Mmmmmrgh. The ass-crack of dawn, the rosy cheeks of Eos mooned me from the window blinds. The gray lingered over the pavement outside, the sun not quite ready to make an appearance. And then the phone screeched and screamed, a thousand-throated peacock situated next to my ear. Groggily, I reached over and nabbed the receiver, moaning something that vaguely sounded like a greeting.

"Jasmine, are you still sleeping? It's nearly eight," said a crisp, cheery voice shot through with the flames of a Leo ascendant.

"Hi mom," I said, palming the morning crumbs out of my eyes as I fished for my glasses. "Come on, you know I'm not a morning person."

"Well, I wanted to call before we went out. Bob's hosting the blot tonight, so we need to go to town and get some mead." A brief, pointed pause. "Well, you could call me once in a while, you know."

"I know, I know." My feet tenderly searched for the carpet, recoiling at the harsh touch. "I've just been swamped at work. There was this giraffe..."

"A giraffe?"

"A giraffe. It was wandering around this neighborhood. You know, one of those with the boxy condo-homes that all look the same. It escaped from some estate. The heir had starved it or something."

"The air?" she repeated. "How can you be starved by air?"

"Heir, with an h. The guy or gal who inherited the estate." I paused, recalling the initial moments of our conversation. "Where the hell do you find mead in Georgia?"

"There's this lovely store with home-brewed beer and wine down near Savannah. I'm telling you, Jasmine, you've got to come down here. There's a Pagan community. You just have to know where to look."

"Didn't one of your circlemates get a bullet through the window?"

"Well, that's just a few rednecks. But you're looking for grad schools again. Why don't you look down here? There's newspapers down here, too."

"There's newspapers in Guam," I said, then shifted the topic. "What god are you honoring during the blot?"

She pulled away from her phone to holler the question across the kitchen. An answer came rebounding back across the tiles.

"Bragi, the god of poetry," she reported. "He's the husband of Idun, the one with the magic apples." Her voice edged into a whisper. "I'm not sure I can really get into this sumble thing, you know? It's not the same as raising energy. And I'm a Celtic girl myself."

"Mom, we're Polish."

"Well," she verbally shrugged. "The Celts used to live in Eastern Europe before they came west. Besides, you work with the Greek gods and you're no more Greek than I am, unless your father wasn't telling me something." She coughed, then resumed. "So, anything new with you?"

"Jill's moved back in."

A heavy silence fell, then passed.

"What now?"

"Oh, she says Ira beats her or something. My guess is that she probably got in trouble with him for drugs again because I didn't see any bruises. Oh, and she's lost her job, so I don't think she can help out with rent. I don't know, maybe something did happen. But it's hard to trust her, you know?"

"What about Joey?"

"She didn't bring him."

A pause, and then decisive, clipped words.

"Well, give your sister a place to stay � for now. But don't let her take advantage of you, you hear? You've got a good heart, Jas, and I know you try to do the right thing all the time. But if it looks like she's doing anything illegal," she drew out the word, "let me know right away. Bob has title to that property, and we could get charged with maintaining a nuisance if something goes wrong."

My mind flitted to the burbling bong of the other night, but I bit my tongue-tip. First time's a freebie, folks. Besides, I needed a place to stay as well, on my paltry salary; if Bob evicted all of us, I'd have to hustle for cash, even to pay for a studio. Rents in this county have been known to cost would-be apartment dwellers a limb; houses are rumored to go at least for the firstborn, if not the next two progeny produced.

"By the way, is she home?"

"Let me check."

I pushed my way through the door, with Squashblossom nudging my bare unshaven legs, crying for food. And there she was, oddly enough, sitting with a cup of java in one hand and a copy of High Times in the other. She glanced up and raised one dark eyebrow.

"It's mom," I said. She immediately responded by flailing her hands, as if a refrigerator was about to crush her to a pulp. I grabbed one good-sized wrist and thrust the cordless unit into it.

"No, you're going to talk to her. You're staying in her husband's house."

She let out a long, lugubrious wind as I broke out the can opener and a small can of tuna. Squashblossom began to plead in an earnest soprano, clawing at the cabinets. Focusing my eyes on the recalcitrant can opener and my strained wrist tendons, I pretended not to listen to the familial hoe-down occurring over leagues of copper wire, strung from a forest of telephone poles that stretched from here to there. Jill escaped into the parlor to evade the satellite dish of my waiting ears, but to no avail: I have journalist ears, the virtual Watergate-busters of all appendages.

"Yeah, things got bad. He's so controlling all the time." A pause. "Yeah, he did." Another lapse, and then a rising tone: "I can't believe you asked me that! What do you want me to do? Pee in a goddamned cup? Strip off my clothes so you can see marks? What?"

The second stretched, full of pondering. "His mother has Joey. She called DYFS on me, saying that I was unfit. . . . I don't know. I'm not the kind of woman they want in the family. They hated me from the get-go, wanted him to marry some rich doctor or something. They make fun of you and Jas, call you a bunch of devil-worshipers, and they don't want you guys to see him, ever. . . . Yeah, I'm going to try to get him back, once I get a job and can pay for a lawyer. But I'm not optimistic, you know? He's a lawyer and he has money. He's always kept it separate, with the pre-nup and all."

Some chatter, a few monosyllables and murmurs emerged from Jill.

"How can you say that?" she countered sharply. "Move to Georgia? What's there in Georgia? A bunch of hicks? How could I forget about my son." The last question flatlined as a statement. "Yeah, well, I'll see how it goes."

"No, I'm not going to live off Jasmine. I plan on looking for a job. Okay, I'll get her."

Her feet slapped against the linoleum, and she slammed the phone into my hand as if it was the business end of a hatchet. Mouthing "thanks a lot," she grabbed the coffee and stalked off, as droplets of liquid caffeine splashed on the floor. Sighing, I bent and wiped it up with a crusty plaid towel.

"Hi mom."

"Well, I got out of her pretty much what you told me. I bet there's more to the story," she concluded crisply. "Maybe I'll get Joan to do a reading for me. She's good with crises. But once she gets a job, make sure she takes care of her part of the bills and the rent; I don't care if she's just sleeping on the couch or in James's room. And make sure she helps out around the place. I don't want you doing all the work."

"Well, I haven't had much luck with James," I said, then relayed the dishes story, and the floorwashing incident. She paused.

"I'll talk to your aunt Jessica. She'll set him straight. Bob did a lot for her last time he was up there. But you just tough it out for now; I'm sure it will get better."

"Okay."

"Do you have your Lammas gathering today?"

"Yep. It's actually an annual picnic for all the Pagan groups in the area, as well as the usual celebration. I'm calling East in the ritual."

"Good. Making anything?"

"Yep. Vegetable biryani. And I volunteered to help out at the children's table during part of the day."

"Oh, that sounds nice. You have fun. And call me during the week to tell me how it was."

"Have fun at the blot."

"Love you," she said.

"Love you," I returned, and then pressed the off button with my thumb before opening the kitchen window for Squashblossom. He leapt onto the sill, staring out at the tomato plants.

"Cat TV is now on," I offered in a silly voice as I trudged over to Mr. Coffee and poured his black bile into my dirty mug. Sneezing from the unseen horde of marauding pollen, I grabbed for the Indian cookbook and began scouring the cabinets for basmati.

***

In mud-encrusted clogs, I crouched in the garden as morning yawned and edged into oven-like heat. My gloved, muddy fingers yanked the green club of a five-pound zucchini, until it was safely in my palm. Green beans were stacked in the wooden carry-all Bob had made me, along with the neon-stalked fans of chard and ridiculously ripe tomatoes that seemed ready to bounce down the driveway and assault Manhattan, teeth-bared. My face brushed the basil as I plucked white flowers from its top, and then sliced some leaves with my scissors, adding them to the makeshift cornucopia. With a muddy hand, I lifted my ugly denim fishing hat and wiped rivulets of salt from my forehead, sending long sunny strands into my eyes. Gingerly, I plucked them out, missing a spiderweb-few.

Bend and lift from the waist: a willow, a nymph, a slender-stalked birch. Light-rays danced goldly on my lashes as I bent again, raking the dew-damp soil with the silver claw. Plucking bindweed, quickweed and purslane, I tossed them onto the driveway, touched with a vague guilt-pang: purslane is edible, and I hate to have anything go to waste. Let the compose gnash it down to constituent nutrients, to better feed the fragile foreigners: the purple phalli of Chinese eggplant, the sexy red peppers and slinky cayennes, the bulbous zucchini.

My fingers plucked an orange-yellow squash blossom, all abundance and opulence in its glow, a sexy specimen of plant genitalia. I placed it on a stone where I kept a holed stone, emblematic of the Mother of Us All, and a few quartz crystals that captured the light in their facets. The wind or the nature spirits had knocked them about, and so I rearranged the crystals to stand at each corner, glinting, with the holey stone in the center. The flower I gently deposited on the left side of the stone. A still-green cayenne went to the right.

My eyes closed, absorbing the warmth, and the yellowing wilt that rides in with August. August, Augusta, the great one. Birds twittered in the oak on the other side of the yard, and I could almost hear the silent wispy swish of a gray squirrel's tail. Tail, tale. Nature is a tale, a story woven and retold each year, a cycle, a myth uttered by an Old Woman at the Samhain fireside, recounting heroes and creations. And for those who feel nothing as they stand there, in that same muddy patch beneath the tomato plants, I pity them. "Worshiping the creation, not the creator," they'd hiss, beating their book of dead pages, dead pulp, a dead tortured man. "Idol-worshiper. Devil."

If my holey-stone and the squash blossom were idols, I'd chose them any day over the Great Cherry Cheesecake in the sky promoted by the high-colored men and their pastel wives, wearing an instrument of torture around their necks as a pendant. My mom took me to churches as a child, even the fundamentalist palace with its floral carpeting and pastel walls, its rows and rows of shining pews. The minister shouted and touched the foreheads of women, who fell back with a screech and writhed on the pastel carpet, as an electric guitar blared badly and a pastel woman sang. Lyrics appeared on an overhead screen, with the magic white ball bouncing along. Except, I suppose, that you cannot say magic. Then, as the white ball imbued with Christ's glory bounced along the words being sung, since there were no books pew-side. The neatly-combed populace supplied their own Bibles.

"Feel how they're raising the energy," my mother, uncharacteristically garbed in a pressed pink skirt and white heels, had whispered into my ear. And I felt it: a buzz and screech and hum, fed into the room by all those open palms and singing voices, directed by the minister's reddened hands. An energy, though wild and forceful, that strangely reflected those sinister sterile pastel walls, and the television screens, the plastic plants along the walls. My guts roiled, and I tugged my mother's hand to leave. Jill lolled, snoring, until I kicked her awake. She groaned and rubbed her eyes, staggering after us as we left.

On the cub outside, I sat, my legs splayed under the trim pleated skirt that barely hid my skinned knees. A Christian woman would have said, "close your legs and act like a lady." My mother only offered me a glass of water that she had filched on the way out, as Jill boredly kicked rocks with her shining white shoes. She had hiked her pleated skirt up as far as it would go, and prim gray-haired ladies crossed themselves as they followed her into the hall as they saw the dragon tattooed on her thigh.

My chin tipped back and I watched a robin flit in a branch above my head, and then let out an airy trill. My pink lips twisted into a grin.

"Please don't take me back there," I told my mother.

She sat down next to me on the curb.

"Well, I wanted to broaden your horizons. Show you what you're missing, what most of your friends at school do," she said, plucking a twig off the ground.

"I don't have any friends and I don't care what they do." My heels drummed the pavement. "People call me a Witch and I like it. Even when they don't mean it nice."

Mom threaded her arm around my shoulder and gave me a hug; I felt her lips brush my hair part.

"Can we go yet?" Jill groused, kicking the curb again.

And so we did. At the diner, the heathen family, in their uncharacteristically pressed and pastel clothing, scarfed down sweet tea and banana pancakes. We laughed too loud, and Jill darted lascivious glances at the waiter with his slicked-back hair. My eyes drifted to the highway outside, and the spring flowers planted in boxes by the door, strewn with cigarettes, the small stones on the sidewalk, a speedwalking woman with an orange labrador on a leash. I sipped my sweet tea and tasted home.

***

He loped to where we sat, under an oak grove in the park, and set up a lawn chair next to mine. My grin glittered infectiously, full of hope. Desire alighted on his black t-shirt. He hugged me hello, his lips lingering on my cheek. A warm oil filled my body as I clunked myself down on my chair, the ass-bone hitting the metal bar, as my stars-and-moon-speckled green sundress half-slipped off a sunburned shoulder.

Silvermoon flounced in a minute later, all flaming hair and an ethereal black dress, layers of gothic gossamer riding the breeze, an unnatural striking black that contrasted darkly against her red hair and the gold-green of August. She unfurled a black beach towel and sat at Christian's feet, only to have him pole her with a white plastic fork; making an irritated high-pitched noise, she shimmied away, moving the towel. And then he turned to me and asked about the ritual.

"It's after the workshops," I replied, thankful that my silver-framed sunglasses hid my lustful little eyes. "Unfortunately, I can't go to the workshops; I have to work at the children's table for a bit. And then I was going to meditate in the labyrinth."

"Oh." His pink lips pursed in a pout. "Well, I'm sure we'll see each other."

"I'm sure," I echoed, and then rose to embrace Olwen and Otter as they came, bags of pagan gear in hand.

Oddly enough, Silvermoon was supposed to share work duty with me at the table, which was smothered with construction paper, outlines of mermaids to color, glittery crayons and acrylic paint. She seemed to have absconded, and so I set to the task. Whipping out a box of crayons, I colored my mermaid, making her African-American. Two little dark-haired girls and a boy or two saw my example, and didn't want to be left out of crayola madness, and so they followed suit. Picture finished, I then grabbed a neon pink plastic egg and then filled it with beads. Shining stickers sealed it shut, and then I began an impromptu jam with myself. Giggling, the girls set about making their own "jamming eggs," although their end result was better than mine.

The lesson? Never stand up in front of desked youth, and rap their knuckles with rulers. To teach, simply do; eager learners will watch, and then follow along. The Pied Piper tooted his merry way along to the cave.

Inevitably, the rugrats broke out the paint and pegged for body art. So, licking the brush tip, I daubed flowers and butterflies onto little sunburned faces, and the occasional Ostara egg. Wisely, I chose not to attempt dragons this time around. And then, a few more rugrats joined the Pied Piping troupe, and we painted away, ending up covered in peeling acrylic. Brittany, a girl of around eight, adeptly painted a purple seven-pointed star on six-year-old Ashley, explaining its magic. I smiled a hidden, proud smile.

Swamp Duck, a big-breasted woman with a Willendorf look, waltzed over with a rubbery grin, and implored me to be part of the children's ritual. "It's about animals," she explained. "We need a chicken when we call the animals. Can you be the chicken?"

"Sure, what the hell." I laughed.

The bronze gong sounded the start of the children's rite. Parents with love-beads and tie-dye shirts helped their youngsters call the animals, as they re-enacted a Native American creation story. "And then Little Bear found the chicken!" Swamp Duck boomed. "And the chicken loved to dance!"

"Na-na-na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na-na-na, na na na na!" I sang, punctuating the Chicken Dance with the usual four claps, wiggling my ass down to the ground and doing the beak-hands. Shrieking, the children joined in, until everyone was nanananaing, wiggling, gobbling and acting like goddamned fools. Mission accomplished. My face flushed hot from the laughter that shook my innards like a gelatin mold.

When I glanced up, I saw Christian standing there, staring with an unfathomable grin that forced me intro sobriety. I turned to hide my face, which was smeared with peeling acrylic. A woman called his name and, when I glanced up, he had gone. I kept the silly grin plastered to my face, but I sullenly fantasized about wedging myself under a slab of granite to fend off the embarrassment of it all. Summoning the spirit of the chicken doesn't entice in quite the same way as lounging on satin sheets in a black lace teddy.

Swallowing the salted wound of my pride, I made my way to the labyrinth, plucking a faux gold coin at the entrance. My mind fixed on the Gods, my sandaled feet tread the twisting path between the whorls of white flour, letting the beat of a nearby drumming workshop carry me into the sacred realms of the Otherworld.

Suffused with the golden light of dream, Celtic Lugh, blond-bearded and spear-bearing, asked why I had difficulty relating to him.

"For men like you can be dangerous," I replied softly. "And you are foreign to me."

He stood in the center of the coiled spirals, with a red-sheened sunburnt face and a bare chest. And he told me of Sacred Kings, and the sacrifice laid on their heads along with the crown woven of the green, and how some men wished the mantle, but not the inevitable sacrifice. Therein lies the problem. For if you life like a king, you must die like one: with the corn, your blood giving life to the wheat. Or in battle, your blood forming a fence that guards your kind. It's the ancient contract. Yes, there's the rutting of the king, the shattering of the hearts of women for pleasure. But the king always dies, the buck caught in the thicket as the hunters ready their stone-tipped spears. Yes, even among the Greeks; this I can understand, even if it is my wont to replace Lugh with lyre-strumming Apollo.

And then I honored the Old Woman as the Reaper as my feet slowly walked the spiral, and children screeched on the swingset behind me. Her face seemed oddly Semitic, with coils of ringleted black hair underneath her black cowl, her hands both bearing torches. And suddenly her face shifted to kind silver-haired Olwen, and then flame-haired Silvermoon, and finally the old woman I have often seen in my dreams with eyes of spring green. She faded back to the woman with coiled Grecian hair. When she wishes, she has the face of fear itself, of darkness. The face of severity, the keen blade untinged by rust. She cuts down the corn, and the God with it. That smirk on her lips made me recoil. And reaching the center, I felt them side by side: the broad, proud king of the corn, the keen-edged smirking scythe that cuts him down. and my hands: to turn him into bread for the people.

As I turned and retraced my steps, I felt the flour walls of the labyrinth rise up, forming the golden fronds of wheat, and even Meso-American corn. Lugh knew nothing of maize, which is what we call corn; corn, to his worshipers, had been wheat. But both maize and wheat are grass, tall golden grass. It formed the labyrinth. And on the return path, I talked with Hecate, the Old One, but I cannot recall what she said, she who is always there, guiding the way.

Emerging, I went on the swings for a while, tensing my long white feet to keep the birkenstocks from flying into a mirroring brown puddle. Christian was nowhere to be seen, and so I went to the center altar to prepare for the ritual.

(to be continued...)