute last thing you want to be doing."
"But I wouldn't —"
"Glory! Listen to me." Anna's voice jumped and her smile faded and she leaned in close. "He can hurt you, okay? He can really, really hurt you, and I don't mean just your feelings. He doesn't want to — he can't reason enough to want to. He can't reason, that's part of the problem. He can only feel. Ultimately, his feelings are what drive him, and he doesn't need to be concerned with consequences."
Anna's face was full of her sincere concern for me. It didn't help. I got up from the table.
"Where are you going?" Anna cried.
"To remind myself of what I know is real," I snapped. I turned and looked back at her. "And neither you, nor he, can stop me."