To Bethany, with teeth.(Reprinted here, read in full.)

To Bethany, with teeth. debuted in Luna Station Quarterly earlier this Spring. I am reprinting it here today in full. An odd little morality tale featuring witchcraft gone wrong…gone right. (Painting above, Buried in the Sand, by me.)

To Bethany, with teeth.

Michael dunks the beaver carcass into a bright blue drum of Strip-All. He sits on an egg crate and plays with his BotPad until the fizz stops popping. Until there’s nothing left but juice and teeth. 

Strip-All self-neutralizes in half an hour, so they say, but after seeing what that stuff can do, he’s not taking any chances. An aquarium net and a ladle, some kitchen gloves and an old pair of swim goggles. The scratched-up lenses are a bitch to see through, but after several passes he manages to collect all the teeth. As far as the juice, he only needs a quart. The remainder has to be out of the house within the hour or he’ll be forced to go back to square one. Fine with him, the stuff reeks. The label on the back says it’s safe to go down the drain. Finally, something easy. How people did this kind of stuff before the invention of consumer-grade electrochemical acids is beyond him. 

He takes his supplies to his work bench and pours a pint of the juice into a hollow he’d made in the center of a block of clay. He pours the rest into a spray bottle and gives it a few pumps until it gives up a spritz. Odd, it no longer stinks. Smells nice, even. Almost like jasmine.

He starts working the juice into the clay and quickly becomes tired. Kneading clay is hard work – he hadn’t anticipated. The contestants on DIY Me, Bro! during week three’s pottery challenge had made it all look so easy. He glances over his shoulder – the weight bench on the other side of the garage mocks him from underneath storage bins and shop rags. He damns his slack bod to Hell. He’s really let himself go. 

But he can’t fall prey to weakness. He is so close. He shuts his eyes and she’s there, floating in the black. Right where she should be. Right where he can see her. So, so close. 

He picks up the pace. He uses his fists – really uses them. Engages his biceps, triceps, trapezius, core. Squeezes the cube in on itself like he’s crushing a skull. Slams it down with his whole body. Pummels it into submission. The workbench shakes. All around him, less precious things fall. 

He folds and kneads, kneads and folds, over and over and over again. Forcing out air bubbles, misting the tough lump with juice so it won’t dry out. He rolls the clay into a cylinder and shapes the curves. Supple and small. His hands seem to have a mind of their own. The backs are white and cracked, a broken winter lake. And his palms. Gray in every lifeline. 

Finished, he admires his work. It wouldn’t get him a job cleaning toilets on DIY Me, Bro! but it was a reasonable likeness. The face was the hardest. To sculpt the fullness of her cheeks without her looking like a nut-hungry squirrel. To press the concave of her temples without bugging her whole face out. The nose is too big, but his hands are incapable of doing justice to an appendage so small. He prays it won’t matter. 

He spritzes her again and goes to work on the details. A fork combs in strands of hair. The tip of a pencil pokes pupils in each iris. All around his pinkie pushes divots into which later he’ll place the teeth. Finally, with a toothpick, he etches her name backwards on the base. 

YNAHTEB.

He tosses the toothpick aside. Crosses his arms and huffs at what he’s written. Even her name has turned its back on him. 

The match has been lit and the fire spreads fast. He feels a sudden urge to pick up the statue and smash it against the wall. Instead, he breathes. Inhales and exhales with intention like his therapist at the Fed Rehab Center had taught him. Eight court-mandated months with some old lady whose job was to teach him to breathe. Our tax dollars at work, right? His nose catches a phantom whiff of that office. Decades worth of the anger-disordered leaking hot ball sweat into the valleys of an old corduroy club chair. He’d have rather done time in a cell.  

He calms down and rereads the instructions. The effigy is allowed up to two weeks to go from its workable state to leather-hard to its final stage. Bone-dry. If there is any water left in the clay…or beaver juice. Liquid, let’s say – prior to firing, the piece will explode. He’d have to start over, freshly slain beaver and all. Trapping a beaver is the hardest thing in the world for someone ignorant of the ways of the wilderness. And plus they’re just plain hard to come by. The two hundred year-old spell didn’t count on the animals being endangered one day. Idiot, he thinks. Why didn’t I try to trap a back-up while I was out there? Oh, right. Cocky.

The west Florida panhandle in late Summer is an absolute steam bath. He’d bought a machine to reduce the humidity, and let the AC bleed into the garage, yet still it took the entire allotment – two weeks – for Bethany to fade to white. To fragile as a sparrow, bone-dry white. He pops a Klonopin to steady his essential tremor and lowers her into the kiln without incident. After a day of firing and cooling, he lifts the lid. Praise his ass, she’s intact. 

His decorative supplies are set mise-en-place. First he paints her hair (sienna), then her eyes (phthalo green), then inlays her name with gold. He smears a dab of Liquid Nails on the root end of the molars and wiggles them into the holes around her body. Snug as bugs. The beaver’s long orange incisors are fitted to her shoulder blades. They curve out far. Spread wide like wings. Angel wings, he thinks. He runs his hand over her softly, regarding the monstrosity with tenderness. So, so close.

He screws a custom made incandescent bulb, red, (praise be to electropunk hobbyists) into an antique pull socket he’d suspended from an overhead beam. He reads the incantation from his device and almost drops dead himself as Bethany’s effigy begins to move. He’s done it. On the first try. Dope-strength euphoria.

Now who’s the loser?

He leans in and inhales the hot breath pulsing from her nostrils. There’s more. A dew in her eyes, a flush in her cheeks. Those summer peach cheeks, so supple and velvety he could bite right into them. She begins to moan. To struggle against closed lips. The spell says speech is possible but he isn’t prepared. His stomach tightens. He becomes overwhelmed. Suddenly it is all too much. 

He pulls up the instructions and scrolls to the comments section where users frequently post updates and revisions – ingredient substitutions, things like that, and for messy or amoral spells, tweaks that can tone things down for the frightened or squeamish. For his sanity, he needs to quiet her. He sorts by topic and rating and finds a good one – over two thousand platinum stars. All he’ll need by way of supplies, it says, is moss and urine. Thank the brujas for Florida live oaks and a bladder bursting from two liters of Coca-Cola meal replacement. It takes him only minutes to collect moss from the old-growths in the backyard, douse them with piss, and smother her up in the nasty stuff. It sticks to her like seaweed. Her body continues to make little jerks and sways, but like magic – exactly like magic – the moanings stop. He does his part and rates the comment. Platinum star.

He turns over the egg crate, lines it with bubble wrap, and nestles her in. He stuffs more plastic around her form to stop her from squirming. Now that she’s secured, he takes a break. Removes some boxes from the weight bench and sits down for a cigarette. Watches tendrils of smoke curl through the red light. The last time he saw her she’d told him she’d see him in Hell. He takes a long look at the egg crate, raises his cigarette like a glass and toasts to her clairvoyance. 

The rhythm of the drags center him. In the calm and the quiet, he begins to think that all of this is, perhaps, awful. In his mind, flashes of her. Her lips, light pink, her favorite color which grew to be his. Her voice, as pure and light as a clear blue sky. How she yielded beneath him, and afterwards that sugar shine skin, proving her desire no matter what she might have said when they’d begun. He misses her. Misses everything she was before things got bad. 

Nostalgia wins. He pulls his device from his back pocket and returns to the comments section, searching for something – anything – that might put her to sleep. He finds one post, no reviews yet, but the site is self-policing. It’d have been taken down if it wasn’t legit. And it’s easy – just a little chant while spelling out the subject’s name. But you can’t write it. The comment suggests Scrabble tiles or blocks. He has Alphabet soup. He brings out the can from the kitchen and it’s over in minutes. He pushes some of the bubble wrap aside and checks for movement. Nothing. It worked. 

At least he can say she didn’t suffer. That he’d done his best to make sure. 

So. Bethany is asleep and will feel no pain. She’ll be safe until she isn’t. He stands up straight. He’s ready. The man. This time, he will break her. 

#

There are severe punishments for practitioners of coercive or malicious witchcraft, but for Michael, this deal with Bethany is worth any consequence that comes his way. Besides, he might very well get away with it. He’s thought of everything. Completed therapy, got a certificate for that. Stopped stalking her cold turkey, gushed to mutual friends about how happy he was to have moved on. Told absolutely no one about the beaver or his newfound interest in the art of ceramics.  

He’d paid a hacker on the dark web to disable her MageMate. The infomercial plays in his brain as if on command. “MageMate. The only app that utilizes quantum electrodynamics to detect with up to a ninety-five percent accuracy when a curse is on its way to you!” It works in conjunction with the Stasis Shroud, a spell deflector of sorts. Those can be rented anywhere – Shroud Cafés, supermarts. Libraries even check them out. “Here’s the drill. MageMate sends an alert to your BotPad along with the location of the nearest available Stasis Shroud!” You hurry your ass over there, get in a booth and shrug it on, and more or less go to sleep, your soul on pause until the curse gives up on finding you. Until it loses itself, its potency shattered, its glitter hitching rides on photons that run from you at the speed of light.

It took him a while to get to this point. He’d first considered a love spell. After all there were only two options: she loves him and lives or denies him and dies, and he vastly preferred the former. But ultimately, the thought of being on the receiving end of an artificial love was a punch in the gut straight down to the nuts. Ruminating on the scenario whittled his rage into the most lethal of spearheads. Put me in a cell, he then thought. Gas me. I’ll never be able to touch her again anyway. 

#

He places the egg crate on the front passenger side floor. It’s a snug fit. 

She’ll be safe until she isn’t. 

One hundred miles from home, a little ways past Apalachicola, he speeds up to 95 mph – faster than the fastest gyrfalcon. He’s heady with adrenaline, beyond all thought. Now. He hits cruise control, retracts the soft top, picks up the effigy and tosses it out. Somewhere far away, Bethany screams. 

#

Michael leaves the top down on his way back home. It’s done, I’ve got the last word, and you can’t bitch to me about suffering, he thinks. Dying in your sleep. Magic or not, few are afforded such peaceful ends. 

His BotPad calls out from his back pocket but he doesn’t hear it over the roar of the rushing wind. It vibrates, but he doesn’t distinguish the sensation from that of the rumbling of wheels over pavement. Contemporary cars are smoother. He’s one for the classics. 

Classics. Shit, he thinks. He hasn’t thought to check the fuel gauge. An eighth of a tank. Maybe less. He never lets it get this low. Gas stations are hard to come by – the United Southern Congress only mandates two per county, except for counties bordering the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. They get five. Over the years hurricanes have become more or less seasonless. Our voting representatives figured automotive luddites deserve a fair shot at a safe evacuation, too. 

He’ll have to stop and ask FuelFinder to chart a route to the nearest station. He makes for the shoulder and as the car slows he starts to hear the dings. When he turns the car off he feels the vibrations. He fumbles for his BotPad. It’s MageMate. 

After the first alert a target has about an hour to get to a Stasis Shroud or deal with the consequences. He scrolls up to the first notification and sees it’s been just about that. There’s no way to know what’s coming. Could be a hair loss curse or a castration hex or anything in between or something wholly unspeakable. Targets don’t gamble if they can help it. 

MageMate isn’t registering any good options for Shrouds given the time he has left. Not at all and definitely not for someone in a gas car. His tremor acts up, bad. Shifting gears will be hard. Who the fuck? He thinks. The smile he’d worn for miles is sucked into a black hole. 

He throws his device on the passenger seat and jerks the car onto the highway. Fuck gas. Fumes will do. He accelerates, hard. If he can get to a Panama City exit, he’ll be safe. Supermarts and cafés galore. After all, one hour is only the app’s estimation. Like a ‘best used by’ date. There’s a non-zero chance it’s a false alarm. Nothing’s written in stone. 

His hand flies up from the wheel involuntarily and smacks the back of his ear. He feels something – a fly, perhaps, hovering on the precipice of his canal. Little tickling legs, a zipping of a buzz. 

Mile markers tick by far too slowly. His jaw is clenched like a vise and it hurts. A warm wet stain spreads over his crotch. He screams like a barbarian in battle. Or like a mother, cradling her fallen son, demanding the Gods tell her why. An impotent howl. He’d push the pedal through the floor if he could. 

Whatever was bothering his ear is now squirming into his canal…flossing itself through his brain. It crackles like a bonfire, cozy like Christmas, but then someone fans the flames. His scream could break glass. He is burning from the inside out.

He loses all control of the vehicle. Its entire left side swerves hard into the guardrail. The godforsaken shriek of metal on metal. The wail of the friction as the car soldiers on. The passenger side tires fly over a forsaken steel bumper. Detritus from another unlucky traveler. Michael’s seat belt breaks his chest. The back tire blows out and the car fishtails. Hands back on the wheel, he overcorrects and the car spins into the median before coming to a stop in four-foot high, matchstick-dry pink Fakahatchee grass. 

All is quiet. The heat leaves his head, and the buzzing fades into song. However dim and distant, it is sharp against the silence. The vocalist, undeniable. Bethany.

I’m dead, he thinks, struggling to laugh through broken ribs. She’s dead. 

We’re together. 

Incredible. He’s had his cake and eaten it. He calls out to her, a painful whisper. During the accident, he’d bitten his tongue. Blood pours from his mouth as he beckons her near. Bethany, come here. Get the hell out of my head and come here and sit next to me. Sit next to me, just let me feel you. All is forgiven. Everything, everything. Because you took me with you, didn’t you? Because you need me. You’ve been as miserable as I’ve been, you just needed me to show you. You’ve always needed me to show you. Oh God, Bethany, I knew. I knew you’d understand, if I could just make you see how much I love you. 

The fire that first torched his brain reignites in the air and falls into the arms of the grasses. It blooms wildly. Through the warped distortion of the mixing air, he sees her figure in the distance. But something is wrong. She’s not coming towards him. She’s moving away. Suddenly, there is pain. 

His screams rip his windpipe to shreds. His buttocks and thighs are melting into the vinyl – the earthy stench of searing flesh. The burnt bacon crackling of fat. At last, the flames find the fuel. A supernova. Every last bit of Michael’s soul drifts into nothingness like a wind-bothered dandelion blowball.

#

Bethany’s scream jolts her from a dead sleep. For a moment she’s shaken. Confused. Doesn’t even remember nodding off. But then again, she’s been up for days with this effigy business. Her body had cause to protest.

Flat on her back on the garage floor, she squints her eyes against the overhead bulb. She must not have installed it properly. It’s been buzzing awfully. And the red light is creepy. She stands up and pulls the string. It’s a bit of a struggle to lift her arms. Her bones feel numb. Concrete makes a bad bed.

Surely by now the kiln is safe to open. She walks to it on stiff legs, puts on her mitts and lifts up the lid. 

And there he lies. Michael, shattered and strewn. A broken mess, a pile of hot white garbage. Well, that’s him in a nutshell isn’t it, she thinks. In spite of it all, she smiles.

Isn’t that just how it goes. A woman finally closes the lid on a piece of shit and as soon as she thinks she might beat him, as soon as she allows herself to hope, abra-fucking-cadabra. He explodes. And she gets to pick up the pieces. 

Controlled despondency, then anger, as she thinks of all the work she’s put into all this. All she’d put into the relationship before. And for what. She replaces the lid, kicks the side of the kiln and calls it an asshole. You were right, Mike, she thinks. I am a failure. 

She’ll deal with his mess another time. Not tonight. From her workbench across the room, her BotPad announces eight new Hello! Hologram chat requests. No one ever sends her those dumb things. No one ever even calls. If it were any other day she’d be rushing to open them. 

If someone died today, I don’t care, she thinks. 

She can only imagine what might have been if she’d had the chance to chuck that ugly pincushion out her car window. A life without him. Safety. Peace. On her way into the house she gathers up that poor beaver’s gruesome teeth. After tossing them in the trash, she stops. Weird, she thinks. They were warm.