OOTD:Fishnets.Short-sleevedsailordress. Death Head moth barrettes. Lunar cycle backpack. When life gives you heartache, give it back a jaunty collar.
The second time she visited the little tearoom, she was better prepared. The little cat bounced from her cushion as Harper came through the door, the heavy clang of the twisted hunk of metal announcing her arrival.
TheSS Yeoman’s Enchantmenthad gone down on a large, icy lake more than twenty years before she’d even been born. A freak storm, the website she’d consulted reported — one minute, the large steamer showed on the radar, and the next, it was gone, lost to the frozen depths. The ship and her crew had never been recovered.And yet.The bell above the door bore the clear markings of the ship’s name. She desperately wanted to ask how the shop’s proprietor had acquired such a maritime souvenir.Scuba diving cats, maybe?
Following the cat through the small entryway into the dining room, she noticed again there were only one or two other patrons. Her table, the one with the scroll, was empty once more.
“D-do you mind?” She murmured to the little cat, feeling vaguely ridiculous as she gestured to the table. “I-I suppose I’m a creature of habit.”
The cat mewled, hesitating with a glance to a spirit board table, the one it had been leading her to, evidently deciding her request was one it was willing to accommodate. It gave her a bossy yowl as she pulled back her chair as if reminding her of the way things worked last time, an indication she should not sit there waiting endlessly.
“I know, I know. Write my order on the scroll. I remember.”
She told herself that morning as she left her cottage that she was going to take time every day to explore Cambric Creek, either before or after her teahouse sojourn.No time for lunch today. Have your tea, read your book, and then keep walking the other way down the block to see what’s there. Maybe you’ll find another little café. Maybe there’s a shop around here like the one with the auction. You could get a job there and actually have a reason to get up every morning. Who knows, maybe you’ll be good at it. They’ll actually appreciate your attention to detail when it comes to matching shades of black and will make you a manager.It would make sense if such a shop existed, for all of the curiosities aligning the shelves and cluttering up the space in the team room had to have come from somewhere.
The green wellness tea, please.Her order was ironic, she thought darkly. It wasn’t as if the tea was magically going to make her well again, no matter how much she guzzled.
Her only plan was to get out of the house. Make herself scarce at home, preventing her mother from pulling her into service as her lackey as she fussed with her crystals. Crystals and stones were her mother’s chosen tools of the craft and for as long as she could remember, every full moon and new moon would see her mother outside in the middle of the night, laying out crystals charged, dropping them in vases of rainwater, wrapping them in herbs. Crystals wrapped in warm, wet towels, placed on her forehead when she was sick, nestled beneath her pillow to chase away bad dreams, worry stones slipped into her book bag as an overly anxious child.
Harper never had an affinity for the bits of colorful rock, much to her mother’s disappointment. Morgan had stepped up in her place, learning the uses for every crystal, how to charge them, how to apply them, how to use them to banish or attract. Her mother was currently going through all of her crystals and stones, checking for damage or discoloration, replacing those deemed unworthy, re-cataloguing each and every one in her collection, which was vast. Harper had no desire to be a part of the chore.
Her plan for the day had worked, as little of a plan as it was. By the time she got home that afternoon — after she had lost herself in her book once more, realizing that her commitment to go exploring would have to wait another day — the driveway was empty, and she was able to scurry up the gravel unseen, slipping into her little cottage like a mouse. The rest of the afternoon and evening stretched before her, but she had gone out. Her version of trying was not what her mother would have approved, no doubt, and possibly not what Morgan had in mind when she made her request, but that, too, didn’t matter, Harper decided. Trying was bound to look different for everyone.
OOTD: Lace skirt. Puffed sleeve blouse. Existential panic. Grommeted boots with oxblood laces.
By the fourth time she stepped through the doorway at Azathé, Harper felt like a regular. The little cat attempted to shepherd her to different tables each time, giving up when Harper still moved to the table with the scroll. She didn’t like not knowing what to do, and in the absence of a direct order, she would fall back on what was familiar and comfortable.
The first afternoon she entered and found the dining room empty, she took advantage of the momentary solitude to explore the space a bit closer. Totems and statuettes of different deities from cultures all around the world lined the shelves, in between the taxidermied animals and skulls. Books on witchcraft, on sorcery, on every facet of the occult lay nestled in between tomes of Shakespeare, poetry books from the 1800s, classics bound in cloth and leather, fiction and nonfiction resting side-by-side with little organization. At least, not that she could make sense of.
A jar of four-leaf clovers sat beside a stack of different tarot decks, Lapis blue eyes peering out from a dozen different points throughout the room, all there to ward away the evil eye. On one shelf rested a small gem-encrusted jewelry box filled with the type of poison rings her sister had admired on the auction’s website. Ceremonial candles and altar tools, a small shelf of irradiated sugar bowls, teacups of different sizes and shapes and patterns in between all the ephemera.I wonder where they get their stuff. By the time the cart arrived with her tea, she had walked around the entire room, giving each corner a cursory exploration.
You should sit down and look at the course booklet.While waiting for her trolley earlier in the week, she’d passed a display for the local college outside the community center.Dozens of graduate programs on offer! Become a Master of planning your future today!A large QR code for the school’s enrollment website and a box of booklets listing the different courses offered sat just beneath the pronouncement, and she’d pulled one from the box, still riding a brief wave of optimism from that afternoon’s teahouse sojourn.
By the time she was back on her own sofa, paging through the booklet, she was overwhelmed by the choices. Her mother had never been the one she’d gone to for help parsing through options, least of all for something important and likely very expensive like this.She’s more likely to tell you it’s not worth the money for you to flunk out of something else.
She should sit and page through the booklet again . . . but it was self-care to take a time-out when needed, right? And she had been told to focus on self-care. . .No sense in letting your tea go cold, she told herself, pulling out her book and turning off her mind.
OOTD: Black dress. Black knee socks. Black bat earrings and matching bow. Ouija tote bag for all your negative confirmation bias. Patent ankle boots.
She had yet to explore the town. Every time she sat at the familiar scroll table and pulled out her book, buffeted in the long, thick shadows that stretched across the length of the dining room, time stopped, that insidious little voice in her head tamped back, and Harper couldn’t bring herself to end her stupor prematurely to do something as inconsequential as get to know her new home.Home is a word that doesn’t mean anything. Home is gone. Nothing will ever feel like home again.
The sentiment was underscored by the conversation she had happened upon earlier that week. Harper avoided the big house as much as possible, avoiding her mother being the true aim, but she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time — standing outside the door to her cottage when a frazzled courier came screeching to the curb at the end of the long driveway. She might have become completely antisocial in the past year and a half, but she still couldn’t bring herself to be rude, particularly to people just trying to do their jobs. The slender mothman had already seen her, and she couldn’t very well go scurrying back indoors and ignoring him, not once he was bustling up the driveway, a box under his arm. Once the truck had lurched from the curb, she had trudged up to the house with her mother’s delivery.
“I just wish I knew what to do to help her. Help her re-find her focus, help her decide what she’s going to do with her life . . . help her dosomething.”
She’d stood stock still, holding her breath.Maybe,she told herself, they’re not even talking about you. Maybe this entire conversation is about one of her crystals.The hope was dashed a heartbeat later, Ilea, as usual, delivering the fatal blow.
“There’s no shame in only having one of them be a witch,” they purred. “Morgan will do perfectly well on her beginner qualification exams. It’s like what the royals say — an heir and a spare, right? Focus your energy on where the potential is. Especially with the new coven. You want to show that the Hollingsworth witches deserve a seat in the inner circle, right? Evelyn doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and I can’t think of anything more foolish than wasting your precious time on someone who’s shown they don’t want to be helped. More than that, even — beyond help. I don’t think there’s any rule on who thespareneeds to be in this equation.”
She didn’t bother waiting to hear how her mother might respond. Leaving the package on the countertop, Harper had slipped from the house, not pausing to wipe away the tears burning at her eyes until the cottage door slammed behind her.
You’re a lost cause, beyond help. Your own mother thinks so.She wasn’t sure what she was bothering to try for, not that she was doing a particularly good job in the first place. Her family had been through enough those past two years, and she wanted Morgan and her mother to be happy. She wanted them to thrive in this new, stricter coven . . . and that wouldn’t happen if she was around to spoil everything, all the time, at every turn. It would be easier to slip beneath the surface of the waves in this desolate sea, letting the undertow pull her until her family was relieved of the burden of her.
OOTD: Black dress. Black shoes, black bag. Black heart, black soul, like a stain that ought to be washed away.
The seventh time she visited the tearoom, she didn’t bother tip-toeing around the dining room to examine the collection of oddities, didn’t exclaim in delight over antique copies of her favorite books or wonder who was wishing on the monkey’s paw that was steadily counting down fingers. She ignored the little cat, who mewled protestingly as she entered the dining room, beelining to her preferred seat to pull out her book. She was desperate to lose herself, to quiet the voice in her head, at least for a little while, until she decided if she was going to continue struggling to swim or sink at last.
The green wellness tea, please.
