Mulberry Wands by Kater Cheek Page A

were brown, unlit, and written
in Spanish. Susan pulled off the side of the road, where concrete
berms had converted a shoulder into a makeshift parking lot.
    Paul was watching her face instead of paying
attention to himself, and as a result he almost vanished into the
sunlight when he stepped out of the car. He scrambled for his
umbrella, but he had to press the catch three times before his
thumb had enough substance to move the metal. With a soft whoomph
the umbrella opened and he shaded himself, feeling solidity return.
Susan was looking around at the things in the courtyard, so she
didn’t see him turn transparent.
    But the old woman peering out from under the
canopy glared at him as though she wasn’t fooled for a minute.
    Susan ambled through the Mercado, which sold
garden art and patio bric-a-brac. A building stood at the back of
the lot, but the yard itself was the showroom. Rusted fences,
gazebos and trellises arched above a menagerie of iron and concrete
animals. Howling coyotes sat next to turtles with river rocks as
shells. A stone fountain burbled near four other empty ones. It was
so cluttered, you had to walk slowly, one to keep yourself from
tripping over a dancing cement frog or terracotta birdbath, and two
because there were so many things to look at. It felt, for him,
like he’d briefly stepped back into the Guadalupe he once knew.
    “Look at that,” she said, pointing to an owl
perched on the edge of the building roof. A shadow from a cluster
of palm trees kept it out of direct sunlight. “I thought it was one
of those plastic owls that people use to keep pigeons away, but it
moved.”
    “Oh, great.” Paul narrowed his eyes, trying
to feel if the owl was one he recognized. It was a great horned
owl, and she was almost certainly here checking up on his
progress.
    Oh, yeah, he knew that one. [That one] is how
he thought of her. She was full of herself because she’d once been
chosen by the lady as Raylight, an avatar to speak on behalf of all
Sunwards. Once an owl glowed bright with the lady, she tended to
become insufferably arrogant. She thought that since she had once
been a vessel for the lady, she knew what the other Sunwards ought
to be doing.
    [That one] looked at him, her thought as
clear as sunlight. She thought he ought to have found out the
answer to their question already.
    It wasn’t like he was deliberately stalling,
even if Susan did smell nice and have a pretty smile. Didn’t they
trust him? Didn’t they understand that these things took time?
    Susan was still looking at the owl, shading
her eyes from the sun. “I didn’t think owls could be out during the
day.”
    “They don’t like it, but they do it if
there’s a good reason.” Paul touched the back of Susan’s shoulder
and gently led her under the awning. He was glaring at [that one].
If [that one] thought he was doing a bad job, she might grab a
translator and bring it over to Susan so that she could interview
Susan herself. He could think of few things more humiliating. “Come
over here where she can’t see us.”
    “How do you know it’s a she?”
    He shrugged. Even if he hadn’t known her, he
would be certain she was female, because Sunwards were almost
always female, and an owl out in the daylight staring at him was
always a Sunward.
    “Don’t you like owls?” she asked.
    “Depends on the owl.” Two. There were two
owls he liked. Okay, maybe three, if you counted Fallon, though
she’d only been civil to him in order to study human behavior.
    Susan let herself be led under the awning,
where a rack of postcards and a line of hanging dried chilies
decorated the check-out register. He folded the umbrella so he had
a hand free to help her set her flowerpots on the counter. She
smiled thanks. She looked twice as pretty when she smiled. Too bad
she didn’t do it very often. She was so serious, sad, almost.
People these days were sadder than they had been. Women had been
more carefree in his day.
    The old woman