She showed up right on time, like she never does. She was wearing one of those tan trench coats, belted tight against the slight cold mist in the air. The coat must have cost more than any single item in my house. It had that look. I took it from her and hung it in our front hall closet next to our generic department store coats.
“The house looks beautiful,” she said, looking around at the tiny entryway, which dumped right into the dim front room on one side and the narrow stairs to the second floor on the other side. There was a neatly folded pile of Gary’s laundry on the stairs--he’d forgotten to take it up for the second day in a row. I wasn’t going to do it for him. And I wasn’t going to hide it from her, either. Her boyfriend might be an artist and sensitive and all that, but I’d bet he still lets her fold his laundry. Or he would, if they didn’t have a housekeeper to do all that for them.
“Come on back, I’ve got the kettle on,” I said. I turned to walk back down the hall without waiting to see if she followed. Gary kept joking that if he got any chubbier, he’d have to turn himself sideways and suck in his stomach to fit down this hall. It was funny because it was kind of true. But we were none of us as thin or as young as we were.
Except my sister, and I knew what she’d done to get that way.
We all make our choices, and she’d made hers, and now she was here to ask if she could make mine, too. The nerve of some people.
“So, where’s Gary?” Iz asked, shifting her dark leather bag from the back of her chair to the floor and then back again.
I stopped moving for a second, carefully keeping my eyes on my own hands, frozen in the middle of scooping up loose tea with the infuser. It was three in the afternoon. “He’s at work,” I said, my voice as even as I could make it.
“Right,” she said. I snuck a glance at her and could see redness creeping up from her neck. For a second she looked like herself--her old self, before she’d changed her face. “And how is that going?”
Her tone told me she didn’t remember what he did. “Oh, same old, same old,” I said. I wasn’t going to make it easy for her.
She smiled vaguely. There were now two bands of red climbing up the sides of her face. “Good, good,” she said. “And you?”
“Same as ever,” I said, setting the teapot down on the table and getting us each a mug. “It still needs to steep a minute.”
Iz hitched her chair forward a little. She looked at the teapot like it might prompt her. “So,” she said, “are you practicing much these days?” Her eyes flicked briefly up to mine and then back to the teapot.
“No,” I said, short and clipped. “I have everything I need.”
“Of course,” she said quickly. “I just thought--I mean, the house is so,” she waved a hand around at the kitchen in general, “I thought maybe, a little household spell or something.”
I pressed my lips together, remembering one of Mother’s last visits, before her health started to fail. Standing there with her hair glamoured blond, like I didn’t know she was an old lady, talking at me about how easy it would be to set up a wish-based system in my kitchen so that anything I reached for would always be right at my fingertips. “You could have it borrow gadgets and things from the neighbors, too,” she’d said, opening and closing each of my cabinets in turn. “And bewitch them so they’d never notice. The simplest little spell, Angela, and it would save you so much time.”
“No,” I said, to the memory of Mother and to Iz. “I really don’t have much call for magic these days. I’m happy the way I am.”
“Of course,” Iz said. “Good.” She reached out and poured herself some tea.
Silence expanded into the air along with the steam from her tea. I refused to break it. I knew why she was here, and why should I help her along? Besides, I knew all about her life anyway. The whole country did. She’d become the kind of person whose choices--what food to eat, what dress to wear, where to go on vacation--were of general interest, somehow. Not tabloids--she’d made sure of that--but nice magazines. Glossy ones printed on thick paper. The kind I had to splurge to buy. Which I did, more often than I would have liked to admit. Of course, I could have kept track of her in other ways--could have scryed her every week like clockwork, the way Mother used to do, or set the birds to looking after her--but she’d have known, she’d have felt it, and I had my pride.
While hers, apparently, was all spent, or else why would she be here?
“Oh,” she said, too eager, into the quiet, “do you remember when Mother would have her old coven over? And they would make those pictures with the steam from their teacups? I used to love that.” She waved her hand over her mug, and when she drew her hand back, a three-masted ship made of steam was sailing in the air above it. I could see there were even little people on board--there was someone up in the crow’s nest, I think with a tiny little spyglass, but I didn’t want to lean forward to look. I couldn’t even meet her eyes.
I remembered those coven meetings differently. Iz had always been enchanted by the little tricks they’d do to wow us. But I used to watch the way they’d look at each other. They were competing with each other, wasting their power on tricks, and for what? A smile from a stupid little girl? After a while I took to hiding when the ladies came over, but Mother would always drag me out eventually, make me come downstairs so Iz and I could show the coven how we’d learned to float a pencil or whatever. Iz beamed and preened under the ladies’ praise. She loved being the center of attention like that. I didn’t. I was always watching Mother, looking for her to smile at me the way she did at Iz, her dazzling daughter. She never did.
I shook my head to clear away these useless thoughts. Then I poked a finger at Iz’s steam-ship, dissipating it. I couldn’t take it anymore--the cringing, ingratiating look on her bright button face, the fluttering of her little hands, the sharp shards of her forced laughter. I wanted to hurt her and maybe myself, so I said, “Just ask me. Just ask me what you came here to ask.”
For a second, she tried to deny it. She didn’t even say anything, just drew a breath to start excusing herself--and then let it out in a rush, her shoulders slumping. She looked me square in the eyes for what felt like the first time that day and she said, “Fine. So can I have it?”
*
I had told myself I was only going to scry her the once. I don’t know what made me do it. I suppose it was about Mother, about missing her. I didn’t let myself stop to think about it too closely. I just went for the cupboard beneath the stairs and got down the dusty box. The basin and pitcher had been Grandmother’s, and there was a kind of comfort in touching the cool metal, buttery soft. I hadn’t used them in years, not since I’d taken them home.
I hadn’t used them, but I’d polished them once a year. Something about the chore--the cotton cloth I laid down, the gloves I had to wear--made me picture myself as the housekeeper in a grand old Victorian home. I read somewhere that it was proper etiquette to refer to a housekeeper as “Mrs,” whether or not she was married. Married to her job, I suppose. ‘In service’ was what they called it, a life in service. But this time when I got out the silver I placed it right on our cheap Swedish table and handled it with bare fingers.
I filled the pitcher from the tap. Spring water would have been better, of course, but I suppose the water in the tap comes from a spring somewhere. And I’ve never been one for standing on ceremony in that way. I’ve worked hard for every spell I’ve learned, and once I learn a thing, it’s mine. So tap water would do me just fine.
It’s the words that matter, anyway. And those I said exactly proper. Chanted them three times and then poured the water from the pitcher to the basin in one smooth motion. I leaned over the basin with my eyes closed and said the words that would reveal my intention. I took a deep breath and then opened my eyes and looked down at my sister.
There she was, her pretty face swimming into focus as the water clouded over with the magics. Little ripples in the water disturbed the image of her face, resolving and unmaking it in turn. One moment I’d see the old face I’d grown up with, the next I’d see the face that now graced the covers of magazines or loomed above me in the darkness of a theater.
I spoke a quick command, and the image resolved. It wasn’t like I didn’t know she was glamouring herself. It was something else I was searching for, something I couldn’t have articulated but wanted very badly.
The image pulled back from my sister’s face to show me her surroundings. She was in her apartment, the one she’d just bought. It was spacious and bright and almost empty. The coffee table was so far from the sofa that there was another tiny table by each of the sofa’s arms, so you’d have someplace to put your drink or your book.
Iz was sitting on a stool at the wide white kitchen counter, writing in her journal. It was the same journal she’d always had--Mother had spelled it so it would never be full--and she sat the same way she always used to, with one foot pulled up onto the stool, so she could hide her face behind her knee.
I could have leaned in over her shoulder and read what she was writing, but I kept the image still and tried to read her face, instead. I could see she was tired. Tired but sparking with power--she’d been eating the material regularly, then, pushing herself forward on her will and her inheritance. And there was a kind of firmness to her face, a fixedness in her eyes and a solidness to her chin that had never been there before. I’d always thought of her as the weak one, if I were being honest, the one who needed praise at almost every moment of the day. But today she looked--more self-sufficient, I suppose. I even thought for a second, she looks like me. That was nonsense, of course, but still there was something familiar, something different yet known, about her face.
As I watched, she looked up, suddenly, startled. I drew back from the basin a bit, instinctively, thinking she’d felt me watching. But a man came into the room and I realized she’d only heard a sound from her side of the glass.
I knew who the man was, of course. I’d read reports of their relationship. Still, it was bewildering to see this famous man cross the room and touch my sister on her back, kiss her softly on her forehead.
I leaned forward, nudging the image in closer with my mind. Was this what I had wanted to see? Was it the way the familiar image of this man wavered and jumped a little, the way the air between them vibrated with just a hint of her power? Had I brought down Grandmother’s silver to find out if my sister had bewitched herself a boyfriend?
Well, she had, and I had seen it. Oh, she hadn’t spent much power on him. The whole edifice she’d built was strong enough that he only needed a touch, a nudge, to fall into line. She’d made herself into the sort of person he would be with before she’d made him want to be with her. But there was some power there. Enough that she’d never be able to let her guard down if she wanted to keep him. The spell wouldn’t need much feeding, but if she ever stopped feeding it, he’d be gone, wondering what he’d ever seen in her.
I sat back a little, looked away from the basin. Is that enough? I asked myself. Have you seen enough? You could have guessed all this. Was it worth it? I felt--not guilty, exactly, but very conscious of the fact that she’d know that I’d done this. Would she guess why? Did I know, myself?
I leaned forward again, as if to prove to her, or to myself, that there was something else I was after. I watched the two of them have one of those simple, logistical conversations that make up the fabric of a life in partnership--I’ll pick you up a coffee, he was probably saying, or, I’ll be back in time for dinner, let’s order from that place you like. I watched their quick kiss goodbye. I watched him walk out of the apartment and I watched her watch him go. Her expression was fond, her affection unmixed with pity. She cared for him, I could see. Not just in the way that millions of women around the world imagined they could care for him--in the way of someone who knew him. And as far as he knew, he cared for her.
She’s built something almost real out of all this artifice, I thought, and I felt a twinge of something--it might have been envy, but then again it might have been admiration--and then I saw her feel me watching.
It’s a peculiar feeling, being scryed. Mother used to do it to us all the time, so I know the feeling well. You’ll be going about your business, and then all of a sudden you’ll feel a kind of tug, a kind of bite, somewhere at the edge of your consciousness. It’s not like that feeling when you’re standing by a window at night and you know that anyone could see you--it’s more like the feeling of something crawling on you, which might be just a twitch and might be the actual legs of an insect.
It’s unpleasant, and once you realize what you’ve just noticed, it’s annoying. I’ll admit that I’ve occasionally stuck my tongue out at Mother when I’ve caught her watching. I’ll even admit that I’ve wanted to make a ruder gesture. But Iz didn’t look annoyed. I saw her look up, and I saw her realize what was happening.
When you feel someone scrying you, that one piece of information is all you know. You don’t know how long they’ve been watching and you don’t know where they are in space--above you, facing you, behind. You feel like you want to look around and find the camera, but of course there isn’t one.
Iz didn’t look around. She just looked up from her journal. At the moment when she realized I was watching, she closed her eyes just for a second. And then she opened them, and she smiled.
It was a sweet and open smile. She wasn’t pleased to have caught me caring about her--she was just pleased. She didn’t know where I was watching her from, of course, so her smile was a little off-center, but I could see it well enough. I felt my hand move towards the surface of the water as I wanted to touch the image of her mouth. And then I sat up straighter, and I did touch the water, and the image vanished.
I stood up with a great deal of clattering, pushing my chair roughly away from the table, picking the pitcher up and then putting it down again. Then I took a deep breath and carried the basin carefully to the sink. I watched the water slide down the drain, ordinary water once again. And I tied on my apron and started to work on dinner.
*
For weeks after that, I walked around with the location of Grandmother’s silver basin and pitcher always in my mind. I was never not thinking about the fact that they were there. It was like living in a city dominated by one tall spire--everywhere I went, I marked where I was in relation to that fixed point. When I finally went back to the closet underneath the stairs to pull them out again, I was almost surprised to find them quiet and inert, not pulsing with some kind of unearthly light.
This time I moved quickly--poured the water with a splash, chanted the spell fast and low like I might be overheard. I didn’t bother with the gloves.
In a moment, there it was, my sister’s beautiful new face, swimming out of the clear water to meet me. There was light on her face, flashing, and her smile was stunning. I pulled the image out and saw a jewel-blue gown, a long carpet, a crowd. A man whose face the world knew at the end of her arm.
I had pretended to myself that I didn’t know this was tonight, that there was no particular reason to look in on her at this moment of all the moments. And yet here I was, staring. Watching the ripples in the air to trace the course of her power.
A woman approached her, holding a microphone like a supplicant bearing a gift. The two of them spoke. The famous man leaned in a few times and made jokes--I could see they were jokes by the way the reporter’s eager teeth flashed in the bright light. There were ripples all around Iz, around her face, her body, in the air between her and this man. But between Iz and the reporter--I leaned in closer, touched the surface of the water lightly to focus the image. Yes--there were ripples there, too, Iz was trying to make whatever she said land heavily on the ear, give it the force of command. But these ripples were faint, sparking and sputtering with unconnected power.
She’d overextended herself. The face, the fame, the partner, the whole facade was sapping her strength. She’d built this machine to use it, but she didn’t have enough to keep it going and to push the changes she was trying to make out into the world. I was almost sad for her.
I watched the rest of the conversation and followed her into the theater, but I broke the connection before she could sit down. As soon as she was still she’d feel my gaze on her. I wiped the basin and the pitcher dry and put them back in the closet. I told myself that this was the last time I was going to scry my sister. I had better things to do. And anyway, I never felt her eyes on me. I’d seen everything I needed to. Grandmother’s silver could just stay in the back of the closet.
Every time after that, I told myself the same things.
*
Looking at Iz now, incongruous at my cheap kitchen table, knowing what she’d come here to ask me, I thought about the day Mother gave us our inheritances, the day I turned twenty-one and she declared that I was of age and Iz, just nineteen, was close enough.
While I was still thinking, still examining the locked box and running my hands along its smooth seams, Iz was already chanting, fast and low. She had hers open within a few minutes, I think, and even though Mother told her to take it slow, she took a little pinch of the material between her thumb and index finger and dropped it carefully onto her tongue.
I made myself look away, first from her bright face, then from the box that contained her inheritance. I hadn’t opened mine. I had no right to watch.
But I’d seen. I’d seen the way her face started to be washed with light, light that came from inside her, light that I knew indicated a kind of power neither of us had ever tasted before. She looked beautiful and untouchable and severe, like a queen in a fairy tale. She looked like a stranger. She was already starting to change. And I’d caught a glimpse of the material itself, too--it looked like earth, like that kind of rich crumbly loam that almost looks good enough to eat. I suppressed an impulse to ask her how it tasted. I felt that I knew without asking that the taste would be dark and bitter. I could almost feel how the grit of it would be rasping against the back of her throat and burrowing between her teeth.
Neither of us asked her then what she planned to do with it, but of course it was all clear soon enough. At first I’d almost laughed when I saw the news. I felt giddy with something like relief. “A movie, Mother!” I said at her next visit, hating as I always did my own eagerness to please her. “Such a trivial thing,” I said, but Mother told me to wait, that Iz would have something else up her sleeve, as she always did.
And of course Mother was right. Iz had a cause in mind. She’d made herself into a celebrity not for the childish reasons I’d imagined, but in order to gather influence about her. Even at a distance, I could see the way the spells were built--carefully, perfectly joined. She was listened to, she was changing things, or she was trying to, and the power that was our inheritance ran through all of it like seams of metal through dark earth.
It was impressive. It was--unselfish. It was so unlike anything our mother would have done. I respected her choice, I did.
So why did it hurt so badly that she was here, now, looking for help the way Mother used to do?
*
I’d been expecting her to ask, been braced for it, but still when she said it, it was like a slap. Painful, but also somehow clarifying. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders. I would do my duty.
And then, instead, I heard myself say “No.”
“You’re not using it,” she said, her voice trembling a little.
I took a deliberate sip of my tea. “That’s not your business.”
“You’ve never used it.” She strained forward in her chair, clenched her hands around her mug. It was an old one that Serena had made in an art class when she was only eight. It had always been brown and lumpy, and now it was chipped, to boot. I felt a fierce flare of pride when I looked at it.
“You don’t know that,” I said, knowing that she did. She would have talked about it with Mother. I could imagine, all too clearly, what the two of them would have said about me.
She sat up a little straighter at that. She was getting angry now. As if she had any right to be. She took a slow breath and said, “Power is meant to be used, Angie. Don’t you remember?”
I sucked in a sharp breath. Did I remember? As if I could forget. As if I could forget my own mother, who said that just about every day of her life. Including the first time she came to visit me in this house. She’d drifted through the place, running her fingers along the walls like she was checking for dust. Finally she settled in the kitchen, leaned back against the counter, and said what she always said: “Power is meant to be used, Angela. Have you done nothing with your inheritance?” And when I tried to explain that I had a plan, she interrupted me, dismissing me with a wave of her hand. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d said. “You’re afraid, Angela. I can see it all over your face.” She shook her head at me. Looked away, as if it pained her to look at me. “I raised you to be strong,” she’d said. “No child of mine should be living this kind of--ordinary life.”
It wasn’t fair of Iz, not fair at all, to throw Mother’s words back at me like that. She was playing dirty, and she knew it. She ought to have known how those words would make me feel. She would have known, if she’d thought, but she never did think. She was always the one to leap into things. Same as Mother. As if there was something wrong with being cautious. Being safe.
It was hard for me to listen to her, now, as she let forth a string of words to fill up the silence that had followed her echo of Mother. She was saying she was sorry, she knew it was hard for me to be reminded of Mother, it was hard for her too, but her spell, the big one she’d been working on for the past couple of years, it was weakening. Of course I knew that--I’d seen it--and maybe she knew that I knew, but she kept talking. “I’m close, Angie,” she said, clutching that mug so tightly that her knuckles whitened until they looked like pure bone. “I’m close to making a real change. But I--I’m almost out.” She looked down at the table. “The material--I need it to keep the spell going. If I don’t get more…” She shrugged and looked up at me again. “It’ll all fall apart.” She took a long, shuddering breath. This was it--it was out, now. Her shoulders slumped. She looked at me from under her fashionable bangs. “I don’t have enough, OK? I need help.”
I might almost have done it--I’m not an unfeeling person--if she hadn’t added, “And you won’t use it, we both know you won’t.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I said. It was almost a reflex--the words just came out of me.
“Angie,” she said, apology in her voice, but I didn’t let her finish. We were past all that now.
“I have plans, just so you know.” I felt my voice getting high and pinched, but I pushed through. They had never respected me, either of them, but I would make them see. “I know you think I’m hoarding it, but what I’m doing is saving it--there is a difference.” I closed my eyes for a second as if that would make me stop seeing Mother’s face when she said the word ‘afraid,’ the way her lip had curled. “I’ll use a little for Gary and me, starting in a few years. Just a little, just enough to ensure us an easy old age.” We’d go to Florida, the Keys--get a little house where Gary could fish. “And the rest is for the kids. I’ll ease their way before I go.”
“And those are lovely plans, Angie,” she said, her voice resonant with an empathy I knew she didn’t feel. “You have a beautiful family and of course you want to provide for them. But,” she said, leaning forward again, “I’m part of your family, too. Aren’t I?”
“Are you? You’ve never come for Christmas.”
“I send cards. I send presents.”
I laughed. “You sent Serena a dollhouse last year. She’s fifteen.”
She rubbed a hand across her face. “It was a collector’s item. I thought--I thought she would like it.”
“You’ve never made much of an effort to get to know them, have you?”
“I thought you didn’t want me to,” she said, slowly, her voice so quiet I could barely hear her. “I thought you wanted them kept away from--from all this. My lifestyle.”
I waved a hand to brush this off. She was partly right, of course, but still, she could have tried, couldn’t she? “We’re still family. Mother always visited.”
“And you hated it when she did. She told me.”
I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t help you. And the kids will be home soon.”
She clutched her mug tighter. She argued. She pleaded. But I was firm. I told myself I was doing it for my family, the ones who accepted me. I was being sensible. Safe. I kept the vision of Gary and me in Florida, Serena and Thomas in their happy lives, in my mind’s eye and I stuck to my plan.
It’s what I’ve always been good at--making a plan, carrying it out. Why change that now?
Sarah Morgan is a nonprofit fundraiser focused on the climate crisis. Her short story "The Hard Choice" appeared in Infinite Worlds magazine, and her story "Charismatic Megafauna" appeared in Impossible Worlds. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and cats. You can find her online on Tumblr or Instagram.