Scarlet Afternoon
Autumn Konovalski
Bernadette squinted through the mini blinds as a middle-aged woman approached her shop. A typical client. Blue veins that showed through her translucent skin, even during the summer. She was too distraught to bother with makeup. Her face was red from crying, almost perfectly matching her frizzy hair.
“Are you Psychic-Medium-Bernadette?” Stephanie asked as she tried to smooth out her hair and yoga pants. For three long seconds Bernadette could feel the infidelity from Stephanie’s partner taking over the room. Stephanie’s grief felt more debilitating than the flu.
“Ale vou zan!” she screamed as she waved her hand to dismiss this meaningless energy.
Stephanie recoiled for a moment, but Bernadette nodded, unphased, and assumed the best position. Her right hand waved out her tarot cards in a single elegant gesture.
Before the front door fully closed, Stephanie’s request came out like a burp: “I need a binding spell.”
Maybe it was the way the afternoon’s red haze had affected Bernadette, or perhaps it was the fact that Stephanie had arrived after closing. Either way, she sometimes found enjoyment in the opportunity to act naive to these requests.
“A binding spell? For your child’s health? Or is it for financial success?”
“For my husband, Charles Lowell. My friend, Cheryl, she does my chakra healing on Wednesdays, and she told me that you could help.”
Now it was Bernadette’s duty to give her the warning spiel. Oh Goddess, help these ridiculous people! “Do you realize the consequences of this? You will risk setting your soul off-track from what you blueprinted for your current life. It could be permanent.”
Stephanie’s eyes welled up; her skin reddened on her face and chest again. “I have to do this. I’m already researching a voodoo ritual to bind him myself.”
Bernadette endearingly rolled her eyes. She should never have moved her business to a gentrified neighborhood. Now she spent her days remedying sour marriages and talking to dead pets. “You will do no such thing. Sit down.”
They sat in silence as Bernadette lit her candles. Her workspace was a mass of glass jars and tins with mysterious contents. Calamus root from her previous client was still burning.
Stephanie glanced at it but didn’t dare comment. This organized chaos was something she wasn’t meant to understand. She stared at the card table in amazement.
“I have some of his hair, if that would help.”
Bernadette couldn’t hold in her scoff. “Keep his hair on his head. The price to do this is sixty dollars. Now chant these words in English with me, nine times.”
She held her hands up and shook them, motioning for Stephanie to stop glaring at her clandestine pastel tins and get with the program. They clasped hands. Bernadette’s cool palms pressed tightly against Stephanie’s warm and sweaty ones.
“Charles Lowell.
You are mine and I am yours.
Leave everyone behind, since you are only mine, and I am the only one for you.
You would love only me and be loyal as a dog towards me and will never think of anyone else except me.
Charles Lowell.”
Stephanie swayed throughout the process. Her chants were loud and thorough, and her eyes were shut so tightly that the Botox in her forehead started to struggle. Bernadette chanted slowly, while sitting perfectly upright. She was somewhere unreachable. Her eyes widened as she mumbled the final chant.
“Charles Lowell.
Humbakkakum Thumbakkum
Thumbbakkum Thinakna
Meria Meria Humbakkakum Thumbakkum Thinkakna
Charles Lowell.”
Bernadette felt the astral plane quiver as she removed Stephanie’s potential influence from thousands of souls on earth. She removed two potential children and a fierce, pure love that would have existed between her and a future coworker while at a successful job at a law firm that she would no longer obtain. All this, sacrificed, just to be bound in this lifetime to “Charles Lowell,” whom, from what she could sense, would spend most of his time alive with the same self-involved characteristics and pompous demeanor. These ridiculous people. “You are now bound during this lifetime.”
Tears of relief began to pour down Stephanie’s face. Little lines of snot funneled onto her lips. Her skin splotched and intensified, from pink back to red. The sky changed from red to scarlet, preparing itself for sunset. The afternoon light peeked through the mini blinds, resting across the card table.
“Estipid,” Bernadette whispered in Haitian Creole, under her breath.
