A Witch, Sorceress, Mystic, and Goddess Walk into a Bar
A Witch, Sorceress, Mystic, and Goddess Walk into a Bar

Don’t mess with magic

Photo by Bill Adler

The Man

He woke with no memory. His name, age, birthplace, and profession, eluded him. He felt as if somebody had hollowed out part of his mind.

Pitch darkness encircled him. A faint hum came from above.

He pushed himself off the floor, took two steps, and bumped into a wall. With his palms, he traced the wall’s contour to the right until it came to an end after three feet. A second wall ran perpendicular to the first. From that extended a third perpendicular wall.

A box of some sort. The air had warmed noticeably since he first regained consciousness.

He continued along the perimeter, using hands as a substitute for eyes. The first two walls were smooth, without protrusions, indentations, or bumps of any kind. The third wall was divided in half by a vertical slit, and the fourth had two columns of round plastic buttons, which he pressed, but which did nothing.

I’m trapped in an elevator. While he still didn’t know who or where he was, the fact that he was in a motionless elevator comforted him. Somebody always rescues people in elevators. That much he knew.

Then the scratching came, like a bear or tiger was on the elevator’s ceiling, trying to penetrate its carapace. The scraping became a shriek of bending metal. Faint light from the elevator shaft’s bulbs dribbled through the opening. A talon reached down.

He screamed.

Deena

Samson whistled at Deena as she passed through the building’s revolving door, a loud two-note tone, the kind you’d use to summon a dog. He followed the whistle with, “You’re looking good today, Deena.” Samson paralleled Deena, his black leather Hermes shoes gliding over the sidewalk as if they were frictionless.

“I’m on my way somewhere.” Deena aimed her eyes straight ahead, denying Samson the pleasure of seeing her face, and, simultaneously, keeping a lookout for a friend, any friend. There’s never a friend around when you need one, she thought.

“Where’s somewhere?” Samson artificially lowered his normally squeaky voice.

Deena walked faster and ignored his question.

Samson kept pace.

Samson worked in the same research department as Deena at Ice Energy. He had joined the firm six months before Deena. Technically, they were colleagues, though Samson regarded himself as her superior, like an Army corporal to a private. He’d often shilly-shally over to her desk, peer at her screen, and offer suggestions about whatever email, document, or spreadsheet appeared on her screen. He wasn’t subtle about looking down her blouse.

“Here, let me help you.” Samson reached toward Deena’s briefcase, but his hand brushed her hip. Brushed as in lingered there. Deena swatted his hand away, the smack echoing off the nearby office building.

“Oops,” he said, his voice devoid of sincerity.

Deena rubbed her thumb and forefinger together and spoke rapid-fire in a foreign language.

A cloud of flies materialized around Samson’s head, buzzing like a herd of leaf blowers. He dropped his briefcase and flailed at the bugs with both hands.

“Gotta go,” Deena said. She made an abrupt one-hundred-eighty degree turn into a CVS. Samson didn’t follow.

Chenoa

“I have an idea for increasing the efficiency of our Type C solar panels and for reducing their total export costs at the same time,” Samson said.

Chenoa whipped her head toward Samson, whose broad smile looked as plastic as a mannequin’s. He was seated on the opposite side of the long, oval table in the packed sixth floor conference room.

What? Chenoa thought.

“We’ve tended to view production cost and energy efficiency as sides of a coin that can never appear together…”

Fuck that. That’s the exact sentence I wrote. Chenoa felt her face on fire and tasted metal in her mouth.

“We always thought the key to improved efficiency was tweaking the palladium to silicon ratio, even though that increased the cost of individual cell production. But what if we changed the architecture of the crystal matrix instead?”

Plagiarist! Thief! Chenoa dropped her hand below the table and balled her fingers into a tight fist. So that’s why Samson asked to borrow my computer yesterday. His wasn’t broken. He just wanted to steal my idea.

Dimitri Long, the company vice-president, beamed a broad smile Samson’s way and gestured with an open palm. “Proceed.” He scanned the room. “Everyone pay attention to what our boy genius has to say.”

Chenoa stomped her foot, causing a small tremor to ripple across the conference room floor. “Sorry!” she blurted. “I had a leg cramp.” She cast an icy glare Samson’s way.

Samson shivered and stood. He pressed his hand against his buttocks. “I, um, just need to go to the restroom and then I’ll present my proposal. Brb.”

Sakura

Anthony entered the room unobserved, the clackety-clack of the copier masking his approach.

The hypnotic whir of the machine’s motors lulled Sakura into a semi-trance.

Anthony circled around to the opposite side of the machine. He slapped his palms on the copier and said, “Boo.”

Sakura jumped.

“Did I scare you?”

“What do you think?”

“Sorry.”

“I doubt it.” Sakura collected the paper from the machine’s output tray, held the sheets vertically between her hands, and thumped them against the copier to flatten the edges. Satisfied she’d evened the hundreds sheets, Sakura looked back up at Anthony and asked, “What are you doing here?”

His breath smelled like cold coffee. “Drinks after work?”

Sakura tapped her wedding ring.

He lowered his voice. “Yeah, but I heard that doesn’t bother you.”

“Excuse me.” Sakura stepped away from Anthony and shifted the paper to her left hand so it formed a wall between the two of them. “You heard what?”

Anthony winked.

“That you don’t mind a little, um, extracurricular activity.”

Sakura’s heart beat fast as she considered harpooning Anthony’s instep with her heel, grabbing his testicles and dropping to the floor, or slamming her elbow into his solar plexus. After a moment’s thought she decided instead to ask, “Who told you that?”

“Samson.”

“I see. What was the context?”

“Huh?”

“What caused him to say such a lie?”

“I don’t know. He just volunteered. I got the impression that the two of you were, you know, frequenting a hotel together.”

“You can tell Samson…” Sakura interrupted herself. “You know what? Nevermind. I’m not — we didn’t, and I don’t want you ever to bring this up again, or you’ll be explaining to HR why the company is facing an expensive sexual harassment lawsuit.”

Anthony opened his palms toward her. “Okay, okay.”

“Did Samson say anything else?”

“No.”

Liar.

Sakura waved her arm in a cone-like fashion, moving faster and faster until it was a blur. A wind chime jangle filled the room. Blue smoke slipped from her fingertips, bounced off the copier room’s walls, flew out the door, and turned left toward the work area.

Sakura drew in a satisfied breath as she visualized Samson’s puffy cheeks, close-set, hazel eyes, pencil-thin eyebrows, and perpetual smirk, and directed the smoke to its destination.

Loreena

“That’s never going to fly.” Samson rested his Starbucks cup at the table where Loreena was sitting. He sat down and asked, “Mind if I join you?”

Ever since his first day at Ice Energy, Samson’s single-minded mission had been to belittle Loreena, to disparage and mock her work. Loreena learned early on to never show Samson any of her work in progress because he bled red ink on everything she did.

He wanted Loreena to fail or quit or both. Or just to be miserable.

Sometimes, unfortunately, she had to collaborate with Samson. Such was the nature of an office.

“What is it?” She took a premature sip of her coffee. The hot liquid burned Loreena’s tongue, but the pain invigorated her.

“Your Spanish translation sounds odd.”

Loreena was responsible for the company’s website, and that role included maintaining Ice Energy’s Spanish language pages. Fluent in Spanish, it was a task she enjoyed.

Does Samson speak Spanish? Not that it matters, because his point is to put me down.

She leaned back in her chair, feeling half trapped and half amused. I’ll chalk this one up to another psychology lesson: the brain of an obnoxious coworker.

Or is he a sociopath?

“Tell me, what part of the translation is wrong?”

“First, you need to know that the tone of your email to the CFO was way off base.”

Of course. He can’t be specific about my Spanish translation because to try to do so would give away his game.

“I see,” Loreena said. “Please inform me.” She tried to speak in a neutral tone, but sarcasm slipped out. Samson didn’t seem to notice. She retrieved a Peanuts spiral notebook from her bag and wrote. Samson seemed pleased, delivering a demeaning monologue while Loreena pretended to take notes. Instead, she penned four sentences in old Gaelic, writing in a primeval script of angular block letters that looked like the outline of stones in an ancient stone circle. She wrote in black ink, but the ink seemed to absorb the coffee shop’s shadows, becoming blacker than the blackest coal.

“Good, you’re taking notes. Smart girl. Maybe you’ll amount to something after all.” Samson leaned over to catch a glimpse of what Loreena had written. He scanned the words, his eyes swinging from side to side, his brow broken by creases. “What is…?” he said, before collapsing into somnolence to the side of Loreena’s table.

A Witch, Sorceress, Mystic, and Goddess Walk into a Bar

“Whoa, that’s what I call timing! We’re all here at the same moment.”

“Ha! All roads lead to McAdams’ Pub.”

“Great minds think alike.”

“Great minds need a drink after work.”

Deena, Chenoa, Sakura, and Loreena entered the pub in height order. They ordered drinks. Denna, a Manhattan, Chenoa, an IPA from Oregon, Sakura, a single malt whiskey, and Loreena, a martini with an olive. Seated on tall stools around an elevated bar table almost dead center in the busy and boisterous pub, the quartet’s fingers turned sticky and red as they enjoyed an enormous plate of chicken wings.

“He’s a shit,” Loreena said softly into her glass.

“Say what?” Chenoa asked. “Somebody hit you?”

“I said a ‘shit,’ not a ‘hit,’ but it might as well have been.” Loreena met Chenoa’s eyes. She paused a beat, took another sip of her martini, and spoke louder, enunciating each vowel and consonant. “I’m talking about Samson. The office asshole.”

“You don’t say?” Deena chimed in.

“I say.” Loreena nodded. “He’s constantly demeaning my work, belittling it, criticizing everything I write, say, and do. Even before I started writing the Northern Latitude Wind Study, he volunteered, ‘This study is beyond your skill level. If you want to work on it, fine, but I think somebody else like Johnson and Kellerman should be the lead.’ Can you believe that? I have a PhD from Brown. Samson’s got a cereal box top correspondence degree.”

“Ha!” Sakura said. She blushed. “I don’t mean ‘ha’ in a good way. Do you want to know what he did to me?”

Her friends nodded.

“He spread malicious gossip that I’m…” She cupped her hand around her lips. “Sleeping around.”

“What a prick,” Deena added.

“I’m sorry,” Chenoa said. “As for me, he steals my ideas. I have to lock my notes in the drawer. I write mostly in longhand now because I know he’s going to inspect my computer when I’m not around. Even with that, he mines my emails and intra-office Skypes and presents my thoughts as his own. I’m sure I’ll get a demerit and the boss will think he’s the cat’s pajamas at the next evaluation period.”

“Cheaters shouldn’t prosper,” Deena said. “Neither should sexist pigs. He came onto me on the sidewalk. Can you believe that? He rubbed his hand along my hip. And if I hadn’t — ” She paused for a moment before continuing. “I slapped his hand away. I hope it left a red mark.”

“Gross,” Chenoa said.

“You should have cut his hand off,” Sakura added.

“That would be the perfect penalty for illicit and illegal touching,” Loreena said. “I wouldn’t mind being the one to dismember him.”

Deena chimed in. “I think we can make him pay an even bigger price for his crimes.”

“Even worse than cutting off his hand? Even in organized crime they only cut off a pinkie,” Loreena said.

“Unless you’re out of pinkies and then maybe they do your hand,” Sakura suggested.

“There’s far worse than losing a hand,” Deena said. She finished her drink in one gulp.

“Oh?” Loreena asked. “What do you have in mind?”

“I’m a witch,” Deena blurted. She waited for a reaction like “really?” “get out,” or “you’re lying,” but instead Loreena, Sakura, and Chenoa reached for a chicken wing simultaneously, their hands colliding in a blur of barbecue sauce. “I’ll curse him.”

“Sorry.”

“Go ahead.”

“After you.”

Sakura, Chenoa, and Loreena took their turns retrieving a chicken wing. As they ate, Deena asked, “Why does nobody look incredulous? I’m a witch. As in, I can cast spells and plan to cast a doozie on Samson. Watch.”

Deena unsnapped her bag and retrieved a silver wand topped with a joker’s head. After rummaging around her bag for another thirty seconds, she pulled out a small, purple, velvet bag with a pentagram embossed on the side. She sprinkled a pinch of turquoise dust from the bag on the remaining chicken wings.

Deena paused for a moment, waiting for one of her friends to object to her adulterating and ruining their snack. Nobody said a word. Loreena raised an eyebrow and Sakura seemed to open her eyes slightly wider but her friends just continued eating. When you’re hungry, you’re hungry, Deena thought. But this will get their attention. She waved her wand over the wings and said,

“Birds of the night,

birds to my right,

it’s time to take flight.

“Before you were just a wing

Now I turn you into a real thing.”

A popping sound came from the basket, which vibrated as if it were atop a washing machine in the spin cycle. The three remaining wings changed color, from burnt red to yellow, before transforming into chicks. They popped their heads up, peeped, jumped out of the basket and off the table, and scurried across the bar floor.

Deena’s friends continued to wear expressions of nonchalance. Chenoa licked the sauce off her lips and Loreena nibbled on her martini’s olive.

Deena cleared her throat. “Girlfriends, did you not see me just transform chicken wings into baby chickens? I’m a witch. You should be surprised and astounded, and especially happy because I’m going to cast a spell on evil Samsom.”

Loreena wiped her fingers with the napkin before clasping Deena’s hand. “Deena. That’s cool you’re a witch. I’m a goddess, a direct descendant of Cernunnos, the horned goddess of the woods. She was awesome in 750 A.D., and I’m pretty awesome, too.” Loreena tucked her chin into her chest. Two golden ram-like horns grew from her head. She returned her gaze to Deena and the horns withdrew into her skull.

“No kidding?” Sakura said. “I’m Onmyōdō, a sorceress. I can summon dark, terrifying monsters from the beyond.” Sakura raised her arm and twirled her hand as she spoke in rapid fire Japanese. Silver and gold lights like tiny fireflies sparked between her fingers and an apparition with a dragon’s head took form above them.

Chenoa gently pressed Sakura’s hand back toward the table. “Maybe the pub’s not the best place to unleash demons.”

Sakura nodded. “Sorry.” She slid her hands into her pockets.

“It’s okay.” Chenoa tapped her glass. “I’m a mystic. I chat with the dead and sometimes raise them. If I’m really angry with someone I can send that person into the underworld, a one-way ticket. There was this guy on the Subway who — ” She pressed her lips together. “Nevermind. Let’s just say that if he didn’t believe in ch’į́įdiitah hodook’ before, he has for the past four years.”

“Hmm,” Deena said. “I guess we didn’t know each other as well as we thought. What a coincidence that four friends have supernatural powers.” She smiled wryly. “What do we do now?”

“Now we combine our powers and cast a joint-spell on Samson,” Loreena suggested. She strummed the table with her fingers.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Sakura asked.

“Dangerous for whom?” Deena asked.

“For Samson,” Chenoa said, “a joint spell would have unpredictable, terrifying consequences for him. Putting a stop on a combined witch, sorceress, goddess, and mystic curse would be nigh impossible. Once it begins, the curse will take on a life of its own. It would be like trying to stop a train with busted brakes that’s barreling down a mountain. Are you willing to take that chance?”

“He earned it,” Sakura said.

“Triple that,” Deena said. “I’m thinking of a box.”

“Ooo. A box. Lots of potential there,” Loreena added. “Nothing good happens in a box.”
['Bill Adler']
['Magical Realism', 'Short Story', 'Fantasy', 'Fiction', 'Women']