Glass. The pumpkins were turning to glass. Everything that whirled between the Bonner sisters had not stayed inside that house. It had not huddled inside the sisters’ bedrooms. It would not be locked inside their closets or hidden on shelves under their sweaters.
It had slid out here, creeping over their family’s fields, this land they would inherit. It was seeping into the pumpkins so that each one now held a little storm spinning it to glass. It made the pumpkins brittle and hard and unyielding as the bond between those four girls. Miel could almost feel it skimming her neck like fingers of cold air. If she stayed still, it would find its way into her. It would make her breakable.
It would turn her to glass.
Miel ran down the path to the road, keeping as far from those pumpkins as the spread of the land let her. Her sweater clung to her skin, and the scalloped neckline of the shirt she wore underneath bit into her like teeth.
The pain in her wrist shot through her body. But she ran, fast enough that she could pretend she didn’t see the pumpkins at the fringes of the fields, hardening and turning clear, shining the faint gold of hot glass.
sea of vapors
Sam and his mother had just finished cleaning up from dinner when Aracely called.
“Can you come help me?” she said when Sam picked up.
His mother stood at the stove, firing the cast-iron pan, the way she dried it so it wouldn’t rust.
Sam propped the phone against his shoulder and looked over at her, his silent way of asking, Do you mind? They’d held to the unspoken agreement that as long as he asked permission to go out when his mother was awake, she wouldn’t comment on the times he snuck out to see Miel when she was asleep.
Did you finish your math? his mother mouthed.
He nodded.
His mother turned off the fire and nodded back.
“Sure,” Sam told Aracely.
“Good,” Aracely said. “Because I’m about three seconds from strangling your girlfriend.”
She hung up, leaving Sam to pick apart what little she’d said. The clench in his throat when he wondered if Aracely knew. The breath out when he realized that if she did, she didn’t seem to want to kill him. And the question of what had gotten her in a bad enough mood that she was ready to kill Miel.
His mother threw a jacket at him. He shrugged into the sleeves on his way out, and followed the moons he’d set out for Miel, a path of light between their houses.
Miel didn’t cure lovesickness herself. She didn’t have what she called el don, the gift Aracely had. But often Miel helped her, passing her matches and glass jars and the right kind of egg. She went out and picked lemons from the tree outside, the gold rinds rain-slicked. Aracely couldn’t set these things out beforehand because she never quite knew what she needed until she met the lovesickness living inside a broken heart.
Sam walked up the front steps, and like always, the color of the outside made him think of a paint he’d once used. Wisteria, the tube had called it. It had sounded like a place, somewhere that was both beautiful and too small to show on a map. But when he asked his mother, she told him it was a flower, a vine that dripped blossoms like icicles.
Aracely met him at the door.
“Watch her,” Aracely said, tilting her head inside.
Miel stood with her back against the wall, shoulders rounded. He would have wondered if Aracely had yelled at her, but in front of those who came for lovesickness cures, she never did.
Aracely’s heels clicked against the floor, Sam and Miel following.
“What happened?” Sam said, keeping his voice low.
Miel shook her head. Not now.
Tonight, Aracely was curing a man. Sometimes Aracely called Sam over to hand her eggs and herbs and the right kind of lemon. Having a boy around made the men more comfortable. They were already skittish about having Aracely’s hands on their chests. Having a girl passing blue eggs to Aracely unnerved them, like the fact that there were two of them made it more likely they were witches.
This man looked a little older than Aracely, maybe twenty-eight or thirty. Everything about him seemed so pale against the dark walls of this room, the color of a blue milk mushroom. The waves of his hair, a dark blond like dried corn, had been cut short. He wore pressed slacks, nice enough for church, and a gray sweater in a knit too heavy for the weather, like he was trying to protect his heart from the thing he was paying to have done to it.
Aracely asked for a Faverolles egg, and Miel, staring at the patch of indigo wall, reached for a Copper Maran egg. Sam slipped it from her palm, replacing it with the cream egg Aracely wanted. Aracely asked for a blood orange, and Miel reached for a lumia lemon. Sam stopped her.
So that was the problem. Miel wasn’t paying attention.
“Sorry,” Miel whispered.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked. She’d taught him which kind of egg was which. She could usually help Aracely half-asleep. The only thing Sam was good for was reassuring the men.