During the next few days, my fingers docilely tapped the grimed keys and my head bobbed at whatever ridiculous comment Brenda had. When she questioned whether Canada geese had eyelids, I quelled an urge to guffaw my soda all over her pastel blouse and instead offered to find pictures of birds, with eyelids, somewhere on the Internet. An hour passed and swirled sunwise down the toilet, never to be returned. Frustration gritted in the crevasses of my molars when I realized that, in every goddamn picture of every goddamned species, birds have their eyes wide open, as if they've downed three straight shots of Turkish coffee. Granted, by human standards they live their lives on fast-forward, hurling themselves forward in the breeze and sleeping on telephone lines. But this did not suit my holy purpose: to sate a madwoman.

And so, I availed myself of what seemed to be the last remaining option: calling the birds to my hand with magick, bringing one inside the newsroom to blink before Brenda. My feet dragged outside to the day, overcast as a blank white sheet waiting for the dab of a pen. The green of the boxwoods rustled, waiting. I wasn't even sure if what I proposed to do was possible, or well-advised; if I succeeded, the bird could easily fly off my hand, starving to death by stacks of yellowing newspapers in a vain attempt to subsist on trashed egg noodles and stale fortune cookies. Granted, the only person I saw do this correctly was the cartoon version of Cinderella, as the small critters of nature picked up needles and ribbon and created a veritable Versacci dress for the beggar-maid. And Gods, if they could do it for one blonde bitch, they could do it for another.

Humming low, my arms stretched, an airplane or a statue. My brain reached out, neurons almost sweating as they pleaded a single word: Come. My half-closed eyes suffused the world in green, the color of the heart, and I wreathed the hue with spectral birds, lining my arms. My eyes drifted open as a catbird darted by, sailing onto the grass. It cocked its head, giving me a definite look in its black bead eyes: That's it. You've completely lost your mind.

Please? I pleaded internally, begging, garlanding the words with images of berries and juicy bugs and whatever else birds like to eat.

No fucking way! It meowed, and then disappeared into the boxwoods as an acrid cloud of smoke wafted from behind me. I turned.

Steve, the copy editor-slash-paginator-slash-sometimes reporter-slash-whoever it is quit this month and he needs to replace, stood with a cigarette in hand, a half grin sliding across his face. The most I saw of him during the workday was his back, as it frequently scurried out the back door for an endless array of smoke breaks, along with the poodle women from advertising. Frankly, one couldn't blame him; anyone who has to simultaneously fill six jobs should have their cancer-sticks state-subsidized. I'm not sure what excuse one could give the poodle women, who seemed to have an endless buffet in the other side of the building, although I do imagine that arm-wrestling snide red-faced storeowners into buying ads would be as pleasant as a dentist's drill.

"Whatcha doing, Jasmine?" he asked.

"Um. Calling the birds."

"Calling the birds?" he repeated with the same smile.

Too bone-weary to lie, I took off my glasses and cleaned them with the fringe of my skirt as I explained the situation. He raised his pale eyebrows.

"Well, if you're a Witch, why don't you just hex her?"

I sighed, and then patiently explained that we weren't the evil Hags of Snow White, handing out apples and brewing hideous potions to take out our saintly rivals. There are rules, I said. Just as it would be unchristian to ask the white-bearded bastard Yahweh to smite your boss with his jeweled scepter, it would be unpagan to require the Goddess to bitch-slap your supervisor. And, like a well-thrown boomerang, it could come back to take you out at the knees if the actions taken were inappropriate. The usual dissertation. Any time the mundanes meet a Witch, they generally have drooling fantasies over needle-studded poppets and death curses, with eyeballs and tongues peeping from a boiling cauldron. Never mind that some of the Witches I know, the ones spoiled and softened by The Celestine Prophecies, chatter about light, love and eating light rays like sushi. You can chase them around the sofa, screaming, "hate! Rage! Anger! Bad thoughts! Bad thoughts!" And they will scream, attempting to ward you off with mudras, loud hokey chants and maybe some cloves of garlic, to avoid the dreaded germs of Bad Thoughts. Trust me. I've done it.

"Nothing against protecting yourself, though," he said, taking a long drag. "I heard about the chink and pollack comment, and the whole thing with Frank. You okay?"

My shoulders heaved and sagged.

"Christ. I'm out here summoning birds, Steve. How okay can I possibly be?"

He punched me lightly in the shoulder.

"Chin up, hon. It'll get better." He paused. "What's Brenda, anyway? Swedish or something?"

"Schelling? I'm pretty sure she's German."

He cracked a bigger grin. "Why not call her a kraut, then?" I giggled and he continued, waving his free arm. "Birds have eyelids, you freaking Nazi! Sig heil!"

"And then I can throw potato pancakes at her or something."

"With sour cream."

"No, no." My finger wagged. "Applesauce. They eat them with applesauce over there. Or I can just dump some beer over her head."

"Nah. That's a waste of beer," he shrugged, and then smiled softly as he ground the butt under his boot heel. "Good to see you smiling again, though."

We drifted back to the refrigerated air and the scent of moldy paper. I deposited a soda on Brenda's desk, and she forgot the affair of the eyelids. But the gears of my mind cranked into motion.

***

At the Planning Board meeting, the gears produced a set of clandestine correspondences, which I had thought lost in the dusty paperbacks of my mother. I've had little use for spellwork, save for love spells that went awry and the occasional beauty working, rose petals and tumbled rose quartz and pink ink, oh my. Spellwork, oddly enough, often falls to the new Witch, eager to experiment with her spice cabinet and her new gothy wardrobe. As a teen, I browsed my mother's garden, plucking leaves and flowers to solve whatever adolescent travesty I was enmeshed in. But as my birth faded further and further from my rearview, diminishing in size, the spells mattered little; worshiping the Gods and weaving myself into life's tapestry with the silver cord at my heel seemed much more Witchy.

"The Gods help those who help themselves," my mother would admonish in a steel-edged voice, usually when Jill was hitting her up for a twenty or a ride to a club. The phrase was usually followed by a modifier: "Why can't you be more like your sister Jasmine?"

One of the board members, a jockey-sized woman with unflattering spiked hair in Spanish Girl Red, rose from the dais and took a quick trip outside, with a detour around half the pews. My eyes followed, entranced by the horror of the spectacle, akin to dismembered limbs thrusting outward from a 3-D flick. Her tight low-ride pants barely gripped her ass, having expended much of their cloth and energy forming scores of unused pockets. A tight white sweater left a beige gut, slashed with the dark horizontal hollow of belly button, rippling as she walked. I glanced back to the dais; the gray-faced officials suddenly seemed interested in unfolding the blue and white plat sheets. The applicant's engineer, a short greasy fellow with a thick gold ring, half-hid a smirk.

They argued passive-aggressively about lot lines as the woman's gut rippled back to its rightful place on the dais. Still more map-perusal and rustling. My eyes drifted back down to my blue-scrawled list. My pen crunched in my mouth.

Protection. Salt. My mind flitted to the roadside trees; no, best to leave that at home. Large baggie. Black, to dispel negativity. Crunch, crunch. What else? Black pepper. Mucho pepper. Sage: always a good one, protective, dispelling negativity. Bent nails or mirror shards; nails somewhere in basement. Unbent will serve. Fire. Crunch, crunch. And finally: Gods? Hecate, of course. Maybe Hades.

The drone went on. The applicant's attorney opened his mouth and unraveled his long legs, as my hand sprang back into official action. But the wheels spun, and I thought of golden-eyed Medea, Hecate's greatest priestess. As a child, I flipped through the multicolored pages of a book on mythology and saw the golden-haired Witch, the daughter of the sun, with her palm outward in a warding gesture as she protected her beloved hero, the famed Golden Fleece at her feet. As a children's book, it merely mentioned that she was a priestess to the Goddess of Witches, and then detailed her aid to Jason, but in a tone of condemnation. My child-lips pulled into a frown. Why?

And then, the realization: Jason had left his talented gold-eyed spouse for a flesh slab of nubile meat. Rage danced in those golden eyes, and she sent the woman a poisoned gift � what Oprah-watching woman wouldn't? Jason, dejected, sat beneath his ship's prow until Hera, the Great Mother, dropped a slab of olive wood on his head, knocking him into oblivion and out of the realm of heroes. (Hera is, after all, the Lady of faithfulness.) And Medea? Driving an elegant dragon-drawn chariot, she slipped behind the thunderheads. And she landed, leaving long wheel-ruts in the high grasses and long plains. The black-haired people lifted her into a gold throne; she took a lover from among them, and they took her name as their own. And the daughter of the sun, Hecate's greatest adept, left that wild land with its gnarled trees and thick sand to her son, to ride in that chariot once again, deathless and darting among the realms with her beloved, Hecate.

Oh, this is the story they never tell you, those white-light crystal-wearers who flinch at the very name of Dark Thoughts.

The residents lined up at the microphone, lamenting the cottage-style boutiques and their proposed fair, gazebo and band shell aside. The clock ticked, nearing eleven. The papers rustled and my chewed pen, propelled by a cramped wrist, flew across the leaf green pages.

***

The witching hour nigh, my heels clicked through the produce aisle, as my hand grabbed an apple. Not a pomegranate, but it would suffice. Plastic baggies from the boring aisle stacked with boxes of trash bags, and loose spices from the ethnic food selection. Some cranberry juice, wine red. The only fellow-travelers were several punked-up teens sporting black eye circles, and a stock boy that was nearly overpowered by a mountain of milk cartons.

At home, music sounded softly in the parlor. I stuck my head in the door. Jill lounged, half-off the sofa, with Wuthering Heights in her hand. Phish twanged from the stereo.

"Hey," I said. "James has gone to work, right?"

"Yeah," she yawned.

"Hey, if you hear some, um, weird noises from my bedroom, ignore it. I have to do a spell."

She cracked a weary midnight grin. "Not on me, I hope."

"Nope. Just some work bullshit. I'll tell you later."

The bells on my door handle jangled as I closed it, leaving it slightly ajar. The sharp scent of sulphur punctuated my intentions as I lit the main alter candle, before slipping off my work clothes and standing, sunburnt and bare, before the dusty mirror. The heat beaded sweat on my brow and under my breasts, as a silver pentacle shone in the candlelight. Clouds of scented smoke spiraling to the ceiling, I draw the invisible barrier with the simple wrapped-steel dagger and called the elements. Last, I called Hecate, the Old Woman, Daughter of Night, seeing her shrouded in a black hood, bearing a torch. And Hades, solemn and bearded, crowned with platinum and gems, a feared but not unfriendly face in his eerie pillared hall.

"Let all that hurt me blow away like the wind; let it blow swift and far; let it be burnt by the fire," I sang, the notes lilting and experimental. Hands slicked with oil rubbed down the black candle, before wiping the gleaming slime onto bare thighs. With the sound of hourglass sands, the black pepper and the sage whispered into the baggie, doused with a touch of cayenne. In went bent finishing nails, fished from the backs of pictures.

And Frank's folded hands floated in the air, Brenda's raging pink face and her hand full of chocolate-covered espresso beans. Disconnected, my distant third-person face mottled and tear-rimed, framed by a pale yellow bathroom stall. Cut-backs. Joe and the editors waltzing out the door. The mountain of paperwork, and darting on assignments. My fingers clenched before I tried to call the birds, desperate in an upside-down world where birds don't have eyelids and news is cobbled in secret by the dwellers in glass houses. Shameless nepotism, dancing Salome with the severed heads of journalists gracing silver platters. Rachel's tear-filled eyes. Teamwork, motherfucking teamwork in the guise of a fist and a pink slip. The short kid, the corporate nephew with his black hair and the tall stocky German, a coffee-swigging football player of a woman. And all those who could laugh at the pain of a grieving mother and the fate of a drowned child, and a greasy apartment complex owner about to lose his brick building in the name of progress, a colorblock-wearing deli-owner. Smirking attorneys.

"Let all that hurts me blow away like the wind." My voice rose, a shout suffused with red, with burning cayenne in the eyes, with the nails I wanted to drive in the heart of the corporate whores. "Let it blow swift and far." The words tumbled, avalanche boulders from under a thick sheet of snow. Killing the sacredness of words, of tears, the sacredness sacrificed to bloodline and bottom line, to the cold scalpel of numbers and corporate decisions. "Let it be burnt by fire!" And my hands, palms outward, waved over the candle, sending the lava of rage into the bag of herbs, the candle's flame, flowing red and thick, burning mansions in its path and gutting the estates of the guilty. My mind was lost in the glow of flame, which became Hecate's torch, and the river of fire that crossed the underworld, the hidden furnace at the earth's center.

Sweat-grimed, my body dropped to the carpet, attracting cat hair like a wet magnet. But the work was not done. Raw-throated and in silence, I opened the circle, threw on some grubbies and clambered in my car, back to the office. The moon, full save for a narrow slice, lit the vast dark sea of the parking lot, now empty of cars in the 2 a.m. silence. Trucks roared and sputtered down a nearby highway, as crickets rubbed their legs in a frictional orchestra. In a swift circle around the building, I left a sprinkling of spices, twisting the nails into the damp earth at the building's four corners. A car rounded the bend, and I froze in the shadows, wide-eyed as deer before a hunter's spotlight. The noise faded with distance, and I continued, padding softly in my sockless sneakers.

My unseen footsteps overlapped, and I bowed to the moon, the Old Woman's gnarled white face. Yes, the wrong face, but the need creates the magick. My hair dangled in front of my eyes, and then I briefly lifted my palms to her.

"Thank you, Hecate of the crossroads. Bring me justice." I stamped my feet and leaned, touching forehead to the crumbled pavement. "Thank you, Hades, invisible one. Bring me justice."

Shadowy, my car drifted outward. The roads to home seemed aimless, spun of moon-silver, filled with dancing ions, that light feeling that precedes the boom and crack of the lightning. A stillness had roused, loosing some unseen force that prowled panther behind the shrubs. But it wasn't looking for me. In fact, I felt this strange silken force flutter happily and move on, pressed to the shadows, raising an unseen talon in greeting. It all felt very strange.

That's because you're all too accustomed to being the victim, a sultry voice whispered in trance, tinkling like bells. It sounded like the Old Woman's young voice, but shifted somewhat. A sense of twining serpentine dragons slinking in the shadows under the clematis, happily searching and hissing. Yes, loosed from her chariot. Who did you think I was, dearest? And where? Heard unheard, the tinkling laugh faded, diving beneath the roadside scrub, its force pooling like moonlight.

***