Mulberry Wands by Kater Cheek

watering.
    “A Daewoo. It’s a piece of crap,” she said.
“I hate it.”
    “Why not get a new one?”
    “I can’t afford a new one,” she said. She
pulled out into the street, which was congested with construction
vehicles and traffic, even though it was a Saturday. He would have
been nervous to drive on such a busy street, but she navigated it
as though it were nothing, not even using her horn or middle
finger.
    “Aren’t you a mage?” he said. He put his arm
out his window, feeling the breeze. It was warm for November, and
the sunlight on his arm was making him fade, so he laid it in the
shadow of the door so the sun didn’t touch him. “Can’t you cast a
spell to get yourself a better car?”
    “Someone has to pay for it,” she said.
    “Who?”
    She shrugged. “Someone. If I cast a spell to
get myself a better car, someone will have to pay for it. Like
maybe someone will rear end me and their insurance will give me a
settlement. But it wouldn’t come free. Someone would pay for it,
and even though it wouldn’t be me, my karma would be the one that
bore the debt.”
    “Karmic debt?” he laughed. He’d met a
bead-and-patchouli wearing hairy hitchhiker who talked about karmic
debt, but never someone as straitlaced as Susan. “You believe in
karma?”
    “I believe in paying for what you take.”
    “So what do you cast spells for then?”
    She shrugged, and leaned forward to turn the
air conditioning on.
    “You do cast spells, don’t you? Isn’t that
what mages do?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So what do you cast spells for?”
    She looked uncomfortable. “I um … I
subcontract prayers for distant cousins.”
    “People pray to you?” Paul asked.
    “No,” she said, pulling onto a huge freeway
that he had never seen before. “People pray to God. If they’re
descendents of Ru--my ancestral goddess, she handles it. She tells
me how to cast the spells to get them what they need, and I do it
in exchange for learning how to do the spells.”
    “So you’re an angel who grants wishes?”
    “No,” she said, but she was blushing. “I’m
not an angel. It’s like a magical internship. I do magic in order
to learn how to do it better.”
    “What kind of spells do you cast?” he asked.
“I mean, what kinds of things do people pray for that you can
answer?”
    She shrugged. Some of the ice was melting
off. “Kids are easiest, because they don’t mind asking God for
anything, and the things they want are pretty easy. Like they want
to pass their math test, or they want their puppy to come home.
Sometimes they want hard things, like they want mom and dad to stop
fighting so much, but even I can take care of that for a little
while. Adults want medical things, mostly, like to stop being tired
all the time, or to have their loved one pull through another round
of chemo.”
    “You cure cancer?”
    “No!” She spluttered. “Not really. I just
cast spells to give them a little strength to help them get through
it on their own. I don’t cure cancer.”
    “So you don’t cast spells to help yourself?”
Paul looked out the window at the seemingly unending sequence of
box stores and office complexes that sped past the freeway. It
looked more like Los Angeles than Hayden’s Ferry. “Like have you
ever cast a spell to win the lottery or something?”
    “My mom did that. She’s won the lottery three
times.” Susan got off the freeway.
    “I’m surprised you don’t do it more
often.”
    “They made it illegal for mages to play the
lottery. My mom was one of those people who ruined it for everyone
else,” she said. She drove in silence for a few minutes before
meekly confessing,“I did cast a spell to help me get my job.”
    They were in Guadalupe proper now, and the
streets were quieter, more residential, with a homey feel like he’d
crossed the border into Mexico. Yards had cacti in pots and swathes
of bougainvillea instead of slopes of newly seeded ryegrass and
gleaming windows. The street signs