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Readers'
Choice

Into Something Rich
and Strange

By Barth Anderson

29 November 2004

As soon as I realized that the rapacious,
rot-sucking revenant would not stop till I was
dead, I changed my phone number. I changed
the locks on my windows, my doors, I let my
beard grow out, and I changed—

Wait. Let me rewind. The story of how I came
to be known as the Great Bringweather really
starts with the muffin—a luscious punk rocker
with a strong geek for the guitar. Worse for me,
he was a sullen misfit with placid brown eyes
and soft hands.

In short, he spun my heart like a pinwheel.

I met the muffin at a Chinese restaurant slash
dive called the White Monkey-Tiger. Lank,
wax-black mohawk draped over half his face,
he sat in a red vinyl booth surrounded by a
cadre of what appeared to be either the
members of a band or too-old-for-D&D boys
(they were both, I later learned), all of them
tilting a pitcher of beer into their glasses and
conversing with an irresistible intensity that
alerted me to the presence of the Holy Fire.

I was in my early seventies, young by the
standards of my craft, but shy about leaping
across the gulf between our years. It took
several Fridays of sidling nearer, like a natural
scientist earning the trust of lowland gorillas, but
eventually, Devin (lead guitarist, Dungeon
Master, and delicious muffin-to-be) invited me
to drink with them. I needn't have worried about
my age. We found a wide field of things to talk
about: Norse mythology, Malcolm McLaren,
skateboard technology (I mostly listened), and
Wagnerian opera. Over the next few weekends,
I became a regular at their corner table.

Then one Friday, Devin's band of
musician-adventurers didn't show. It was just me
and the muffin, and soon we were knee-deep in
his favorite topic, his yet-to-be-performed punk
opera about King Arthur. Though he'd been
invited to submit it for a grant, he felt his libretto
was too breezy, didn't carry proper mythic
weight.

"Ahem. You're greedy," I teased. "You want to
tell the whole Arthurian cycle in forty-five
minutes, when you should focus, er, on one
relationship—Mordred and his estranged father
the king—imply the rest."

Devin picked up a bar napkin and tore into the
paper with his pen. When he finished his notes,
he lit a cigarette and gave me a cagey look, like
I was the last truffle in the box. "So do you have,
like, a job?"

"I'm not, ahem," said I, "'employed' in the, shall
we say, conventional sense, no, my dear young
man."

Puff. Puff. Slight clench of his chiseled jaw. "So
are you on, like, disability?"

"I'd sooner take money from a bank than the
government," I said. "Wait. Same thing." I
laughed, cleared my throat. "You mean, how do
I get money for beer and sweet and sour pork
every Friday? Well. Yes." I'd never learned to
lie well about street witchery. "Let's just say I
don't need much, and besides, ahem, there are,
er, 'forces' more generous than employers and
bankers."

I watched our hands on the bar as we spoke, his
smooth fingers holding his Camel straights with
confidence, mine fidgeting and obsessively
ashing my cigarettes. "You're into something
strange, I bet," Devin whispered. The bartender
gave last call and I was about to put down my
share of the bill, but I froze when Devin asked,
"Are you a witch?"

I'd practiced in solitude for years, scraping
together what spells and lessons I could while
looking for a master, or even a colleague that I
might call friend. "Very well. If you insist. Yes," I
said. "And you are too, or will be, one day, my
friend." I blushed. "A witch, I mean, not my
'friend.' Though, I would like you to be more
than my just my friend. I mean, if you're—"

I shut my mouth and winced.

"I don't know what I'm supposed to be in
this—incarnation," Devin said, with such sadness
and regret for someone his age. He slipped a
hand beneath the lip of the bar to rest on my
thigh and quoted Mordred from his opera.
"Should not the old teach the young?"

My thought couldn't easily voice itself with his
hand on my leg, but I dearly wanted to teach
him a few things.

Devin turned his profile to me and performed a
magnificent French inhale for my amusement.
Then he said, "You keep the Holy Fire."

His bluntness was disarming. "I keep the Fire.
Yes. Ahem. I do."

Cool blink. Smoky smile. "Will you show it to
me?"

"I would love to show you," I said, unpocketing
my wallet to settle up with the bartender. Next
to me, T, the noted barfly and poet, was
sprawled on the bar in white muscle shirt and
ratty knit cap. He watched me hand my money
over and then wrote something on a bar napkin,
passing it to me. T was known as a drunk oracle
in my niche, so I pocketed the napkin, and slid a
five over to him. "You the king," T slurred at me
as I left with Devin.

I wouldn't read the bar napkin for months. I
wish I'd read it right then. It said, in his
befuddled scrawl, we unRoll our redDest
carpEts 4 the caPtains of Hell.

White Monkey-Tiger was on the edge of my
niche, a five-square-block neighborhood located
in the old flood plain between the interstate and
the river. This section of town had everything a
street witch could want: ancient warehouses,
abandoned lots filled with weeds gone to seed,
sidewalks alive with disorderly urban mix.
Nickel bag, dime bag, three-card monte.
Hooded graffiti taggers. Local churches fed the
local homeless, and well-heeled men cruised
behind polarized windshields. Elderly white
couples owned old bungalows from a time when
the neighborhood was more gentrified, and
young artists lived cheaply in dilapidated
mansions. There was a chichi wine bar and, yes,
a crack house, but a window factory too, and a
Russian gang, and a dollar theater, and in the
mornings, after my niche's midnight bedlam went
to bed, kids played in the Thomas Jefferson
Park fountain. Maybe to some my neighborhood
was a scary, inner-city nightmare. But nature
and I hate homogeneity. To me, this niche was a
well-attended watering hole, and I its tender.

Devin and I stepped out of the restaurant into
the mania of Jefferson Avenue at bar time. A
group of angry young women were fighting with
a pride of prostitutes. Cop cars were rolling in
with red lights on and sirens off. Pimps moved to
intercept the police while Devin and I wove
through the gathered prostitutes.

Some witches keep little indoor compost heaps,
but not me. At that point in my career I needed,
ahem, volume, so I built a cage out of a couple
rusty metal gates and slats from old peach
crates, and stashed it in the back of an
abandoned mechanic's shop near the White
Monkey-Tiger.

Standing before my compost heap—a mix of
rotting produce from the Italian restaurant, lawn
clippings donated by my neighbors, eggshells,
coffee grounds, manure from the city-farm
store—Devin raised his hands as if to a
campfire. Lord. My witchy little friend could feel
the Fire in there, and he wasn't just sensing the
physical heat, either (the microbial oven in my
compost burned at a crucial 180 degrees, at
which temperature the primary elements, birth
and death, do dance). He was sensing the
exhaust from Cosmic Animus that all witches
sense, the power released from yeasts budding,
bread rising, beer brewing, opposites attracting,
neighbors screaming on corners, urban culture
gelling. Devin knelt and pulled back the bottom
slat, where one could remove the composted
organic material. Volunteer oyster mushrooms
and string bean creepers seemed to claw at him
through the wire mesh of the gates. He pulled
out a handful of crumbling black dirt and smiled
up at me. "Perfect, isn't it?"

It was, of course, and I was glad he appreciated
it.

"Show me," Devin said.

If I'd been less smitten, I might have wondered
at how much he seemed to know already, but I
held out my hand and he turned his wrist, placing
the wad of humus in my palm.

Our hands touched.

Behind us, we could hear the upper registers of
angry women, and male voices shooting through
bullhorns.

I closed my fingers around the humus and shut
my eyes. Some witches compose elaborate
Gaelic poems for their spells, but that always
seemed like pre-Inquisition frippery to me. The
intent matters more than the words, anyway, so
I used literature for great acts and garage bands
for messing around. I quoted a favorite. "Birth,
death, rot! Birth, death, rot! Whine like a baby,
but it's all you got!"

"Hey." Devin grinned, illumined red by swirling
police car lights. "You're quoting Death Throe
Prisoner!"

So true, but I couldn't respond in that moment.
Cosmic Animus discharged from the chunk of
humus into my soul, my Anima as we say, and I
felt like a torch for a second.

I'll never forget the look on Devin's face: lustful,
proud, and avaricious. "How does it work?"

"Come around to the front," I said, recovering. I
led him up the shop's dandelion-riddled
driveway. From there, we could see the
veritable free-for-all on Jefferson Avenue. In the
spotlight thrown from a patrol car, a screeching
transvestite hooker squirmed between a large
white cop and a pimp in trench coat carrying a
cane, hurling herself at two Latina teenage girls,
screaming, "You got problems at home, don't
come looking for me with a knife, OK?"

The girls lunged for the prostitute, kicking and
slapping her. "Chinga tu madre en la cabeza,
Señorita Chi-chis con Pinga!"

Normally, I wouldn't interfere—a strong niche
gets stronger on its own, without my help—but I
had the muffin's full attention, so I squeezed the
humus until it crumbled between my fingers.

Just when it looked like the cops were about to
lose control of the situation, the transvestite's
pimp hauled his prostitute away from the
Latinas. One cop, though white as Donny
Osmond, reeled off a whirr of street Spanish to
the two young women and afterwards seemed
surprised at himself for a heartbeat.

Devin gave me that cagey, sidelong look again.

The cop's words didn't totally satisfy the Latinas,
but they crossed their arms and stepped back
from the fray. The transvestite hooker raised an
index finger. "I ain't gotta go looking for they
men," she said to Officer Donny. "I stand one
place—men swarm all over my ass!"

Laughter fell like rain, and the patrol car's
spotlight dowsed itself as the crowd unclenched.

I was dizzy and excited from contact with the
Holy Fire. "See? See how that worked?"

Devin flicked his lank mohawk out of his eyes.
"Did you make that happen?"

"I merely made it possible," I said, elated,
"drawing to a situation the power it needed."

"But how?" he asked with an impatient edge.

"Incongruent elements form a battery," I said,
"Pasteur was wrong and the Copenhagen Circle
was right: a spontaneous generation of life does
exist! Use it to feed a living culture, like this
niche, and you compound—"

"But what does that mean?" Devin all but
sneered. "'Life'?"

I gave Devin a hard, dissecting look. But all I
could see were pretty eyes and a heroic jawline.
"Come home with me." I put my arm around
him. "I'll show you life."

"No." He shrugged out of my embrace.

I froze, wounded.

But then Devin put his arms around me. "You've
done enough work tonight," he said. "You come
home with me."

Devin became my pupil, my lover, and the
companion I had been hoping for. Lessons in
composting began immediately, the base of all
witchery, along with making yogurt, sourdough
starter, and lessons in using the exhaust from
such microbial feasts for conjuring or predicting
the future (D's unique talent). Devin learned
quickly, which made his teacher vain.

Having a tall young man on my arm made me
feel vain as well—powerful in ways that the
Holy Fire could simply never do. We worked
on his opera (I loved Arthur's story), and I let
him shave me every morning, the feel of his silky
hands on my face stronger than any drug.

I don't know music, but I do know Arthur, and
Devin allowed me to rewrite his libretto. I made
Arthur a detached father-king, Mordred a caring
son vying with the condescending Lancelot for
Arthur's love. I was mythologizing Devin, turning
him into a sympathetic prince on paper and in
my heart. I was also excising all of Devin's
horrid rhymes ("Lancelot" with "romance a lot";
"take it farther" with "kill King Arthur") and
together we cast spells over his Neo Opera
Fund grant application, the new draft of the
libretto, and the demo tape for the grant board.

But while I lingered in Devin's studio, listening to
him create sharp-edged punk leitmotifs for
Mordred, I failed to notice the changes creeping
into my niche. Boarded windows were replaced
with panes. Beat up low-rider wrecks slowly
vanished, and cars with dealer stickers in the
windows drove down these boulevards now.
Street folks retreated to the margins of my niche
and then slowly they disappeared altogether. A
Gap appeared. An Olive Garden. An Urban
Outfitters. Then—gad, the shame—a Starbucks.
My neighborhood's idiosyncratic flavor was
becoming the homogenized taste of any other
city with the same stores, same signs and logos.
Same, same, same. But I was more concerned
with the muffin.

The night of Mordred and Arthur's "sponsors'
performance," when Devin, his band, and the
singers were asked for an initial run-through for
Neo Opera's grant board, I dressed in my
ground-score tuxedo and sat in the back of the
warehouse theater, which was filled with the
performers' friends and their polychromatic
heads of hair. The overture kicked in as Devin
and his bandmates in a cool blue spotlight
bashed the audience with the main Camelot
theme, a victorious guitar line that drove Wagner
straight into Sid Vicious. The audience as a
single person rocked their upper bodies, and I
eagerly scooped up the Xeroxed program,
scanning it.

Next to "libretto" on the program was Devin's
name and Devin's name alone. My name wasn't
mentioned. Not even in the "shout outs."

Mordred sang the opening aria, while I sat there
steaming. When it looked like Arthur would
bequeath Camelot to Mordred in the watershed
third act, the audience was spellbound (quite
literally—that was my doing). And when the
performer who sang Mordred also sang Nimue's
triumph over Merlin, conflating the double
destruction of Arthur's kingdom and his magic,
the grant board stopped taking notes.

But it was all lost on me. When the final note
stopped reverberating and the spotlight dimmed,
I edged around the crowd to the stage, leaning
against an exposed brick wall, waiting for Devin.

"You have something wonderful here," a woman
in turquoise from her silk wrap to her heels to
her Santa Fe rings was telling Devin. "Tone
down the Sex Pistols and bump up the Andrew
Lloyd Webber, and I can get you some killer ink
on this opera."

I rolled my eyes but Devin said, "You don't think
the punk elements will play?"

"For a very narrow niche, sure," she said, "but
I'm thinking bigger and so should you." She
squeezed Devin's arm, whispered something that
made him grin, then tapped away on her
turquoise shoes.

When Devin came to lean next to me against the
bricks, he said, "It's in the bag. She said so.
They're going to fund M and A."

I handed him the program.

He turned to me. "What?"

"You gave me absolutely no credit on the bill."

His sculpted face, normally angelic when he
looked at me, now scowled in contempt. I'd
never seen this expression of his before. "My
name represents both of us," he said with
sweetness.

"I want, er, to feel part of this, too, D."

He flipped his mohawk back from his eyes.
"Oh," he said, "you were."

I felt petty and egotistical, but who was being
pettier? All I wanted was my name on his stupid
little Kinko's program. "Will you list me as a
contributor when the show finally goes up?"

He shook his head, looking at me. "You'd give
me your last drop of blood if I wanted it."

I frowned. "Sure I would, D."

That's when he slapped me. My brain went
blank and shiny and all I could think was, I
shouldn't have bothered. I shouldn't have
pressed. I couldn't stand to lose Devin. When I
remember this moment now, I recognize that he
slapped his voice right into me. As my mind
unfogged, I looked down at my fingers, which
had just touched the place where he slapped
me. Blood.

Devin slipped his hands under his armpits but
not before I saw his long, curling fingernails. He
couldn't have played guitar with those nails.
That's when I realized that something insidious
was afoot. I lurched away from him and
walked/ran out the front door, so dazed I didn't
know where to go. What was happening, I
couldn't figure, though the clues were literally
right in front of me. Outside the theater, the
avenue was bustling with shopping bags, cellular
telephones, Gap jackets, and (shudder) Tommy
Hilfiger shirts. New awnings and weeded
sidewalks were spreading into my niche like a
pestilence.

A few days later, Devin finally phoned me at my
apartment. He was the only one who ever called
me, so I answered, "Yes? Devin? Is that you?"

His normally sullen voice now sounded strange,
strained. "I fucked up, man. I was so stressed
out about getting funding for this opera. I treated
you like a dick, and I'm so sorry."

"You should be," I said, glad to hear him say it.
"You were a dick."

"Have I wrecked everything? I hope not," he
said, and I thought I heard a catch in his breath,
a little sob. "I need you. I've always needed you
and I probably will forever. I'm in deep. I
need— I need—"

"Will you give me credit for the libretto, Devin?"
Days had gone by, so I don't know why it still
mattered. I missed him, I think, and I just
wanted something that forced him to admit I was
special.

"Yes. Sure. Anything." The edge in his voice
sounded like commitment, strength to me. "Will
you let me come over. Right now?"

"Anything for you, boy," I teased in my most
fatherly voice.

I put on my running shorts in case he wanted to
go to the gym and straightened the rug in the
front hall. When he arrived at my door, I saw
that Devin's mohawk was gone. He'd shaved his
head and wore a black turtleneck, black dress
pants, and black boots with an ankle zipper.
Devin used to say only suburbanites wear all
black. He looked wonderful and I told him so,
but I missed his gutter-punk look. "Why'd you
shave your 'hawk?"

Devin walked into my bedroom and flopped
onto my futon. He looked so exhausted his face
seemed mummified, skullish. "I'm in deep. They
want so much from me. New songs. A record
deal. Then a tour. It was supposed to be all
about King Arthur. It was supposed to be
about—" He shook his head in disbelief or
maybe disgust and looked out the window at a
massive structure that was going up in my
neighborhood, a store or something—a sight
which seemed to exhaust him even further. "I
need . . ."

"What?" I asked and put a hand on his thigh.
"What can I do for you?"

His exhaustion froze into a face of bitterness
suddenly and he looked at my hand. "You just
keep giving."

I laughed. "Ahem, well. For a select few."

He raised his forlorn, bloodshot eyes to mine. "I
need more," he said with a little laugh. "Get me a
beer, lover."

I went to the kitchen and got him a
Leinenkugel's.

"See a Starbucks is going in on your street?"
called Devin.

From the kitchen window, I could see the green
and black Starbucks sign. It was like a
toothache I'd been ignoring for months. "I know.
Well. They're quite cancerous, yes," I said,
uncapping the bottle as I came back into the
bedroom. "But, indeed, who cares? I'm so glad
you came to—"

I felt an unleashing of energy, like someone
releasing a drawn slingshot in my direction.
Surprising me as I entered the bedroom, Devin
knocked the bottle out of my hand without lifting
a finger, sending the beer spinning across the
floor. My eyes followed the foaming bottle, so I
didn't see Devin lunge for me. He knocked me
down, shoving me face-first against my futon,
and grabbing a fistful of my long hair, his
suddenly claw-like fingernails raking my scalp.
"D," I grimaced in pain, "what are you—?"

"I just want— I just want—" he said, unbuckling
his belt behind me.

When I realized this wasn't one of his games, I
tried to twist out of his grasp, get my arms
around him. I'd been working out (for him), but
a strong septuagenarian is no match for a
twenty-year-old body. He shoved me back
down and got on top of me, pressing his chest
into my back as he tugged down his black jeans
and underwear. A second later, he yanked
down my running shorts.

I tried to tap the Holy Fire, but I couldn't feel its
presence in my room, my apartment, which was
scarier than anything Devin could do to me. I
tried to draw power from my niche to sweeten
this moment, fill the air with romance, charm
Devin. But something wicked was blocking me.

I cried out with his first lunge and kept still while
he vented himself. He panted wet breath into in
my ear.

Time moved like a choppy movie.

Devin and I lying on my futon, my legs draped
over his, Devin tracing his suddenly short nails
over my skin.

Me standing, post-orgasmic and dizzy, going to
get us more beer.

The door slamming shut as Devin left me alone
in the apartment.

A puddle of beer. The smell of dying yeast. An
empty brown bottle.

Looking at my harried reflection in the bedroom
window with brooding night beyond, I knew
things had changed from awful to terrifying.
Sure, sex was always coarse and rude with us
and I'd planned on giving him exactly what he'd
taken, but Devin had broken something in me.
Why hadn't the Holy Fire answered my call?
What happened to my niche? I felt miles and
miles from finding a circle of witchy companions
or a master. Worse, the whimsical affair
between sweet guitar-boy and the old gentleman
had mutated into something sinister. And I
wasn't sure I was strong enough to stop it. I was
ashamed to realize I still wanted Devin.

I got up and went to my library (fifteen
cardboard boxes marked "books"). While
reading about different ways that witches could
lose their power—like the last century's Great
Rift when the followers of Louis Pasteur's New
Science forced the governing coven at Carlsberg
Beer underground, and street witchery was
born—I came across the word "revenant."

Revenants, said Nils Longren in Art of the
Impossible, are fearful witch souls who eddy
and whirl at the moment of death, recoiling from
the next step in the Wheel of Life: birth. "To
sustain their unsustainable 'unlife,'" the great
Longren said, "revenants devour the rot, the
Animus, in a strong witch's niche, and if the
parasite gains purchase, it will prey on this same
witch for generations, draining the witch to
death, incarnation after incarnation. Worse, due
to the fact that the revenant knows its prey
better than the prey knows itself, the revenant
will make itself irresistible, and extraction will
take great will at best or, at worst, a calamity."

Longren fell from my hand back into the
cardboard box. I had to scrape what power I
could manage to protect myself from something
treacherous, base, and undisciplined.

My heart.

So as soon as I realized that the rapacious,
rot-sucking revenant would not stop till I was
dead, I changed my phone number. I changed
the locks on my windows and doors, let my
beard grow out, and put a different name on my
mailbox. I went to my neglected compost heap,
hoping to find some old strength there. But
behind the mechanic's shop, which was being
remodeled as a T.G.I. Friday's, my compost
gates and slats had been yanked down, the pile
of black grass and crusty produce kicked all
over the lot.

No compost. No Holy Fire.

I walked home, crushed, and for the first time in
months, I looked at my niche as it really was.
The corners where street singers sang and
tattooed transvestites waved to passing cars
were empty—no foot traffic now. Abandoned
lots where thistle and mint grew wild had been
paved under for chichi restaurants. It didn't used
to be this way, I thought. Once, my
neighborhood would have digested this
gentrification into itself. But how could it now?
The local culture had been wiped clean. Worst
of all, I realized that the monstrous structure
rearing its head over my niche was—I can
barely admit it, even now—a mall.

Northdale Mall. Egad.

A greater humiliation to an urban witch even
than Starbucks, malls are life without her
dancing partner: death. No true culture exists
there. No one is forced to bump into their
seeming opposite, to negotiate, and nothing in
malls changes or adapts to the world outside. All
the "unsavory" elements have been moved out,
making way for bland commerce. Without
shouting, crazed laughter, passion, or true
culture, a mall is Pasteur's coven of sterility
taken to maddening ends.

My niche was inert, I realized, standing in the
middle of Northdale's vast, well-swept parking
lot. I was totally defenseless.

When I got home, the phone rang. I went rigid in
panic, and caller ID proved my worst fear: the
revenant had found my new number.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

What was left of me to rot away, I wondered.
The sunny sky rapidly darkened, and the air
smelled of rain. (Who was calling a storm?
Devin? By the Fire, why?) A moment later, he
was ringing my apartment buzzer. "Last time was
just a game," Devin said, his young voice a spell
at my door. "Come on, you know that." He
knew I was on the other side, leaning my head
against the door. He filled my mind with images
of how sweet he looked when he played his
song "Six Pack of Nimue" on his Fender. "Come
on, lover," he cooed. "I owe everything to you.
Let me in."

I wish I could say I resisted, but addicts never
refuse. When I opened the door, Devin's face
was sheet-white, his once-shaved head was
thready with old hair, a skull-smile, and his long,
cracked fingernails grew longer while I stood
there staring. You'd think this visage would
make it easy to slam the door, but my instinct
was to help. "You shouldn't have come," I said,
backing away from him.

He stepped inside. He closed the distance
between us quickly, and immediately began
unbuttoning my shirt. My vision blurred with the
fear of giving in to him again, and I pushed his
hands away. Devin gave me a sultry head to toe
as if he could freeze me with that sexy look. And
he did. I froze. That look made me want him to
just do it, just take and erase me so I wouldn't
feel shame for not resisting. Then his fingers
went back to my shirt.

A team of round-flanked fjord horses. The
wagon bouncing on a fallen body.

A spray of blood.

Exposed bone.

"This isn't right," I said, lifting Devin's hands from
my shirt. "Stop."

The revenant slapped me, but this time, the slap
sharpened me, and I saw that he expected me to
slap him back.

No. This game had to end. I grabbed him
around the throat and shook him once, hard,
without letting go. "I said, stop it!"

Lightning illumined the side of Devin's frightened
face. I glanced at the window and saw a broiling
front roll toward the city at an unnatural clip.
Then I realized. It was me. I was bringing the
weather. My heap was gone, my niche drained,
but I still had power somehow. Devin's eyes
bulged at me as I held him. He wanted me to
see something, I could tell. He wanted pity.

Horses, again. Red fjord horses tugging this way
and that on their carriage harnesses, then bolting
riderless into a Copenhagen market. I was
buying something (pickled beets in a jar of
vinegar and dill?) so I didn't see the accident
itself, but I could see the blood, red as beets.
"You died," I said to Devin, still gripping him by
the throat. "I saw you die."

He clutched at my wrists. "Yes."

"You were my student, then, too."

"Yes. You were like a father to me." I still had
him by the throat, though I'd softened my hold to
hear him speak. "But I always come back. Just
like you asked."

Thunder split and boomed overhead. "I asked?"

As if I was wringing it from his body, water
leaked from his right eye. "And I always did
what you asked."

It's us, I realized, looking down at the
guitar-boy-cum-leering-thing. We basic,
disparate elements of life and death danced and
sparked the Holy Fire together. The Holy Fire
was here, with me and Devin (and had been for
generations, it seemed), and it raged in this
moment, while I choked the revenant and the
revenant pleaded for its unlife. A compost heap
of two.

I tightened my grip on Devin's throat. While he
gagged, a great heave of thunder rolled over the
city and wind beat against my windows. The
wrack of the storm was right over us now, and
the air felt dense with storm, and it was mine.
My storm. He had a handful of my hair and a
grip on my shoulder as I reclaimed the magic
he'd siphoned from me. "Birth, death, rot," I
quoted.

The revenant finally shut its beautiful eyes in
terror. "But when I come back next time—I
won't—be me."

"I'll remind you of your strengths," I whispered.
"You'll see the future again. You'll be a prophet.
Or a prophetess. It won't matter to me. I'll
watch for you." I continued my spell. "Birth,
death, rot—"

"No! No! No!" cried the revenant. "I did what
you asked! You did this to me. You have to
help me!"

How many lives of mine had he drained? How
many more would he take? He'd already taken
everything of mine—lyrics, dignity, magic—and
put a mall in its place. "You'll never change," I
said.

Lightning struck outside my apartment and rain
fell in astonishing sheets, like riot hoses turned
on the town. I slammed Devin down on the floor
and leaned on his windpipe. The stench of so
much pent-up rot rose into my face, as I
strangled two, three, five, twelve unnatural
lifetimes from him, my eyes tearing from the
smell and fury and regret.

The torrent came, not a mere downpour but a
rushing flood of water from the sky. Watery
laughter gurgling in the sewers burst out in
hysterical fits and a flood ran over the streets.

There was no body—that had rotted away
years ago—just a dense, disgusting reek that
filled my living room. It was unbearable, as was
my broken heart, so I fled my apartment and
climbed the back steps in bounding leaps to my
building's roof.

No sorrow up here: just my raging storm. Like a
Halloween witch's hand, lightning reached
across the sky. Thunder churned, and clouds
piled overhead. I looked down at the rivers
roaring through the streets of my ruined niche,
then across the neighborhood at the greater
humiliation silhouetted in the rainy murk.

"Well, well . . . ," I muttered, wiping my eyes in
the rain. "Hello, Northdale Mall."

It was time to clean up after myself. Pine-Sol
wouldn't do, and I needed something weightier
than Death Throe Prisoner for this release.

"Full fathom five my body lies," I shouted,
pimping Shakespeare badly, fists raised, "and of
my bones are coral made! These are pearls that
were my eyes!"

Water began to rise toward windowsills.

"And nothing of me doth fade but that suffers a
sea change into something rich and strange!"

Below, standing on the roof of a BMW with a
newspaper over his head, was the poet T. He
had a soggy cigarette in his lips and he saw me
standing over him and shouted, laughing, "You
old son of a bitch! You did this!"

Shoppers scattered from the mall for their
SUVs, Range Rovers, and Lexi, arms loaded
with waterlogged shopping bags, but it was too
late for that. "Fly! Fly!" I screamed, wind
whipping through my silver mane. "This niche is
mine!"

"Azz right, bring the weather down!" shouted T,
dogpaddling up Hancock, cigarette and chin just
above water. "You freakin' bring it,
Bringweather!"

Through the night, the thirsty river crept out of its
bed and drank the city near its banks, namely,
the streets of my niche. Erected to take
advantage of my neighborhood's booming
economy, hastily constructed buildings collapsed
first. Then a whole section of the mall slid into its
parking lot like a wedding cake at a rowdy
reception.

One night of rain turned to two, then three, then
four. My neighborhood, located so near the
river, took the brunt, while the rest of the city
looked on in shock.

But during those rainy nights, I slept hard and
fast and dreamed of a transformation. It is a
dream that I still dream now. Redwing
blackbirds call from the kitchen of the Olive
Garden. Traffic signals poke through the surface
of a lake, red stoplight winking just above the
algae. And standing on the brim of a baseball
diamond's pond is Devin, as I first knew him:
mohawk draped over one half of his sculpted
face and smoking a cigarette. He's looking
across the scum-covered water at me, and
Mordred's opening aria sounds so beautiful that
I start myself awake.

Even after he returned to me years later, albeit
as a woman in her thirties with a prickly attitude,
that dream still awakens me with a drumming
heart. Even after the price I paid for my old
man's foolishness, I long for the nights when I
was special to Devin.

These days, I wake from that dream in my
recovering niche, and I walk down to my
compost heap with carrot shavings and lettuce
leaves from dinner the night before, then I head
to the corner bakery where I can get four
day-old rolls for under a buck. The old Gap and
Urban Outfitters stand shuttered with sheets of
plywood, and I stop to read the gang graffiti that
has bloomed there overnight, seeing whether the
Ukrainians or the Guatemalans claim my niche
today. In Jefferson Park, I play a hand of euchre
with the poet T and his fellow drunks, then I visit
Starbucks on the corner.

Yes. I admit it. Starbucks is still here. Did you
know that these Starbucks coffee shops are the
same all over the country? All over the globe?
It's the same Starbucks floor plan, everywhere.
Stunning. Same comfy Starbucks chairs and
Starbucks spider plants by the Starbucks plate
glass windows. Why would I allow this
homogenous horror to remain in my niche? Well,
imagine my delight: the same microbes burning in
my compost heap thrive in the Starbucks spider
plants, and the same actinomycetes dwell in the
the Starbucks dumpster, the Starbucks
bathroom floor drain.

Same, same, same.

My Starbucks stands adjacent to the White
Monkey-Tiger, and the baristas, Sheila and
Sharna, work at both establishments. When I
enter, I greet them largely and order my usual
(double decaf iced Frappuccino) and while
Sharna clangs espresso grounds out of the metal
filter, I take a trip to the bathroom. The smell of
antiseptic soap doesn't fool me for a second.
"Rot, death, birth," I whisper-chant while I have
a pee, calling to the Fire hiding in the bathroom
grout, where mildew has survived the sponge.
"Dance, you freaks, for all you're worth."

Then I leave the john and grab a seat in the
comfy Starbucks chair by the Starbucks
window, which looks out at the North Sea
merging in mist with a bright, grey sky.

"Velkommen hen til København, heksbroder,"
says an old dude with hair as gray as mine,
though cut into a stylish crew. He's wearing his
white linen shirt and folding up a newspaper
riddled with slashed vowels and dotted As as I
sit.

"Tusind tak," I say, loving his name for me,
heksbroder—brother witch. I ask if it's just him,
or if the others will join us this morning.

The old witch nods to the front door as a group
of young people in Munji jeans and Mecca
shoes pushes into the café—remnants of the old,
broken Carlsberg Circle, but now, so many
generations later, a cohort of heksen seething
with new Fire. As the kids queue for coffee,
boisterous and overly loud as always, the café
suffuses with a subtle light and heat. The music
gets louder. The coffee, no doubt, gets stronger.
It makes me close my eyes in gratitude for being
so lucky as to find this café, these witches, and
their lovely burn.

"Her ovre den er," says a voice. It's Gustave, the
handsomest of the male baristas working today.
I open my eyes and he's smiling at me from
under dark eyebrows. "Jeres Frappuccino."

They only offer me service like this at the
Copenhagen Starbucks, though the ones in
Moscow and Jerusalem are good, too. Grinning
up at Gustave, I say, "Tusind tak, mig kun lidt
muffin."

He pats my shoulder. "Jer erlykkelig over at
anrette jer," Gustave says in his sultry voice of
cigarettes and promise, "mig Bringweather."

Copyright © 2004 Barth Anderson

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Barth Anderson's first compost-magic story, "

Bringweather and the Portal of Giving and
Taking

," appeared in Strange Horizons in May,

2002, and one more installment could be
forthcoming. Barth's stories have appeared in
such venues as Asimov's, On Spec, and
Talebones, and his first novel was recently
purchased by Bantam Books. His own compost
heap needs more nitrogen and fewer coffee
grounds. For more on his work, see his

website

.

To contact him, send him e-mail at

[e-mail]

.

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