Chapter 1: Serena, Gospel

Our magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.

— Dion Fortune

There was once a woman who grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was happiest in the late 80s and her favorite band was Concrete Blonde. She had a couple of copies of Silver RavenWolf. She found that whenever she cast a spell, that spell came true.

With a spell for prosperity, she got a job sewing costumes for her favorite drag queens, which she promptly lost because she made an error in sewing. Worse: She made it competently through a couple of costumes before she was assigned to a dragonfly bodysuit with winged harness. She picked up on some embroidery that the lead seamstress had begun. She copied the intricate, scaled, beaded pattern all one long afternoon, only to find she had embroidered the entirety of the dragonfly’s thorax to her skirt. The work had to be picked out, thread by thread. A lot of materials were wasted and the costume wasn’t ready for the show. The dragonfly had to go in off-the-shelf butterfly wings, and the night ended in tears. The woman, Serena, didn’t see the show because she was reworking the whole project. She finished but she was fired anyway.

With another spell, Serena called a lover back to her after he had left, so he said, for good. Angel found another girl in Nashville and drove up there and called up to tell Serena about it. He was at the level of overjoyed where he thought nothing of calling an old lover to confide about a new one — “I’m so happy I’m terrified.”

Sabrina asked him to talk just once more so she could thank him for all he had meant to her. In the three-day interval before the scheduled call she fasted and waked and wove the strongest spell she could, consulting her collection of tomes from the used bookstore and the glossy new ones she’d found at Media Play. At the end of the three days she bound the spell and picked up her phone and made the call.

You can picture her, if you like, if you remember 1993, sitting on a pocket-sized balcony, door open behind her to a bedroom with paneled walls and brown carpet smelling like cat piss. The house is divided into fifths and she has the attic. She’s smoking because that’s what you did in 1993. She’s winding the phone cord around her finger. She has the happiest conversation, the happiest 20 minutes of her life. For a few months she can remember it in almost its entirety; later, only in fragments. She kicks herself — no, beats her head against doorframes — that she never wrote it all down. But at any rate, she persuades him to drive down to Chattanooga to see her. He loves her. He tells her that. He loves her.

She puts down the phone and leans back against the door and waits while black turns violet and the sky bulks lower and the clouds put out fingers toward the earth and sleet begins to fall.

Her reverie starts with conversation and then becomes the warm time in bed when she gets him out of this cold and then becomes worry and then becomes anxiety, frantic bargaining, but she can’t take back the spell and isn’t sure that she wants to; after all, he might be almost to Chattanooga by now.

The ice freezes her rose velour skirt to her legs.

They don’t have smartphones or social media and his family doesn’t know where he is for the longest time either, but within two days she learns that his car has spun out on the ice and he’s died.

There’s no need to dwell on it. All that happened a long time ago. If we let the sadness make us, well, sad, we’ll never get through it. Spit in the gods’ faces, pull up your big-girl panties, come along.

Serena moved north out of the city into Red Bank. She got married a couple of times, or rather, she let men marry her, get bored or impatient with her, divorce her. She had a daughter in the late 1990s. She worked a few retail jobs before she got on with Centaur Fulfillment, where she worked up to be in charge of bathroom break logistics.

She’s changed. She doesn’t throw spells at all any more, but it’s more than that. Picture her, one the deck of her two-story duplex in Red Bank. The wide boards are untreated, splintery. Her wide calloused feet move across them with ease. She settles into a folding chair and puts her coffee cup on the little rain-warped card table in front of her. She’s heavyset, now, with a small ribcage and large wide fanny. Her dark hair, escaping from a scrunchie ponytail, curls around her neck. It’s a gray early-spring day, exhaling green across the trees. She’s taken off her sweat shirt and she’s wearing a sports bra and a loose, almost ankle-length India cotton skirt. Purple toenails. She’s olive-skinned, lightly freckled, with pale blue-gray eyes. A soft voice, gently complaining, gently eschewing complaint. I know he can get loud, but, I don’t know, maybe you shouldn’t be too hard on him, sweetie, he’s doing the best he can. The mail never came today and I was expecting a check, but I don’t know, they’re probably understaffed. Her most constant phrase is I don’t know, not as an answer to a question, but as a conditional, appended to any assertion.

Because why? Because the spells worked. Because her wishes came true. Came true, and cursed both her and, worse, other people.  She hasn’t dwelt on sorrow or worked herself up into either a magical arrogance of power or a Christian rejection of it; instead, she’s simple sidled down, back, inside herself until she rarely expresses an opinion without also asserting its opposite and almost never articulates, even thinks, even imagines, any desires of her own. She tapes fairy and angel prints up around her house and sometimes practices Buddhist meditation. She drinks coffee that’s sloppy-sweet with hazelnut creamer, and she eats a lot of white-bread-and-peanut-butter sandwiches. She never gets too attached to any future, any outcome. The price is just too high. An preference might become a wish, and a wish, terribly, might turn into a spell under the weight of intention, turn into a spell and come true.

With her first husband Serena had a daughter, whom she named Gospel. In fact Serena had become quite Christian by then — Christian in a gentle eclectic way that included angel meditations, serenity prayers, Mother earth devotions, lots of herb tea, and the occasional strange mushroom. She gave whatever she could to anyone who asked, which might have explained the two husbands, neither of whom was much good. Luckily they became bored, rather than angry, with Serena and each left within a few years.

At 23, Gospel was a quick, fierce person with a host of passions — Dr Who and Necroshock fandoms, parkour, painting. She wore overalls over tank tops to show off her wiry form, and she wore her black hair scraped back into a fierce tight bun that stood up on top of her head like she was Olive Oyl. She had intense crushes and cut herself in neat brackets of lines up her arms or legs or ribcage when her love wasn’t returned. She was atheist but cautious — gods probably didn’t exist, but if they did, they were up to no good. Best be wary, just in case. She had lots of side hustles, mostly as an aerobics teacher or athletic trainer to rich folks who liked her gritty look (though in fact she wasn’t particularly worldly), and her main work was her art, which so far had consumed a lot more in materials than she had earned back in sales.

Sometime in the same spring that the presidency of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of Southeast Tennessee and North Georgia was assumed by Mar’Celle of House Pettigrew,  Gospel was out tagging near SPOT Venue when she first met Rev. C. Blossom Alcatraz.