“Iwantthecabinetonthiswall, I think . . . and the table placed just in front of it. I want this workspace to be absolutely perfect. Hmm . . . no, a bit more to the left.”
The movers shrugged, shifting the table a few negligible centimeters as her mother squinted, surveying the landscape of the room as if she were an explorer looking out from the summit of Mount Everest for the very first time after a brutal ascent, finding the view to be somewhat lacking.
“Ilea, can we make sure none of the crystals sustained any damage during the move? Let’s catalog everything, please. I don’t want to find out that the jasper points are chipped six months from now when my moving warranty is only good for the next week. Just a bit more to the left, now . . . perfect, right there. Everything is perfect.”
Perfect. Everything had to beperfectat all times. Every thing at every moment of every waking hour of the day. Perfection was the only state her mother accepted, from her wardrobe to her home to her daughters. Harper hung back, not wanting to mar theperfectlandscape of her mother’s new workroom with her distinctimperfection. Unfortunately, her attempt to escape notice was in vain.
“Harper, darling, why don’t you find another one of the movers and direct them on where to put all of your things. Although it will be a wonder if they can even fit the furniture through the door.”
“I’m sure the door is a normal door, mother. Don’t they have building codes?”
Her mother tutted, turning her attention back once more to the cabinet and the precise placement of the table before it.
“Ilea, let’s make sure we have room to leave the upper shelf open for display. Pru Hevisham mentioned something about the new coven taking turns with hosting duties.”
The very notion of entertaining had her mother practically bouncing on her toes in excitement. Harper swallowed hard, hoping her face didn’t betray the dread she felt at the mere thought of having to beperfectand on display for an entire day under her mother’s watchful eye.Sisters, let me be the first to introduce you all to my eldest daughter, the failure.
“I’ve no idea what their rotation looks like, but I’m hoping we can be added to it as soon as possible. Who knows, we might be hosting a welcoming tea! Let’s make sure everything is set up flawlesslynow. Set it and forget it.”
A lie, for her mother never forgot a thing and would fuss and tinker with every detail until every speck of the room, down to the last dust mote, had passed muster.
“Of course,” Ilea agreed, making a show of jotting something down on their tablet face. “We may as well take care of it now. Work smarter, not harder.”
Harper was certain if she rolled her eyes any harder, they would rotate right out of her head and go spinning across the floor, lost to the unpacking detritus forever.Perfection, always perfection.Work smarter, not harder. Keep it simple, stupid. A goal without a plan is just a wish without directions. Her mother was full of the sort of platitudes one might find on a motivational poster at one’s therapist’s office, or else, the nuggets of wisdom imparted by the daytime manager of a quick service restaurant to their team in a meeting full of chants and hand clapping. She would need to find a new therapist here, eventually, and fortunately, her days of fast food service were behind her, leaving her little appreciation for her mother’s bon mots.
“I can’t imagine garden sheds have the same standards as an ordinary household door.”
Harper jumped when she realized the jab was directed at her, the conversation resuming without warning. Ilea was poisonous in every form. The familiar had sunk into the role of personal assistant with gusto, an ever-present tablet and stylus in hand, trailing after Harper’s mother constantly, an inescapable presence and the bane of her miserable existence since moving back home.
“It’s hardly going to be big enough for you to even turn around in there, you know. I still don’t understand why you don’t just take one of the rooms upstairs and move your—“
Her mother was once again facing the cabinet as she spoke, providing the perfect opportunity for Harper to drift out of the room.
As much as she didn’t like being ordered around as if she were a child, checking in on her things was not a bad idea. The movers had, to her knowledge, already delivered her carefully labeled belongings, but it was worth double-checking, especially if it got her out of her mother’s bubble of awareness.
The carriage house was connected to the main house by a gravel driveway, sitting back some twenty or thirty yards, shaded by a line of enormous elms and maple trees. It was hardly a garden shed. Technically, it wasn’t even a carriage house at all, even though that was how the real estate agent had suggested listing it. There was no open ground floor area, nothing large enough or wide enough for a carriage or vehicle to pass through, no stable where there may have once been horses.
It was a cottage, she decided. A tiny cottage just big enough for her, its back door leading to a winding flagstone path that led to the back garden, to the lilac grove and pink honeysuckle, moon flowers and hellebore and showy white datura, their heraldic trumpets only opening beneath the moon. It was a perfect witch’s cottage, and the only thing that could have possibly made it better was for it to have a different address entirely, perhaps across town in the middle of the actual woods. Instead, it was less than one hundred feet from her mother’s back door, a fact which dampened her enthusiasm for her new living quarters greatly.Well, that and you’re hardly a witch. You may as well just call it a carriage house, after all.
The movers had indeed already done their work, she was relieved to see. All of her things, every box from her apartment, the few pieces of furniture she kept, everything had been painstakingly labeled —CARRIAGE HOUSE ~ HARPER— and she was relieved to see doing so had paid off. What the movers hadnotdone, however, was actually move any of the furniture into any of the designated rooms. Not that her new abode could boast many of those.
A tiny, compact kitchen just off the living room, a single bedroom, a miniature bathroom, and a room that was having an identity crisis — too small to be a proper bedroom, too large to be a linen closet, it seemed utterly without purpose to her, with a tiny, diamond-shaped window near the top of the wallpapered wall. Perhaps, she thought, she might turn it into a small reading nook. She could line the two sidewalls in shelves and wedge an armchair beneath the odd little window.Perfect. And then you never need to leave.
Despite the proximity to her mother and her own questionable claim to witchiness, the cottage was perfect. She envisioned it in autumn — a carpet of crimson leaves from the overhead maples carpeting the walkway, a miniature hay bale set outside the front door holding a collection of decorative gourds, with a festive jack-o-lantern beside it. In spring, the lilacs would be in bloom, perfuming the air, and she would put in flower boxes on the two small front windows. In the summer, she would charge spring water and crystals beneath the full moon in the secluded backyard, disrobing and performing the ancient rites on her own, no catty coven necessary.
The movers had left her furniture clustered in the living room — a loveseat that had been a floor model and purchased at half cost, two cheap pressed-wood bookshelves with unpronounceable-to-her-eyes Scandinavian names, a wingback chair, and her bed. Her undersized kitchen table had been disassembled, and at first, she didn’t quite realize that the round, wooden table all her boxes were stacked upon was not the one she had moved with. It was too heavy, too sturdy, and she realized it must’ve been left in the cottage when the house was emptied after her grandmother’s death.
Deciding she could move her meager furniture on her own and that doing a bit of lugging was a preferable scenario to having one of the movers invading her space once more, Harper pushed up the sleeves of her black dress.
The bed was easy enough to slide across the floor once she positioned the moving skates she’d had in one of the boxes beneath each leg, and she wondered, as she carefully walked her mattress down the hallway, one slow step at a time, if this was how the ancients had constructed the standing stone circles she’d visited on a trip to Europe, years earlier.
She would need to buy a storage shelf for the small kitchen, she realized once all of the boxes holding her utensils and gadgets and pantry items had been moved to the small galley space. She had loved cooking once and had amassed an array of tools that had been long neglected.Maybe you can start cooking again, you can even take a class. Mom said this place has tons of programs through the community center. Who knows, you might decide to make potion brewer your designation.
A scuffling sound in her front door interrupted her musing, bringing her head up sharply. Harper crossed the small room in a few steps, assuming one of the movers had left a box on the small stoop. Instead, she found Ilea’s lithe body stretched against the doorframe, dropping quickly when it opened and nearly stumbling backward. Her eyes narrowed instantly, feeling defensive.
Her mother’s poisonous familiar only took a moment to recover from their momentary inelegance, nose raising as they took her in. “Ah, Harper. Youdidmanage to find your way over. We weren’t sure.”
Her hand tightened around the door.Fucking Ilea. “You weren’t sure if I would find my way fifty feet up the driveway? Well, I’m thrilled to burst your bubble, but it was a pretty straight shot. No trouble at all.”
