The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs

The night felt both eternal and instantaneous.

Daffodils, first sign of spring. It’s how you know everything is about to change.

Part of growing up is doing things you don’t want to do. When it’s in the best interest of someone you love.

Her fingertips stumbled over the key she’d found years ago. She liked having it. A fib for the chain. Or a talisman. A reminder that secrets can sometimes be discovered when one looks closely at ordinary things.

Once inside the hedge, the garden, though sleeping for the winter, nevertheless seemed to glimmer with hidden life. A winding flagstone path made its leisurely way to the door of the house, lined on both sides with tufts of sage, thyme, rosemary, and lavender, grayed with cold. In place of grass, the earth on either side of the path was a riot of plants in varying stages of hibernation and decay. To this side, the dried stalks of full-grown asparagus rustled together. In the far corner, their roots sunk into the wood of the house, an array of nightshades — tomato plants, dried and brown, the gnarled tangles of henbane and moonshade lying in wait for spring. The webbed vines overhead cast the garden in long blue shadow, blurred at the corners, hard to make out, and yet strangely the air inside the garden was not as bitingly cold as it was in the outside world.

A weird artifact of the past, aiming at the future. An intrusive, constructive contradiction.

It crumbled apart into ash, going from form to formlessness. To everything, it’s season. The pine cone grew into being, burned bright, and now it had disappeared. That was natural.

Most conjure doesn’t really deal with the weather. It’s about the house, or the body. Luck, and love. Money, obviously. And fixing enemies. It’s about power for the self, and influence over others. Charms get delivered by washes for the floor, or bath salts for the body. Candle work. Bible work. It’s small and personal.

A thin stream of smoke drifted skyward, speaking of mysteries within.

It’s like magic, the way god wipes the memories of pain from your head.

Shed locked it away, inside a drawer in her mind, and hidden the key.

The only constant was change.

Once she started seeing them, she could never unsee them. They stalked her, shreds of magic clinging to the real world everywhere she turned.

It could be that the best thing is something different from what you expect.

Doctor Dowers,” teased Connie. “Listen,” said Liz, “after all the crap I had to take in grad school, you bet everyone’s calling me Doctor. I’ll get my cabdriver to do it if I can. I’ll make my mother do it.

Liz used to joke that when she was an undergrad at Cornell, she and the girls in her sorority would play “Homeless? Or tenured professor?” while driving around the streets of Ithaca. It was a hard game.

Woodenly written, ineptly footnoted. It was so bad it was starting to make Connie angry. There often came a moment in grading when Connie struggled with anger at her students. That was usually when it was time to stop for the night.

But she liked having it. A fob for the chain. Or a talisman, maybe. A reminder that secrets can sometimes be discovered when one looks closely at ordinary things.

Enough. What does “enough” feel like? When happiness and contentment happen, how do you know?

It would appear that we are nearly out of time," Janine Silva said, eying her vintage Spiro Agnew wristwatch....