The Mothering Coven Read Free Page A

crockpot!” She rattles the amber-poke against the window frame.
    “You,” she bellows. “Vile Borgia! Away!” We rush to the window.
    “It’s just poor Mr. Henderson,” says Mrs. Borage. Mr. Henderson waves towards the open window.
    “Do the creatures take soup?” shouts Mr. Henderson. He is stamping his boots on the sidewalk, clutching the crockpot. The streetlight above his head winks on.
    “The last bus!” yells Ms. Kidney. “It leaves from the lumberyard at sundown.”
    A kiss for Mrs. Borage.
    “Happy birthday my Scrumpleshine, my darling,” says Ms. Kidney. “I’ll bring you honeybells.” She bangs through the front door.
    “Skip, Ziegenpeter!” bellows Ms. Kidney, and Mr. Henderson goes skipping out of Ms. Kidney’s path. His knees creak. Mr. Henderson is a Przewalski, quite a Przewalski, but his legs are the legs of a cricket, skinny, black, and chirping. Mr. Henderson skips like a buzzard-horse-cricket. It is the saddest skip we’ve ever seen. Agnes documents it for her research. A hyper-color Polaroid.
    “Can I have it!” says Bryce.
    “No,” says Agnes.
    [:]
    Suddenly, the crockpot slips out of Mr. Henderson’s arms and breaks on the sidewalk. The broken pieces fall away from the soup, which is a red cylinder, unmoving. Mr. Henderson stares at the cylinder of soup. He stares at the unnecessary crockpot.
    “Does everything suffer my attention?” asks Mr. Henderson. He can’t bear to look at the brightly lit house, with the warped walls and the sinking roof making curves like the physical universe, and Mrs. Borage waving kindly from the window, so he looks down the street, not toward the cul-de-sac and the abandoned Security Spray Complex, but in the other direction, toward the lights of the lumberyard. He watches the woman run toward the lights, her broad back and high-crowned Russian hat with the earflaps moving up and down like wings. She is shouting something. It sounds like “Heißa hopsasa!”
    “Who is Heißa Hopsasa?” says Mr. Henderson.
    Mr. Henderson is afraid that he will see the woman lift into the air. He is afraid that the wings of the Russian hat will carry her up, up, and away, high above the treated planks piled in the lumberyard, and she will go flying through the unmonitored airspace of the town. Did the Russians send her?
    Mr. Henderson remembers the days of espionage, the little plane circling the pink and gold striped domes of St. Basil’s Ca thedral. Basil the Blessed. Basil Fool-for-Christ.
    Mr. Henderson forgets how Ivan the Terrible blinded the architects, how they never erected another dome in Moscow. Poor Postnik! Poor Barma! That happened before the days of espionage, in the days of feudal pattern warfare.
    Mr. Henderson has been losing his vision slowly, a little bit lost to each pot, not one of them fearsome in their beauty.

X
     
    Bryce turns the keys in the cockatoos and the music starts again. Does everyone know the words?
     
Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja,
stets lustig, heißa hopsasa!
Ich Vogelfänger bin bekannt
bei Alt und Jung im ganzen Land.
    Ozark does! She winds the cockatoos at night for practice. She likes to hear them sing about Ganzenland in deep, rich voices, as though Ganzenland is where the cockatoos belong. Every time she creeps to the hat stand in the darkness, Ozark expects that they’ll be gone, the whole flock out the window. She has not been able to locate Ganzenland anywhere in the episteme. But does an island of cockatoos belong in the episteme?
    It’s too cold to go outside in just her spangled leotard and tights, so Ozark puts on Bertrand’s gambeson. Ozark climbs up the rubble of the Security Spray Complex. She can look out at the lights of the town. What does she know about the town?
    It is latitude 42N52, longitude 73W12.
    “It is one of the vortical centers of the universe,” thinks Ozark. But there are so many of them. It might not mean anything. She takes out a piece of paper and makes a guest list. If the episteme