The Book of Magic: A collection of stories by various authors

“And Ms. Mego?”

“She was young for a while. And she had me driving her to the mall, and once I had to sit outside Jazz Bones and wait for, like, two hours, until she came back with some dude. And he thought it was just awesome that she had a driver, and I had to take them to his place, and spent half the night sitting out in the car.”

I gave him a look.

“I got to! One complaint from her and I’m doing jail time, Celtsie! But she’s getting old and powdery again. Only garage sale season is over, so I don’t know where she’ll get her food. And I think it’s really bad when she eats those old toys. Like she’s eating more than just toys, you know? And you’re the only person I know who might know how to fix it. Fix her.” He flung himself back in his chair. He took a pack of Camel filters from his shirt pocket and shook one out.

“You got a whole pack of cigarettes out of the drawer!”

He halted, cigarette and lighter poised. “Sorry. I didn’t think to imagine just one cigarette in there.”

I squeezed my head between my hands. He’d depleted the junk drawer magic for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit the cigarette, drew in smoke, and blew it up toward my ceiling. “So. What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” I said flatly.

“But you’ll think of something? Soon?”

“I’ll try. For now, get out. I get something, I’ll call you. You’d better have some minutes on that phone.”

“I got no money!”

“Fine.” I went to the cookie jar and tipped it. The emergency twenty was still taped to the bottom. That was a surprise. When I saw the cigarette, I’d just assumed he’d already taken it. I slapped it onto the table. “Go buy minutes. Right now. Drugstore is only three blocks from here. Buy minutes and don’t use them. They’re mine.”

“But what if someone calls me or—”

“Don’t answer. Out, Farky. I’m doing this for Selma, not you.”

“That hurts, Celtsie. I’m going. I know I deserve it. But that hurts.”

“I meant it to,” I told him coldly.

I followed him out to the shop front and watched him leave. The rain had calmed. He wrapped his arms around himself and hurried away. I wanted to go see Selma right away, to be sure his tale wasn’t a bullshit one. But as life always does, or perhaps it was contrary magic, I suddenly had a stream of customers. A dachshund, two ferrets, an old gray cat, and a pair of sleek black cats were all occupying the boarding cages in my shop before I finally got a break. I hung up the “Back Soon” sign, locked the glass door, and pulled my grate down over it for good measure. Farky was pretty good at picking locks.

I turned up the collar on my windbreaker and jogged the six blocks to Expensive Coffee. It was busy, and Selma was behind the counter, simultaneously taking orders and making coffees with the smooth expertise of years. The other barista reminded me of a maddened squirrel as he dashed about behind the counter, doing little more than getting in her way. Selma’s focus was on the customer in front of her. I took my place in line. I waited for her to notice me. She didn’t, even though her smile slid over me twice as she scanned the waiting queue for signs of impatience. Then it was my turn.

“I’d like a grande iced sugar-free latte. With soy milk. And a plain bagel.”

“Sure thing!” Her fingers danced over the register. “Anything else?”

“Selma,” I said.

She looked up at me. “Oh. Celtsie. Nice to see you. Anything else?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“That’ll be $7.85.”

I reached into my pocket. “Damn! Left my wallet at the shop. Back soon.”

“Okay. Next, please.”

I walked away, feeling queasy. My old friend. Could she possibly not remember that soy milk makes me throw up, as in all over the front seat of her mom’s car when I was seventeen? And that I hate bagels? And did she not remember that artificial sweeteners give us both terrible headaches? Any one of those I might have slid past her on a busy day. But not all of them. Not unless some precious part of her had gone missing.

I walked back to the shop, scanning the sidewalk as I went. I found a scarred penny in the gutter. And a little girl’s blue butterfly barrette, rather grubby. I unlocked and went in. All was as I’d left it. I went through to the kitchen, rubbing the scar on my neck as I went. Cold weather makes it pull sometimes. I opened the junk drawer and tossed in the barrette and the penny. I stirred it hopefully, not even sure of what I should ask it to produce. Sometimes it gives me hints. But only when it’s charged. I saw a ticket stub, a leftover piece of candle from my jack-o-lantern, a sparkly red slipper charm on a keychain, a ruler, a dried up orange marker, a marble darning egg, three hairpins … just the stuff the junk drawer seemed to produce for its own amusement. I shut it.

The rest of the afternoon passed slowly. Cooper came down to sit beside the till. The dachshund barked at him until Cooper growled back. One of the black cats was crying pathetically. I passed out sardines to all and sundry, and that calmed the shop for a time. I wondered how you got rid of a toy-eater. And if she was only choosing the most precious toys, how did she know what they were? How had she become a toy-eater? Was she really dangerous to people, or had something else happened to Selma? Had anything happened to Selma, or were we just growing apart through the years? I should have asked Selma if she’d sold her cards. Farky was such a bullshitter. And a crackhead. And he’d burned up the charge I’d built up on the junk drawer for a cigarette. Toys. Precious things. Upstairs, in the top of my closet, in a cardboard box, were two ancient stuffed animals. Terry and Boomer. What would happen to me if the toy-eater ate them?

I cheated on closing time by fifteen minutes. Once the grilles were down, I opened all the cages. “Crates,” people called them, as if dogs and cats and ferrets were things to be stored when not in use. Cooper was asleep beside my register. I nudged him awake. “Take them upstairs, Coop,” I told him, and he did. He dropped to the floor with a solid, twenty-eight-pound thud, looked at our tenants, and led them to the pet hatch in the door that went upstairs. I watched the ferrets go, lippity, lippity, after the cats, and the dachshund last of all. The dachshund high-centered for a moment on the pet hatch, teetered there, and then tipped in.

I finished closing up, scooped some litter, refreshed water bowls, and then followed them. I climbed the stairs slowly. The old runner was threadbare in the middle, but the edges of it were still rich red. I went past the locked door on the second floor that led to what I thought of as my legacy rooms. Behind that door, a Wurlitzer jukebox crouched in one corner, gleaming and waiting for a quarter. There were two moose heads, mounted as if battling each other, and some Kipling first editions. Ancient toys, and prized LPs, and a hundred other marvelous things that perhaps no one would ever value as highly as they had. Precious things. A feast for a toy-eater? Maybe.

I climbed the next flight of stairs and pushed the door to my apartment open. It’s a big apartment. Three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bath with a good-size tub, and a library. I don’t know why anyone has a living room when they could have a library instead. There’s a beat-up squashy couch in the library, and two overstuffed chairs, frayed where Cooper and other cats have cleaned their claws on them. There’s an old nineteen-inch Sylvania television set in a console. There’s a turntable in the compartment next to it. It all works. Why replace stuff that works? I put some of last night’s chicken chow mein in the microwave to reheat and shook some crispy noodles onto a plate. Then I went into my bedroom and opened the closet.

In a big shoebox from some winter boots were Terry and Boomer. I took them out and looked at them. Terry had been a stuffed toy terrier. Now he was a rather lumpy bag of stuffing. Only the felt backing for his button eyes remained. The stiffener for his ears had long since given up its stiffness. Boomer had stripes. That was about the only clue that he had been a tiger. He had two stiff whiskers left, and his tail was limp. Yet I found myself handling their battered fabric bodies as if they were old and beloved pets. I settled them again in their shoebox and layered the tissue paper over them. “Good night,” I told them, as I always had when they’d been on my childhood bed. The same single bed I sat on now. Their bodies had absorbed my junior high tears over boys who passed me by, and my high school tears over failed tests. They’d gone off to college with me and adorned my dormitory bed. And come home again when I returned to Tacoma.

I put the lid on the box. Why didn’t I throw them away? What were they, really, beyond some threadbare fabric sewn around cheap stuffing? The answer seemed both silly and simple. They were Terry and Boomer. My friends. Imbued with the life of a thousand play-pretend games. My friends when it seemed no one else cared.

I tried to imagine Ms. Mego eating them. Eating my hugs after nightmares, tears after Steve broke up with me on the school bus in front of everyone. Teeth ripping frayed fabric, chewing old stuffing.

Okay. I had to stop the toy-eater. How?

It seemed obvious. She fed on beloved toys and grew younger. What if she ate something that had been hated?

Did anyone keep a toy they hated?

I thought of toys I’d hated. Scary ones. A chimp doll the size of a two-year-old, with rubbery hands that felt like he was holding on to me. A fashion model doll with slutty eyes and the flat mouth of an axe murderer. Oh. That clown doll with the big mouth with red lips and flat black eyes. What had become of them? Two donated to Goodwill. One I ditched at a bus stop.

The bad part of running a business is that people expect you to be there during business hours. Especially if they want to pick up their pet. I sat in my shop the next day, calling secondhand stores, asking if they had chimp or clown dolls in stock. I spent a lot of time on hold. Then I started on the quasi antiques stores and the “collector’s stores.” No chimps or clowns, but two offered to show me “vintage” dolls. And they were both open after my regular closing hour.

Both were outside the Wedge, the section of Tacoma I live in. No bus service from the Wedge to where they are. I have an old Celebrity station wagon for the rare occasions when I need wheels. I’ve customized it to my needs over the years. Like my TV, it does everything I need it to do, and I see no point in replacing it. It got me to Marcella’s Vintage. Her dolls were immaculately dressed, in boxes and completely unremarkable. At Raymond’s Old Toys, I had better luck. I walked into a cluttered shop that smelled vaguely like cheap cigars and Pledge furniture wax. The clerk, who was possibly Raymond, waved me toward some glass cases in the back and went back to reading an old issue of Tiger Beat.

Pay dirt! There were three glass cases, containing appalling dolls. Most were in mediocre condition. A Barbie sneered at me, her model’s mouth flat. A Cabbage Patch doll slouched in coveralls. There was a brightly painted marionette of a Mexican bandit with bandoliers on his chest and thick six-guns in each hand and a maniacal look on his face. But none of those were the one that gave me the chill.

There was a baby doll, eyes an improbable staring blue. Mouth ajar, two tiny teeth showing. Chubby hands open and reaching. It was dressed in a pale pink garment that reminded me of a hospital gown. It looked like a little succubus. It had the sort of scuffs on its face and pink plastic hands that told me it had been stuffed into a toy box under the Tonka trucks and plastic McDonald’s Happy Meal horrors. Yes, horrors. Has anyone ever wanted a plastic Hamburglar to play with?

I pried the owner free of his cigarette and coffee to unlock the case and departed the store with the succubus in a brown paper sack. I phoned Farky before I started the car. “I think I’ve got what you need. Come get it.” I didn’t give him time to ask any questions.

When he arrived at my shop, I unlocked the glass door and slid the grille up and let him in. He came in shaking off rain and then clasping his hands in front of him to still a shaking that had nothing to do with weather.

“Where’s your coat?” I asked him.

“Sold it to the vintage store,” he said brusquely and then said, “What do you have for me?”

There are times when you can help someone and times when there’s nothing you can do. I tilted my head toward the paper bag on the table. “It’s in there. A doll I’m pretty sure was hated and feared. If you can find a way to get her to eat it, it may undo her.”

“Yeah. Like an opposite thing.” His wet sneakers left tracks on my clean floor as he walked back into the utility room. He picked up the bag without looking inside. He glanced at me and then away. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” I wiped my hands down the front of my jeans, but guilt doesn’t come off even when you do that. I wanted to offer him food, money, coffee, but didn’t. He left, bag in hand, and as I let him out the door, the pelting rain on the brown paper sack made a hollow drumming.

So. That was that. I locked up again, doused all my lights except for my custom-made neon in the window, and headed up the worn steps. I paused on the landing and even found the key on my ring, but decided tonight was not a night for me to look at my treasures and think warm thoughts of the past. Instead I went to my apartment, microwaved a chicken pot pie, and ate it on the couch with all my tenants attentively watching me. When I went to bed, Cooper came and purred on the pillow by my head. I closed my eyes and wondered how Farky would deliver the toxic doll to the toy-eater. I wondered if he’d show up to drive her, or if he’d tumble back into using. I wondered if he’d go to jail and what would happen to him there. I pretended that none of it was my concern.

At six-thirty a.m., I let myself stop pretending to sleep and got up. In my pajamas, I went down to my shuttered shop. My clientele followed me down the stairs and grudgingly got back into their pens. I don’t know how Cooper conveys to them what they’re to do. I just know that since he was abandoned with me, my life is a lot easier. I dished out the morning chow and water, made sure their cuddle blankets were clean and fresh. I went back upstairs, got dressed, and came down and opened my shop.

It wasn’t raining. Business was slow. I fed, I scooped poop, I surfed the Internet. I sold a leash. I took in a recently adopted black kitten. Blackie would stay with me for a month. Why would anyone adopt a kitten right before going on vacation for a month? I will never understand people.

I put my hand on the junk drawer. Barely humming. I went upstairs and scoured my desk for clutter. I came back down and fed the drawer a rubber band, an AA battery, a bent paper clip, a business card from a cleaning service, a refrigerator magnet, and three loose coins. The junk drawer doesn’t really care about the value of what’s dropped in there; it’s the idea of being given things.

At noon, I hung up my “Back Soon” sign and headed down to Expensive Coffee. Selma was behind the counter. I ordered a vanilla latte. “What name you want on that?” she asked me.

“Selma, it’s me. Celtsie.”

She looked up from her register, and our eyes met. She gave me a tired smile. “Of course it is. Sorry.” She took my money and gave me my change.

I sat down at a table near the window. When they called for Kelsey, I went and got my drink. Yes. That was what she’d written on the cup. As I took it, one of the other clerks bumped into the counter and spilled a slop of milk on to the floor. Selma turned on her. “Clean it up. And pay attention. Are you stoned, or just stupid?”

The girl looked at Selma with wide brown eyes. I saw her pinch her lips tight shut, mutter a “sorry,” and stoop to clean up the spill. I left. No. That wasn’t the Selma I’d known. I wondered if killing the toy-eater would bring her back.

At my shop, I checked the pickup dates and times for my clientele. I left a message on Farky’s cellphone. Then I flipped the sign to “Back Soon,” leashed up the dachshund, gathered my poop sacks, and headed out for a walk in Wrongs Park.