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The mail being delivered to the Salem Gift Emporium on Essex Street in Salem, Massachusetts, on a quiet September afternoon is not normally a remarkable occasion. It’s our regular drop of pre-Halloween-season deliveries, which mostly consists of box after box of witch-themed crap—black capes and black cat figurines and mugs with Samantha from Bewitched on them.
This non-momentous occasion has interrupted my non-momentous activity of sitting behind the counter at the Salem Gift Emporium bored out of my mind, watching the slow September foot traffic move past the window. Susan doesn’t allow phones at work. She says I “don’t look ready to help the customers” if I’m staring at a screen. So instead I mostly do nothing.
I have found that the key to fighting boredom is to tell yourself that you are not really bored. You are actually quite interested in the minutia of daily life. That tree across the street. The cars going by. That guy who likes to protest in front of the store sometimes, brandishing his Witchcraft Is Evil sign like it’s his last hope on earth. At least he has a hobby.
I did not choose to work here at the Salem Gift Emporium. Just as I did not choose to live in Witch City, USA. My mother barely even chose to live here. And yet here I am, surrounded by pink T-shirts that say I’m 100% THAT witch and plastic broomstick key chains. This is the tackiest of Salem, Massachusetts. And it is where I work six days a week.
When you are unimaginably bored, there are two things that you definitely do not want to do. The first is to let yourself start thinking about anything other than what is right in front of you: the tree, the traffic, the guy with his protest sign—they are all that can exist for you right now. Anything else needs to be pushed aside—dreams, plans, memories—those things will rush right into the void that is boredom and cause you only pain.
The second thing you do not want to do is think about the fact that not thinking would be much easier if you were high right now.
I cannot be high at work. I cannot be high at work. I cannot be high at work.
This is what I repeat to myself as I stare at the tree across the street and wonder when the leaves will start to change and when the damp, horrible chill will enter the air and enter my bones and bring everything that comes with it.
October was always a terrible month in Salem. Now it is the worst.
But with the delivery of the mail comes at least a temporary break in boredom. There are boxes to be opened and invoices to be sorted. There is something to do other than sit here and feel sorry for myself, which sometimes feels like my actual full-time job.
Susan comes out of her office in the back of the store when she hears Tim the postman come in.
“Big order today, huh?” Tim says as he stacks up the boxes of deliveries.
“October waits for no woman,” Susan says, already examining the shipping labels.
Tim hands me a pile of mail.
“How about you? You ready for witch season?” he asks, winking at me.
“I tend to think of it more as ‘drunken jerks in mass-produced plastic costumes that will soon end up in a landfill’ season,” I say, going through the stack of mail.
“Where are the kids’ witch hats?” Susan asks, shoving boxes aside. “They’re still not here. They should have gotten here yesterday.”
Tim gives me a “good luck” look and heads out.
“Which hats?” I ask Susan.
“Exactly!” she says. I can’t tell if this is an intentional joke on my unintentional pun or not, because she is already heading back into her office.
I resume sorting the mail, which is mostly bills and special offers coming up for our town’s big month of notoriety. But at the bottom of the stack, there is a larger silver envelope addressed to the store without a return address on it.
Susan comes out of the back room with a box of T-shirts and the phone attached to her ear.
“Why yes, I do happen to know that witches are really popular right now, Alex. I run a witch-themed gift shop. And no matter how popular witches are, that does not change the fact that you promised me that my regular Halloween order would be in by now. One hundred pointy black hats are not going to do me a lot of good come November first.”
Susan starts stacking shirts on the shelf. She looks over at me and rolls her eyes. I look down at the silver envelope in my hand, turn it over, and see a purple ink stamp of a familiar image. Two crescent moons facing away from each other with a circle in the middle. The triple goddess. It’s a witch thing. There’s no getting away from witch things in this town.
“Susan?” I say.
She holds up a finger to indicate that she needs a minute.
“Yeah, sure,” she says into the phone. “You go talk to your supervisor and get back to me. Bye-bye now.” She hangs up and angrily tosses the phone into the box of shirts. “It’s like he doesn’t understand that we bring in ninety percent of our income in one month.”
“He doesn’t know Salem,” I say.
“I mean, look around.” Susan gestures dramatically around at the empty store. “No customers. Three weeks from now?”
This is a familiar rant. I know my part.
“Customers,” I say in a monotone.
“That’s right, Eleanor. October means customers. And customers mean I can pay the rent. And paying the rent means I can pay you.”
“And paying me means Mom and I can eat,” I say. This is meant to be a funny continuation of the regular script, but of course it is not funny at all, and I regret it as soon as I say it. Susan stops stacking T-shirts.
“How is your mom today?” she asks, suddenly serious.
I shrug. “The same as when you saw her two days ago.”
“Did she hear back from that new doctor yet?”
I don’t want to tell Susan that she shouldn’t get her hopes up. Mom has been to so many “new doctors” with “new approaches” that I lost count a while ago. But if I say this, Susan will get upset, and I just need this day to ride out calmly until I can get to the parking lot of the convenience store at the end of the street and smoke half the joint that is waiting in my bag.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Susan raises an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”
“You should ask her yourself,” I say.
Susan does not like this answer, but she accepts it and resumes stacking. “Well, I can come over tonight with some soup I made. It’s really good. Creamy celery.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s no bother.”
We each pretend to be absorbed in our tasks now, because there is nothing else to say about this.
I finish sorting the mail, putting the bills in Susan’s in-box and tossing out the pile of Halloween propaganda. The silver envelope is still sitting on the counter.
I hold it up.
“Do you know what this is?” I ask Susan.
“No, what is it?”
“I mean that I don’t know.”
“Open it.”
I rip open the back of the envelope, tearing the moon symbol in half, and pull out a small book, photocopied on thin paper and stapled together. The title is written out in flowery cursive.
“It says, ‘The Major Arcana, A Magical Guide to the Story Cards of the Smith Rider Waite Tarot Deck.’”
I open the book to the first page. There is a picture of a figure looking up at the sky with handwritten text under it.
Hello and welcome, human seeker.
“Maybe it’s a sample?” Susan says. “Is there an order form with it?”
“No,” I say. “And it looks homemade.”
“You can just toss it,” Susan says. She finishes stacking the T-shirts.
“We carry that tarot deck, don’t we?” I ask.
Susan pulls a small box off the shelf and hands it to me.
“You going to learn how to tell the future?”
“I don’t think I want to know the future,” I say, trying to make another joke that I realize once again isn’t funny.
“You never know,” she says.
“If the past is any indication, I can tell you that none of it’s good,” I say, digging in further. I silently make a vow to stop talking for the rest of my life.
Susan ignores this. It is often best to ignore the things that I say. I open the box and take out the stack of cards.
“Hey, did you process those returns I asked you to do?” Susan asks me.
I put the cards down.
“If you asked me to do it, then I did it,” I say, annoyed.
“Um, okay,” Susan says, giving me a look.
“I mean, who buys thirty ceramic cups in the shape of a pumpkin just to return them all?”
“Evelyn Rosco does that, after she decides to switch the theme of her fortieth birthday party from ‘autumn’ to ‘puppies.’”
“Evelyn Rosco is an idiot,” I say, grumbling.
“Eleanor, honestly. What is wrong with you today?”
Poor Susan. She is not my mother, but her proximity to my mother makes me treat her like my mother sometimes. Especially when I feel like I must at least make an attempt to be pleasant around my mother, who has her hands full dealing with her own problems. So then Susan gets monster me. Grumpy me. The Real Me.
In pictures of them together from college, my mom and Susan look like twins, or as close to twins as my white mom could look to her Korean best friend. They had the same layered haircut, same overdrawn eyeliner and semi-ironic accessories. But these days Susan looks healthy and content, and my mom looks like someone who is very sick. Because she is.
“Sorry,” I say. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.”
“Well, maybe I can interest you . . . in some vagina vases?”
This is one of Susan’s favorite jokes. The feminist collective store down the street, the polar opposite on the witch spectrum from Susan’s store, once had a sign in the window that declared, We Have Vagina Vases!
This always makes me laugh, and I am grateful to Susan for the one millionth time for putting up with me and letting all my terrible moods fade away as quickly as they roll in.
She picks up the empty T-shirt box.
“I’ll be in the back screaming at some more suppliers. If you hear shattering glass, do not call the police.”
“Understood.”
Susan goes back to her office, and I look at the two objects on the counter in front of me. The stapled booklet and the tarot deck. I turn the book over to see if there’s anything on the back that might offer some clue about its origins.
A short history, it says.
As easily the least witchy person in Salem, I am not normally one to indulge a mysterious book that arrives in the mail. As far as I’m concerned, the only remarkable thing about this town is that it has managed to turn a gruesome historical tragedy into its own personal theme park. It’s a place where the actually morbid is transformed into a parody of itself, a plastic fiction, a buyable commodity.
But there is something about how bored I am, how I have nothing better to do than flip through our display deck of the (Smith) Rider-Waite to find the Fool card, that keeps me engaged in this mystery for just a little longer.
There he is—a jaunty guy with a little dog, looking like he’s ready to fall off that cliff. I rest my head on the counter and prop the card on the box in front of my face.
Something’s coming.
I’m staring at the Fool when the bell on the shop door rings and two girls who I don’t recognize come in. A girl with a blond buzz cut wearing a floral floor-length dress that would not look out of place on an Amish farm woman, and a taller, dark-haired girl wearing a bright blue silk robe over a black dress, her hair up in braids entwined with flowers.
“Did we wake you?” the blue-robe girl says to me with a smirk as I sit up and attempt to look helpful. Before I can respond, she begins flipping through a “history of Salem” book that she has taken off the shelf.
We don’t get a lot of people my age in the store. The kids from Salem High actively stay away, a nice by-product of their ongoing mission to avoid any
extravagantly dressed girls entering the store feels like an event. I suddenly feel very underdressed in my dirty black jeans and slightly-less-dirty black T-shirt.
I don’t realize that I am staring at the flower-dress girl until she looks over at me and catches my eye. I quickly look down and pretend to be deeply engaged in reading the little tarot book.
“I think we should go to the library,” blue-robe girl says to flower-dress girl.
“We’ll go to the library next,” flower-dress girl says.
“Can I help you find something?” I ask.
Blue-robe girl approaches the counter. “I’m looking for a map of the witch trial locations. Like a walking tour map.”
“Walking tours leave from the kiosk down the street three times a day,” I say. “Five times a day in October.”
The girl shakes her head. “I obviously have been to all the locations already,” she says, somehow annoyed with me.
Her friend is standing behind her, looking around the store as if there’s anything special to be found here, rather than a bunch of tacky junk.
“I need the physical object of the map,” blue-robe girl continues. “The commodified, capitalist, fetishized, mass-produced thing that attempts to profit off the deaths of persecuted women.”
This is a slightly more interesting request than the usual “Do you have a beer cozy with a witch on it?” questions we usually get in here.
“We don’t have a map,” I say. “We’ve got a lot of other crap that fits that description, though. Take your pick.”
This makes flower-dress girl laugh. I am not sure if she is laughing at me or with me. But it is when she laughs that I happen to notice that this girl is very, very cute. Like, uncomfortably cute.
Her friend is less amused. She sighs in a way that implies that I have exhausted her and goes back to browsing the shelves. I sneak another look at her friend, who is now looking at the deck of tarot cards in my hand.
“Do you read?” she asks me.
“No. Just looking at the pictures.”
“Reading is just looking at the pictures very, very closely,” she says. She comes over to the counter and takes the Fool out of my hand. “My favorite card.”
“Why?” The closer she gets to me, the more the fact of her cuteness becomes difficult to ignore.
“He’s the sign of new beginnings. Of allowing yourself to dream. Nothing happens without the Fool.”
“Yeah, but he’s not called ‘intelligent dreamer’ or ‘starting-over guy,’” I say. “He’s called the ‘Fool.’ And he looks like he’s about to fall off that cliff.”
The girl smiles and hands the card back to me. The tip of her finger brushes my hand, and I feel the sensation traveling up my arm until it gets to my face, where I am pretty sure I am turning bright red.
“No way,” she says. “He’s just getting a good look at things before he sets off on his journey. If it ended now, then there would be no story to tell. And the story is the whole point.”
“Pix, I’m going to that T-shirt store on the corner,” blue-robe girl says, the bell ringing as she goes out the door.
“Be right there,” the flower-dress girl calls back.
“Your name is Pix?” I ask.
She smiles. I notice that her eyes close a little when she smiles, as if she is on the verge of laughing, as if she is savoring the joy. “Penny, officially,” she says. “But she started calling me that when I cut my hair short. When Ofira gives you a nickname, it tends to stick. So I’m Pixie now.”
Something inside me does a double backflip when she says this.
“That’s so funny,” I say. “I was just reading about the woman who drew these pictures. . . .”
“Pix!” The other girl has stuck her head back in the door, evidently deciding that Pix is taking too long to follow her.
“I’m Eleanor,” I say, desperate to say something else to this girl before she leaves. “No nickname.”
“Well,” Pix says. “We’ll have to do something about that.”
Triple backflip.
She smiles and turns toward the door.
“What does she need the map for?” I ask before she can go, stalling to find some way to keep her from leaving me alone with my thoughts.
Pix seems to think about it for a moment before answering.
Then she says, “Just some witchcraft,” and goes out the door.
I watch her walk down the block through the window—going after her best friend? Girlfriend?
No, no, no. No good can come of this line of thinking.
To distract myself, I open up “The Major Arcana, A Magical Guide to the Story Cards of the Smith Rider Waite Tarot Deck” again.
Something’s coming, friend. Watch for it. Keep an eye out along that vista. It’ll be here before you know it.
I turn the page.
contact with me at all costs. The feeling is mutual. And although unusual outfits are not uncommon in this town, these two
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