The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy Read Free Page A

scrub.
    It is odd. I wear glasses for distance, and Jessamine doesn’t. I never knew what she saw when she looked at my house, and I never tell her what I think about her chrome and glass furniture or her love of plastic fabrics. A guest doesn’t criticize the host’s house no matter how long they have known each other.
    “Ell?” Jessamine shakes my shoulder. “Stop it. What are you doing?”
    There is dust everywhere. Housekeeping has never been my strong point. I scrub a film of ancient cat vomit off the linoleum and fight with myself. To care, or not to care? Well, says Jessamine in my head, simplest if we spell it away, and that way both of us can relax.
    I sit back, drop the sponge on the floor. My hands flash through a series of mudras. I feel the dust and dirt shifting away to somewhere it can be more comfortable, and my house becomes a strange sacred space outside of the normal world where things will not stain it. Jessamine is happy here.
    I, Ellowyn, feel as though I’ve sliced off my roots.
    From the living room come the screams of three different cats. I jump up and run there and see that the couch where they usually lie in a furry heap is repelling them. They scramble in air, trying to swim to safety, but the table repels them, and the carpet. They float, claws extended, an inch above the ground. Their cries become more frantic.
    “What did I do? What did you do?” I cry, snatching at my frantic cats, who cling and claw and screech.
    “Damn, I forgot about cats. This is a people-only house now,” my internal Jessamine says with my mouth.
    “Well, stop it! Change it back! Stop it!” I am talking to myself.
    “You’ll have to free the hands.” My second voice is an approximation of Jessamine’s, higher and more forceful than my own.
    I am supporting Sprite’s hind legs with my right hand. Fleet clings to my shoulders, and Dobro stands on my left forearm, his paws wrapped around my upper arm. They all moan, an eerie, ascending sound like the end of the world.
    “What happened?” Jessamine asks from behind me. Her voice is thin with fright.
    I turn and force Sprite and Fleet into her arms. “Your silly spell,” I say in my own voice, “your silly banish-dust, repel-pests, eternal-stainfree spell has turned my house into a tomb.” Hands freed, I shape the mudras again in reverse order, stumbling a little because this is not my usual spell method. The Jessamine overlay in my mind prompts me, sighing all the while. She craves cleanliness that is close to hermetic, and now I know why all the way down to my bones. I can remember the apartment where Jessamine lived before we met, filth and cockroaches and rotting food, her mother’s older sister spreading pestilence and chaos everywhere around her in a way that Jessamine did not learn until later was magical.
    Such stains, set deep into her image of her childself. Such a compulsion to escape them.
    I shape my hands around the final mudra, and my roots regrow; the house is connected to the everyday world once again. The cats, still moaning, drop to the floor and vanish into their safest hiding places.
    Jessamine is crying. We both go to the bathroom to put Neosporin on our bleeding scratches and to spell for healing. “Ellowyn, what happened?” Jessamine says.
    “You should know,” I say. “It was your spell.”
    “It wasn’t supposed to work this way!”
    “What did you imagine it would do?” Now, from my view of the inside of her mind, I know what the spell was: a spell of total understanding. I can even ferret out her thinking about it, why she devised it: she is lonely in her passions, and she only wanted me to appreciate them more than I do. We have been getting together for years. We are best friends. Yet, there has been this film between us, areas we have kept separate from each other where we might clash, and finally her frustration about this place where she is still and always alone built to the bursting point.
    And, in her