To Marfa’s surprise, the young man grinned in response, and his face changed from unrevealing wariness to something much younger and happier. The smile clinched the matter for Marfa. He would do, this Michael Damson.
He played electric guitar, she found out later, but he practiced with the amplifier unplugged, to spare the neighbors. After he’d settled in to his new apartment, Marfa started inviting him up for tea once or twice a week. He was like a new penny, this one, and might be snatched up and spent by any warlock on the lookout for new talent. If Marfa Petrovna Kopelnikova had anything to do with it, Michael would learn to use whatever power he possessed for good purposes. She would keep an eye out for a decent warlock to train him; in the meantime, she would watch him herself.
* * * *
“Hey, babushka,” Michael said, stepping over the threshold.
“You look like a crow of ill-omen, you,” Marfa answered. “Come in and have tea.”
But he looked more like a heron, or some other tall, thin bird, with his long legs and hunched shoulders. Marfa handed him a cup of tea and pushed him down into a chair. Katzy watched from her place on the windowsill, her ears flicked forward as if listening to their conversation.
“What are we drinking?” he asked, and took an experimental sip. “Could use some honey.”
Marfa fetched him honey. “Just peppermint and hibiscus. How goes the search for work?”
“All right.” Katzy leaped onto the table and put her head under his hand for a caress. “I got a gig playing music for TV commercials.”
“A gig, huh? A gig means good money? You’ll earn enough to pay rent?”
He grinned. “Yeah, no problem. Lousy music, though.” At Marfa’s questioning look, he explained how the music was supposed to sell used cars, and not to be beautiful or moving in any way, except maybe to move the listener to reach for his wallet. Marfa finished her tea and rose to take her cup and saucer to the sink.
Michael joined her, taking the teacup from her hand and washing it himself. “So what are all these plants here?” he asked, with a nod toward the skeins of herbs hanging over their heads. He finished washing his own cup, set it on the draining board, and dried his hands.
Marfa pointed out the different herbs. “That one, on the end, with the long leaves, is spiderbund, good for the nerves.”
“And this?” He reached over his head to point out another skein. “Looks soft, like rabbit ears.”
“Felsom, for protection.” Marfa saw that his interest was genuine. Herbs were witch magic, female magic, but no harm could come of him knowing, she thought. “Take them all down, tall one, and I’ll show you.”
Michael repeated after her the names of the herbs and their uses like a litany. “Angelica for a merry heart, meadowsweet for bravery, purple loosestrife to control demons, barberry and mugwort picked from nine fields for fertility, belladonna for flying. Can you really fly?”
Marfa snorted in answer.
Most of all, Michael seemed to love to hear Marfa tell stories of the tiny village in Russia where she had grown up. Like Miami Beach, it had been located at a nexus, and the winter storms there had been fierce, the magic distilled into icy crystals that sleeted down, burying the village for months under drifts of snow and frozen element. Not until spring and the big melt would the villagers creep out from their snug little homes to see what transformations the magic had wrought. Once, Marfa recalled, the lake had frozen solid, and when it had thawed in the spring the villagers had found it to be stocked full of tiny, silver fish.
“Like sardines, they were, and we ate them all the summer and jarred them in oil for the next winter, and for once nobody went hungry. The next spring, when the lake thawed, they were gone, as if they’d never been there at all.”
“I’ve never seen snow,” Michael noted, and sipped his tea. They’d been talking for hours and were on their third cup; only crumbs remained of the cookies Marfa had baked.
“Oh, snow. There’s snow, and then there’s snow,” Marfa said. Michael raised his eyebrows, his signal for her to go on talking. “Plain snow is just cold and light and a bother to shovel from the footpath. But elemental snow, that’s different. It flashes like electricity, and if you touch it without gloves, your hand tingles and you can flick sparks off your fingertips. At night it sparkles under the moonlight like a thousand candles. There are some people in the far north who live all the winter in houses built of elemental snow, and a stranger people you will never meet.”
“I bet there were some strange people in your village, too,” Michael teased.
* * * *
On another visit, Michael wanted to know about magic spells. “How do they work?” he asked.
“There are professors at universities who study magic; maybe they could tell you the how of it.” Marfa was sitting in her rocking chair, Katzy on her lap. Michael leaned against the wall next to the window.
“So how do you make it work?” he asked.
“All right, curious. You have the zagovorui, the rune spells. For protection, those are. And the podbljudnaja, for divination.”
“So you just say them, and they work?”
Marfa nodded. “The witch says the words and they focus the flow of magical element in and around her. My grandmother taught me, as hers taught her.”
Michael was silent for a moment, contemplating the board floor beneath his feet. “Who are you going to teach?”
Katzy leaped from Marfa’s lap, as if startled. “When the right girl comes along, I’ll know it,” Marfa answered.
“What if the right girl is a boy?” he asked quietly.
Marfa knew what he was asking. Gently, she tried to explain. “Witch magic is for girls. A boy with talent studies with a warlock. Different techniques, different spells, different purposes.” She bent to pick Katzy up again. “One day I’ll find a girl to train up as a witch.”
He didn’t answer. Not long after, he left.
* * * *
As spring turned to summer, they met often. As he listened to her talk about magic, the habitual wariness in Michael’s eyes was replaced by eager interest. Too bad he’s not a girl, Marfa found herself thinking, for he would make a fine witch.
Sometimes they would walk down to the beach. They walked slowly, through the rancid smell of garbage from the open dumpsters behind the hotels, past swarms of starving feral cats lurking in dark alleyways, distracted by the flocks of chattering parrots perched on the telephone wires, and ignoring the stares of the bored retirees on their balconies.
“I’m looking forward to the storms,” Michael said. They came to the wooden stairs leading up to the boardwalk, and he took Marfa’s arm to help her. “Where I come from, we don’t have any storms.”
“Where you come from, huh?” Despite their growing friendship, Michael had said very little about his past. “Where’s that?”
“Southern California.” That explained his unfamiliarity with magic, his seeming unawareness of the possibilities opened up by his own talents. He told her about the wrecked, dry landscape of strip malls and interstates. “In August and September we’d hear on the news about the magical storms out here. I always thought it sounded cool.”
“Cool?” Marfa snorted. “You get a lot more than ‘cool’ during elemental storms.” She told him about how you never knew what would wash up onto the beach during an elemental storm: enormous kraken, drifts of pearlescent seashells, debris from wrecked ships, gold doubloons. The winds raged, rain washed down in floods, elemental bolts struck over and over again, and the city emerged on the other side of the storm transformed, trees uprooted, streets rearranged. Animals from the zoo wandered stunned along the Art Deco avenues. Odd bumps and thumps emanated from beneath the boardwalk. Clouds of butterflies glinted like rainbows over Biscayne Bay.
Perhaps this was why so many refugees from the world had settled here, Marfa speculated. Miami Beach was a city of the displaced, of people washed up on this wide white shore by war, politics, intolerance, poverty. The Cubans, the Haitians, the Jews fleeing from the second World War, the gay men, the old survivors—they all had seen transformation, devastation, and when it happened again during the great storms they knew that their lives would go on, afterward. Perhaps not as usual, but they would go on.
“And what brought you here, Michael?” Marfa asked, as they strolled along the boardwalk, watching the waves roll endlessly up onto the sand. He looked away and shrugged, asking her, instead, to tell him more about the zagovorui for bringing happiness.
* * * *