Nebula Awards Showcase 2015 Read online

  “He’ll pick you up at seven o’clock tomorrow. Be ready to go to dinner. Don’t bring up witch stuff. No talking shop on a date. His name is Lyle.”

  “Lyle?” Sheila said, as if the name seemed completely made-up—a fantasy novel sort of name, one of those books with a cover that features castle spires and portentous red moons covered in strands of cloud. One of those novels where people are called things like Roland, Aristial, Leandor, Jandari, or . . . Lyle.

  “Lyle,” said her mother. Then the phone went dead. Sheila looked down at it for a while as if it were a gun that had accidentally gone off, leaving a bullet lodged in her stomach.

  The bullet sat in Sheila’s stomach and festered for the rest of that night, and the feeling was not unfamiliar. Sheila’s mother had a habit of mugging her with unwanted surprises. Furniture that didn’t go with Sheila’s décor. Clothes that didn’t fit her. Blind dates with men named Lyle.

  Her mother was a mugger. Always had been. So why was she still surprised whenever it happened, as if this were a sudden, unexpected event? By the next morning, Sheila had come up with several jokes about her mother the mugger that she would tell to the two clients who had appointments with her that afternoon.

  “Mugger fucker,” Sheila mumbled as she brushed her hair in the bathroom mirror. “Mugger Goose. Holy Mugger of God. Mugger may I?”

  Her first client was a regular named Mary, who was forty-three, had three children, and was married to a husband she’d fallen out of love with four years ago. Mary came every other month for a reboot of the spell that helped her love her husband a little longer. She’d tried counseling, she’d tried herbal remedies, she’d even tried Zumba (both individually and with several girlfriends as a group), but nothing seemed to work, and in desperation she’d found Sheila through a friend of a friend of a former client who Sheila had helped rekindle a relationship gone sour years ago, back when Sheila had first started to make her living by witching instead of working at the drugstore that had hired her while she was in college.

  The knock came at exactly ten in the morning. Mary was never late and never early. Her sessions always lasted for exactly thirty minutes. Sheila was willing to go beyond that, but Mary said she felt that Sheila’s power faded a little more with every second past the thirty-minute mark. She still paid Sheila three hundred dollars for each session, and walked away a happy—or at least a happier—woman. She’d go home and, for five to six weeks, she’d love her husband. Sheila couldn’t work a permanent fix for Mary, because Mary had fallen so out of love with her husband that no spell could sustain it forever. Their relationship was an old, used-up car in constant need of repairs. Sheila was the mechanic.

  When Sheila opened the door, Mary pushed in, already complaining loudly about her husband, Ted. Sheila had never met him, though she did have a lock of his hair in an envelope that stayed in her living room curio cabinet. Except on appointment days with Mary; on those days, Sheila would bring the hair out for the renewal ritual.

  “I don’t know if I want the spell again,” Mary said. She hadn’t even looked at Sheila yet. She just sat down heavily on the living room couch and sighed. “I don’t know if I want to fix things any longer.”

  “What else would you do?” Sheila asked, closing the door before coming over to sit in the chair across from Mary. “Divorce? Start over? You know you could do that, right?”

  Mary clutched a small black beaded purse in her lap. She was a beautiful woman, long limbed, peach-skinned, with dark hair that fell to the small of her back like a curtain. She exercised, ate healthy, and didn’t drink too much alcohol—even when alcohol sounded like a good idea. She wore upper middle class clothes that weren’t particularly major designer labels but weren’t from a mall store, either.

  “I don’t know,” Mary said, pushing a piece of her layered black hair away from her face. Sheila noticed that Mary had gotten a nose piercing in the time between their last appointment and this one. A tiny diamond stud glinted in the sunlight coming through the living room windows. “The children . . .” said Mary. Sheila nodded, and stood, then went to her curio cabinet and took out the envelope with the hank of Ted’s hair in it.

  Sheila opened the envelope and placed the lock of hair on the coffee table between them. It was a thick brown curl that Mary had cut from Ted’s mop one night while he was asleep. When Mary had come to Sheila for help four years ago, Sheila had said, “I’ll need you to bring me something of his. Something you love about him. Otherwise, I’ll have nothing to work with.” Mary had said she didn’t love him anymore, so how could she bring Sheila anything? “Surely you must love something about him,” Sheila said, and Mary had nodded, her mouth a firm line, and said that, yes, she did love Ted’s hair. It was beautiful. Thick and curly. She loved to run her fingers through it, even after she’d stopped loving Ted.

  Now Mary looked down at the lock of curled hair as if it were a dead mouse Sheila had set out in front of her. “You know the drill,” Sheila said, and together the two pinched an end of the hair and lifted it into the air above the coffee table.

  Sheila closed her eyes and tried to feel Mary’s love come through the coil of hair. Like an electrical current, a slight hum flowed through it, but it was weaker than ever and Sheila worried that she wouldn’t be able to help Mary once this slight affection for Ted’s hair eventually disappeared. She took the lingering love in through her fingers anyway, whipped it like cream, semi-­consciously chanting an incantation—or more like noises that helped her focus on the energy in the feeling than anything of significance—and after she’d turned Mary’s weak affection into a fluffy meringue-like substance, Sheila pushed it back through the hair, slowly but surely, until Mary was filled with a large, aerated love.

  When Sheila opened her eyes, she noticed Mary’s face had lifted a little. The firm line of her mouth had softened and curled up at the edges, as if she wanted to smile but was perhaps just a little shy. “Thank you, Sheila,” said Mary, blinking sweetly on the couch. This was when Sheila went soft, too. Whenever a client like Mary, hardened by a deficiency of love, took on a shade of her former self—a youthful self who loved and was loved, who trusted in love to see her through—Sheila had to fight to hold back tears. Not because seeing the return of love made her happy—no, the pressure behind her eyes was more a force of sadness, because the person in front of her was under an illusion, and no illusion, thought Sheila, was pleasant. They were more like the narcotics those with chronic pain took to ease their days. This returned love would only be brief and temporary.

  At the door, Mary took out three hundred-dollar bills. “Worth every penny,” she said, folding them into Sheila’s palm, meeting Sheila’s eyes and holding her stare.

  When Sheila closed the door behind her, she turned and looked at the face of her cell phone. Thirty minutes had passed. On the dot.

  Her next client was new: a good-looking young man who was a bit too earnest for only being a twenty-three year old recent college graduate. His name was Ben, and he had just acquired a decent job in an advertising company. He’d gotten a mortgage, purchased a house, and was ready to fill it with someone else and him together, the kids, the dogs, the cats: the works. Sheila could see all of this as he sat in front of her and told her that he wanted to find love. That was simple, really. No need to drum up love where love already fizzed and popped. He just needed someone to really see him. Someone who wanted the same things. He wasn’t the completely bland sort of guy that no one would notice, but he wasn’t emitting a strong signal either. Sheila did a quick invocation that would enhance Ben’s desire so that it would beam like a lighthouse toward ships looking for harbor.

  She charged him a hundred dollars and told him that if he didn’t get engaged within a year, she’d give him his money back. Ben thanked her, and after she saw him out of the house, it was time for Sheila to sit in her living room and stare at the television, where the vague outline of her body was reflected in the blank screen.

  Lyle wo
uld be coming to pick her up in several hours. Lyle, Lyle. She said his name a few times, but it was no good. She still couldn’t believe a man named Lyle was coming for her.

  Sheila had tried to make the thing that made her different the most normal aspect of her life. Hence her business: Paranormal Romance. She had business cards and left them on the bulletin boards of grocery store entryways, in the fishbowls full of cards that sat on the register counters of some restaurants, and on the bars of every lowdown drink-your-blues-away kind of joint in the city of Cleveland, where people sometimes, while crying into a beer, would notice the card propped against the napkin holder in front of them and think about Sheila possibly being the solution to their loneliness, as the cards declared.

  She had made herself as non-paranormal as possible, while at the same time living completely out in the open about being a witch, probably because of what her father had once told her, years ago, when she was just a little girl and even Sheila hadn’t known she had magic in her fingertips. “If I had to be some creepy weirdo like the vampires and werewolves or whatever the hell else is out there these days,” her father had said while watching a news report about the increasing appearance of paranormal creatures, “then I suppose a witch would be the way to go.”

  The way to go. That’s what he’d said. As though there was a choice about being cursed or born with magic flowing through you. Vampire, werewolf. Whatever the hell else. The memory stuck with Sheila because of the way her father had talked as if it were one of those “If you had to” games.

  If you had to lose a sense, which one?

  If you had to live on a deserted island with only one book, which one?

  It was only later, after Sheila felt magic welling up in her as a teenager, that she realized how upset he was when she accidentally revealed her abilities—a tactless spell she’d cast to bring him and her mother closer. Unfortunately, her father had noticed Sheila’s fingers weaving through the air as she attempted to surreptitiously cast the spell while her parents were watching television one evening. Her mother stuck by Sheila, but he filed for divorce and disappeared from their lives altogether.

  Thus her business, Paranormal Romance, was born. She would make it work for her, Sheila decided in her late twenties. She would use this magic in a way that someone with good legs, flexibility, and balance might become a dancer or a yoga instructor.

  This desire for normality also explained why Sheila wanted to kill her mother after she opened the door that evening to find a man dressed in a black leather jacket, tight blue jeans, a black V-neck shirt, and work boots, sporting a scraggly goatee, whose first words were, “Wow, you don’t look like a witch. That’s interesting.”

  “Probably the least interesting thing about me,” said Sheila. She tried to restrain herself, but couldn’t refrain from arching her eyebrows as a cat might raise its back.

  “I’m Lyle. Nice to meet you,” the somewhat ruggedly good-looking Lyle said.

  “Charmed,” Sheila said, trying to sound like she meant it.

  “No,” said Lyle, “that’s what you’re supposed to do to me, right?” He winked. Sheila’s smile felt frail, as if it might begin to splinter.

  “How do you know I’m a witch,” Sheila asked, “when my mother specifically told me not to bring it up?”

  “Don’t know why she told you that,” said Lyle. “First thing she mentioned to me was that’s what you are.”

  “Great,” said Sheila. “And I know nothing about you to make it even, and here we are, standing in my doorway like we’re new neighbors instead of going somewhere.”

  Lyle nodded his head in the direction of the staircase and said, “I got us a reservation at a great steakhouse downtown.”

  Sheila smiled. It was a lip-only smile—no teeth—but she followed Lyle down the steps of her apartment to the front porch, where she found Gary dragging Snowman up the steps by his collar. The dog had its ridiculous grin plastered on as usual, but started to yap in the direction of Lyle as soon as he noticed him. Gary himself was grimacing with frustration. “What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

  “This guy,” said Gary. “When he ran off last night, he really ran off. Someone on the neighborhood Facebook group messaged me to say she had him penned in her back yard. Three blocks from here. You’re a bad dog, Snowman. A bad dog, you hear?”

  Snowman was barking like crazy now, twisting around Gary’s legs. He looked up at Lyle and for the first time in Sheila’s experience, the dog did not look like it was smiling, but was baring its teeth.

  “Woof!” said Lyle, and Snowman began to whimper.

  “Well, it’s a good thing she was able to corral him,” Sheila said, even as she attempted to telepathically communicate with Gary: Did this guy just woof? “I’ve never gotten along with dogs, so he’d have probably run away from me if I were the one to find him.”

  “Oh, really?” Lyle raised his brows, as if Sheila had suddenly taken off a mask and revealed herself to be an alien with tentacles wriggling, Medusa-like, out of her head. “You don’t like dogs?”

  “And dogs,” Sheila said, “don’t like me.”

  “I can’t believe that,” said Lyle, shaking his head and wincing.

  Sheila shrugged and said, “That’s just the way things are, I guess.”

  “Who are you again?” Gary asked, looking at Lyle with narrowed eyes, as if he’d put Lyle under a microscope.

  Sheila apologized for not introducing them. “This is my date,” she said, trying to signal to Gary that it was also the last date by rolling her eyes as she turned away from Lyle.

  “A date?” Gary said, clapping one hand over his mouth as he said it. “Sheila is going on a date?”

  “That’s right,” said Lyle. He nodded curtly. “And we should probably get started. Come on,” he said, pointing toward his car parked against the curb. Sheila inwardly groaned when she saw that it was one of those muscle cars macho guys collect, like they’re still little boys with Matchbox vehicles. “Let’s go get some grub,” Lyle said, patting his stomach.

  “Grub?” Gary whispered as Lyle and Sheila went past him, and Sheila could only look over her shoulder with a Help Me! look painfully stretched across her face.

  The steakhouse Lyle took her to was one of those places where people crack peanuts open, dislodge the nut, and discard the shells on the floor. The lighting was dim, but the room was permeated with the glow from a variety of neon beer signs that hung on every wall like a collection in an art gallery. Lyle said it was his favorite place to dine.

  He said it like that too, Sheila could already hear herself saying later as she recounted the evening to Trent and Gary. He said, “It’s my favorite place to dine.” Can you believe it? What was my mother thinking?

  “Oh, really,” Sheila said. The server had just brought her a vodka martini with a slice of lemon dangling over the rim. Sheila looked up at her briefly to say thank you, and noticed immediately that the server—a young woman with long mahogany hair and caramel-colored skin—was a witch. The employee tag on the server’s shirt said her name was Corrine; she winked as Sheila grasped after her words. “Thank you,” Sheila managed to say without making the moment of recognition awkward. She took a sip, licked her lips, then turned back to Lyle as the server walked away, and said, “What were you saying?”

  “‘This is my favorite place to dine,’ I said. I come here a couple of times a week,” said Lyle. “Best steaks in town.”

  Sheila said, “I don’t eat meat.”

  To which Lyle’s face dropped like a hot air balloon that had lost all of its hot air. “Your mother didn’t tell me that,” said Lyle.

  “No,” said Sheila, “but for some reason she did tell you that I’m a witch, even after she forbade me from speaking of it. Clearly the woman can’t be trusted.”

  “Clearly,” Lyle agreed, which actually scored him a tiny little point for the first time that evening. There it was in Sheila’s mind’s eye, a little scoreboard. Lyle: 1. Sheila: Anxiou
s.

  He apologized profusely, in a rough-around-the-edges way that seemed to be who he was down to his core. He wasn’t really Sheila’s type, not that Sheila had a specific type, but he wasn’t the sort of guy she’d ever gone out on a date with before, either. Her mother would have known that too. Sheila’s mother had always wanted to know what was going on, back when Sheila actually dated. When Myspace and Facebook came around, and her mother began commenting on photos Sheila had posted from some of her date nights with statements like, “He’s a hottie!” and “Now that’s a keeper!” Sheila had had to block her mother. And only weeks later she discovered that on her mother’s own social networking walls, her mother was publicly bemoaning the fact that her daughter had blocked her.

  But really, her mother would have known that Lyle wasn’t her sort of guy. “So what gives?” she finally asked, after Lyle had finished a tall beer and she’d gotten close to the bottom of her martini. “How do you know my mother? Why would she think we’d make a good pair?”

  “I’m her butcher.”

  Sheila almost spat out the vodka swirling in her mouth, but managed to swallow before saying, “Her butcher? Really? I didn’t know my mother had a butcher.”

  “She comes to the West Side Market every Saturday,” said Lyle. “I work at Doreen’s Meats. Your mother always buys her meat for the week there. As for why would she think we’d make a good pair? I don’t know.” Lyle shrugged and held his palms up in the air. “I guess maybe she thought we’d get along because of what we have in common.”

  Sheila snorted, then raised her hand to signal Corrine back over. “I’d like another martini,” she said, and smiled in the way some people do when they need to smother an uncivil reaction: lips firmly held together. She turned back to Lyle, who was cracking another peanut shell between his thick, hairy fingers, and said, “So what do we have in common, besides my mother?”

  “I’m a werewolf,” said Lyle. Then he flicked the peanut off his thumb and snatched it out of the air, midflight, in his mouth.