She looked away.
Marcus was helping a customer select a “manifestation journal” — really just a fifty-dollar notebook with moon phases printed on it. Her boss wasn’t magical, and probably didn’t even know witches and magical beings were real, and that Fernwick was one of the largest magical cities in the country.
She had maybe five minutes before Marcus would be on her to stock something for him.
Ramona turned the pages of the grimoire carefully, the old paper crackling under her fingertips. Some of the spells were standard fare — protection wards, attraction charms, the usual. Others were more esoteric. More powerful.
More interesting.
A spell to summon your heart’s desire.
Another to call forth prosperity and good fortune.
One that claimed to “reveal your truest path when all seems lost.”
The academic in her — the part that wasn’t quite dead yet — recognized the linguistic patterns, the symbolic frameworks. This was old magic. Pre-standardization, working on intent rather than precision, which meant it was either incredibly powerful or incredibly dangerous, depending on who was casting.
Most likely it was a mix of both powerful and dangerous foranyone.
Ramona should have put it on the clearance shelf. Should have priced it at $5.99 and let some college kid buy it for the aesthetic.
Instead, she slipped it into her canvas tote bag. The leather was cool against her palm. It felt like something.
It felt like possibility.
Or maybe just stupidity. Hard to tell the difference these days.
The rest of the shift crawled by with the speed of continental drift. A woman spent an hour asking about crystal energies before leaving empty-handed. A man tried to convince Ramona that the $42 oracle deck should really be $28 because “Mercury is in retrograde and money is just energy anyway.”
The urge to explain that Mercury retrograde was an optical illusion and had nothing to do with cosmic commerce died in her throat. She smiled. She nodded. She ran his credit card for the full amount.
Marcus took a two-hour lunch and returned with a green juice that cost more than Ramona made in three hours. When five o’clock finally arrived, Ramona was grabbing her coat when Marcus’s voice stopped her.
“Hey, Ramona? Got a sec?”
Everything inside her went cold.
Those three words —got a sec— never preceded good news. They preceded conversations about “productivity” and “company direction” and “unfortunately, we have to make some changes.”
She turned, coat half on, clearing her throat and forcing her voice into a casual, feminine pitch. “What’s up?”
Marcus pressed his lips together and tilted his head, the expression he probably thought looked sympathetic. “So, uh, I wanted to give you a heads-up. We should probably talk tomorrow. About where things are going. Your role here, that kind of thing.”
“My… role?” Ramona asked, a tiny squeak in the words.
“Yeah, just… let’s touch base in the morning, okay?” He was already looking back at his phone, dismissing her. “Have a good night.”
Ramona stepped out into the January cold. Her breath fogged. Her fingers were numb.Let’s touch basewas corporate-speak forYou’re fucked.
Two years she’d been working here.
Two years, and apparently that earned you a firing delivered in startup-bro language.
Her phone buzzed. A text to the family group chat from Iris with a photo attached: Iris and her husband at some Italian restaurant, everyone’s teeth unnaturally white in the dim lighting. The caption:First Mommy and Daddy date night in months!
Iris, with her thriving curse-breaking business and her perfect family and her complete lack of understanding about why Ramona couldn’t just “bounce back” from a divorce and a career implosion.
The photo made something twist in Ramona’s stomach. Not jealousy, exactly. More like grief for a version of herself that used to exist. The one who had dinner reservations and date nights and a wife who looked at her like she mattered.
