The Same but Different (169)

PSI-2

Hyacinth awoke to find a tray full of eggs florentine, hot coffee and strawberry pie waiting for her on her dresser, still warm and giving off trails of steam. She approached it on tiptoe as if it might be a baited trap. Lacking a stick, she eased open one of her dresser drawers and poked it with the edge of a box of sanitary napkins.

There was a tented white piece of paper on the tray that somebody had decorated with stickers. She recognized Milo’s handwriting, and Calliope’s glittery artistic exuberance.

Hyacinth winced at the implications. I’m sorry, cute little note from Milo and Calliope, I don’t believe you.

She abandoned it on the tray and burst out of her room to confront the inevitable disaster.

She approached the railing too fast, intending to lean over it and use the height advantage to survey the damages. Milo’s safety spell caught her, but instead of lifting her gently and setting her down with a paternal pat on the head, it spun her around and then dipped her backwards like a dance partner before setting her upright and shaking her hand. She flexed her fingers and examined her palm — it was free of both ectoplasm and fairydust.

“Okay, that’s not working right,” she muttered. She approached the railing again, wary of being thrown off, and looked down.

The front room was occupied by a dozen neatly-arranged cots with folded fire blankets on them, and a card table with four folding chairs that gave Hyacinth an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. (Have we had that? Do I vaguely remember buying that for magic storms? Where did I put it and how many years has it been hiding there?) Bethany was sitting at this card table and drawing with crayons, kicking her little legs back and forth under the chair. The box of games and the box of projects were on the other chairs, as well as a box of art supplies that Hyacinth did not recall. The bowl of contraceptive charms was on the end table. The dining room had been cordoned off with a line of rolled bedding and pillows. Inside were a little red boy with curly white hair and a sailor suit, a little brown haired girl in a pink pajama sleeper, a large bald black man with stretched earlobes, and a lot of stuffed animals — including a gorilla with yellow sunglasses.

Near the dining room, Ted, Maria, Steven and Calliope were standing and talking. Maria clapped her hands and laughed.

As Hyacinth watched, bug-eyed, the little boy in the sailor suit took a giggly, flat-footed run at the kitchen doorway. Nobody made any move to stop him from interacting with the malfunctioning magic, Sanaam didn’t even look up, and Hyacinth gave a truncated scream.

The little boy executed a pretzel-shaped loop-de-loop and landed on his pudgy bare feet. “Eee!” he squealed.

“Good one, Pablo!” Sanaam said.

“Yah!” Pablo said.

Calliope waved. “Hi, Cin!” She pointed at the pink gentleman with the almond-shaped eyes. “This is Steven Yaojing! I know you never have anything dry cleaned, but he is actually nice! He’s third generation like me!”

“Just from about a thousand miles away,” Steven said, nodding. He looked up at Hyacinth, “Don’t I already know you?”

Hyacinth considered having no idea what Calliope was talking about to be a normal situation and she discounted it. She flung a vast gesture at the orderly room, the safe children and the lack of hysterics. “SINCE WHEN ARE YOU PEOPLE COMPETENT?”

The General stuck her head out of the kitchen, hanging cautiously onto the doorframe like Milo. There was a round goose-egg on her forehead that was slowly shading in purple. “We helped them,” she said.

“AHA!” Hyacinth declared, pointing. “INJURIES! What happened?”

“Erik has a sense of humor,” Maggie said. She hitched up her skirt and stepped carefully over the invisible baby gate, although Erik certainly wouldn’t hurt her. “Milo wired everything through him for the storm. He’s not supposed to control it.” She shrugged. “But it’s a storm and he figured it out and he likes it better than making salty sugar.”

“That was Erik dancing me around up here?” Hyacinth said.

Maggie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But he hit my mom on the kitchen ceiling and now she’s stuck in here. Ann’s talking to him. I tried, but he doesn’t want me down there. He’s kind of being a jerk.”

“He’s sick right now, Maggie,” Hyacinth said. “Sick people are jerks. I’ll talk to him.” She cautiously approached the stairs.

Ann appeared at the basement doorway. Just as she lifted a foot, she was very gently boosted over the invisible baby gate in a seated position, then rocked once back and forth as if riding a swing. She kicked up her heels with a laugh, and then firmly planted her red rubber boots on the tile floor. “Thank you, Erik, dear!” she called over her shoulder. “General D’Iver, he’d just like you to promise you won’t be mean to anyone or ruin the surprise.”

“I will not ruin the surprise,” the General said dully.

Ann frowned. “Your ability to walk through doorways today and take things off shelves is in the hands of an eight-year-old boy — who is in considerable pain, I might add — and if you’re not going to lie to him about being nice, then I will do it for you. And you’ll be taking your life in your own hands because I’m not sure how much he can sense through the magic and what he’s doing is not entirely conscious.” She made a pointed smile with too many teeth. “Dear.”

“I will bear it in mind,” the General said.

“His label is bothering him. I told him I’d bring him a bandage for his hand,” Ann said. She turned and waved. “Good morning, Cin! How was breakfast?”

“I don’t trust it or any of you,” said Hyacinth. Her irritated expression fell into despair. “You didn’t do the decoys without me, did you? You guys?”

“No, dear,” Ann said. “It’s not raining yet and we wouldn’t dream of it. Milo put the rod up, that’s all.”

“Yes!” said Hyacinth. She ran down the stairs. The baby gate caught her and made her do a graceful front flip, without once upending her nightdress.

———

“Bethany,” said the grinning blonde woman in the white nightie.

“Yes, Miss Hyacinth?” said the little pink girl with the blue crayon.

“Do you like to push buttons?”

Bethany set down her crayon, abandoned her rainbow unicorn, and nodded.

“Especially if you don’t know what they do?” said Hyacinth.

“Yeah…?” said Bethany, grinning.

Hyacinth set a modified pasteboard cigar box down on the card table. Its lid had been glued shut. A large friendly red rubber button had been set in the middle of this lid. ‘Fine Cigars’ had been scribbled out in black marker, and another word had been printed above it in bold capitals with an underline and exclamation points.

“‘Decoys,’” read Bethany.

Hyacinth straightened briefly. “Oh, you’re reading now,” she said. “Well, never mind. I know what it does and I love it anyway. Press the button.”

Bethany put three careful fingers on the big red button and pressed. It flattened with a mechanical ‘click.’

After a moment’s anticipation, while clicks and clatters answered from the basement, a swarm of garbage boiled out of the doorway beneath the sweeping staircase. There were crumpled tin cans and empty containers and glass bottles and pieces of broken crockery, and one quacking duck. Most everything had been painted and decorated with pipe cleaners, pompoms, glitter glue and googly eyes. Some pieces flew in chaotic zigzags and loop-de-loops, some of them spun like propellers, and some of them stopped and started like engines with bad alternators. Some were playing music, an orchestra of warring low-resolution boops and bips. Some were blinking lights or sparkles or altogether consumed with colored flames. An empty tissue box with glowing angel wings flapping at its sides zoomed a rapid circle around Hyacinth and Bethany’s heads, followed by a dented bottle cap with the image of a dandelion sprouting from it.

The Junkyard Armada had arrived to protect the house from wayward magic strikes — each and every conscript a ragtag misfit with multiple issues.

Ann was patiently holding the front door open for them, but many of them bapped into the front window like houseflies and headed off in the wrong direction before hitting the walls, the ceiling, or each other and correcting themselves.

“Yes!” shrieked Hyacinth, holding her arms aloft. “Fly, monkeys! Fly!”

Bethany’s manic grin faded. “Miss Hyacinth, that’s racist.”

“I have brain damage, lower your standards,” she replied reasonably, before snapping back into character, “Fly! Fly!”

A shiny chrome toaster emerged from the kitchen with a pair of red hands clamped around it.

“Come back! I’m making a club sandwich!” cried Mordecai. He hit the baby gate, bounced back into the kitchen and vanished with a thump. “Damn it!”

Three crispy browned pieces of bread popped out of the slots with such enthusiasm that they hit the dining room ceiling. Sanaam caught two of them and the third one landed on the floor. Pablo approached it. “Num!” he said.

“No, not that one! It has plaster on it!” Sanaam said.

The toaster bumbled around the front room and knocked into the banister before making its way out the door. A couple of cans and bottles followed it. They were the last. A few stray items that had been too damaged in the launch to remain airborne were flopping like fish on the floor. Ann began to collect them, cradling them in the crook of her arm. “That’s all right. There-there. We’ll fix you for the next one and you can try again!”

Calliope ran out the front door to watch the survivors deploy themselves.

“Can I go too?” said Bethany.

Hyacinth paused at the doorway and turned. “Oh, all right. Only because it’s not raining yet. Come on!” It didn’t have to be raining for there to be strikes, but with that many expendable magical items demanding attention, the yard was usually safe for a little magical girl.

“Mind the babies, sir!” Sanaam cried, vaulting after them. “I’ll only be a minute! I’ve never seen this!”

The enchanted castoffs had the glitter of diamonds against the overcast sky. The ones that didn’t light up either reflected or refracted the ones that did. They spiraled around the house like a single tentacle of an enormous fabulous octopus, and as they hit the invisible limiter of their programming, four storeys above, they began to fragment into clouds and disperse over Hyacinth’s ostensible property. There were horizontal limits as well, and when they hit those they bounced back into the yard and into each other. After almost a year of intermittent study, Milo still wasn’t sure how flies and starlings managed to swarm without crashing. Barring an illegal application of artificial intelligence, the decoys were going to function more like a roller derby than a natural wonder. Many of them fell to the ground, twitching. It was all right. They’d either right themselves or work just as well as they were.

The issue was that magic strikes just loved Erik — this had been going on ever since he got hurt. It didn’t matter that they hid him in the basement under two blankets, magic storms still wanted to cuddle up to him and give him a great big sanity-shattering hug. The quartz crystal rods, one of which was slotted into its accustomed place at the top of the cupola, were mass-produced and designed to disintegrate into a million pieces when overloaded. Milo and the General had discovered this was necessary, after some ill-advised experimentation last year. It was impossible to keep up with the breakage when you needed to climb up on the roof carrying a four-foot-long rod of solid stone. There wouldn’t have been room to store enough of them in the house, and the municipal building would’ve called the cops on Ann if she tried to walk off with a dozen boxes of rods, when a single box would last a normal shelter all season. Hence, decoys.

The decoys only functioned when there were a lot of them. Magic strikes were capricious; they could bypass a veritable storm of targets to nail some poor bastard who’d forgotten his tie had a stain-repelling charm on it. They might still nail the rod trying to get into the house and hit Erik, but when there were hundreds of other potential targets in a compact area, each strike was just as likely to divert and nail one of them. This would spectacularly destroy the enchantments and the object itself, but there were plenty more. Over the next couple months, Milo and Hyacinth would make continual repairs and additions between storms, so as to keep the maximum amount of flying magical trash in the air at one time.

But the first storm of the season was always going to be the most impressive.

Calliope laughed and applauded. Sanaam couldn’t think of a more appropriate comment and joined in. Hyacinth was still dancing around and encouraging her ‘monkeys’ to fly. Bethany rolled her eyes and shook her head.

Ann was up on the roof, sowing the decoys that hadn’t made it out of the house across the sloped tar paper like seeds, as extra insurance.

The noise in the yard was just short of deafening. It was better indoors with the doors and windows closed, and when it started to rain the beeping and shrieking faded to a background distortion that you could almost, kinda-sorta ignore — but you better not because if it got too quiet out there the magic was going to start breaking the rods again and it was time to go into panic mode. Faint irritating noises were an indication of safety!

Honestly, that was about how Hyacinth usually gauged whether things were going okay and she had adapted quickly to include beeping and shrieking with violin music, radio, clattering dishes, yelling and minor explosions as sounds of domestic tranquility.

Two women, one bright yellow and one milk white, were walking up Violena from Sabot Street, both with suitcases. The white one also had a birdcage and a hat with a droopy purple ostrich plume. The yellow one was much younger and altogether more tasteful. She stopped in her tracks, looked Hyacinth’s house up and down with horror and then turned around.

The white one caught her by the arm and spoke to her. The yellow one nodded, resigned.

Everyone in the yard was rather distracted by the flying garbage and didn’t notice them until the white one kicked over the plywood board that served Hyacinth as a gate. “Good morning! We’ve come for your shelter!” she declared.

The yellow woman was examining the sandwich board on the street, which appeared to contain the regulation symbol for a storm shelter — a black and orange pentagon with a lightning bolt. They weren’t allowed to lie about things like that, were they? It would be like forging a crosswalk. Someone would get run over and the police would put a stop to it. “I’m… I’m weighing my options,” she admitted. She gave a nervous laugh.

“She has brain damage! Lower your standards!” Bethany said.

Hyacinth patted her affectionately on the head and then shoved her aside. She cleared her throat and smoothed back her wild hair. This was a safety issue. That yellow girl could get hurt if she decided to try walking to a shelter run by a normal person. “Good morning, Bianca. Good morning, new girl. Please don’t mind me, I’m just excitable.”

“This is Miss Hauser,” Bianca said.

“Kitty,” said the yellow woman, offering a hand.

Hyacinth shook it. “I’m Hyacinth. Welcome to the nearest shelter to North Sabot Street and Poppy Lane. We don’t have any toilets or electric, but we do have a lot of free food and a workable system for keeping the magic strikes down.” She indicated the decoys. That was a reasonable explanation for the decoys, although not for why they needed to be covered in glitter and googly eyes. “Please stay with us. Is anyone else coming from the doss houses, Bianca?”

The white woman scoffed and shook her head. “You know, Mr. Olivier is still with us and he offered to pay everyone’s bus fare to the shelter on Pine. It’s just Miss Hauser and Jessica and I.” She lifted the birdcage.

Inside was a spiky yellow fruit of some kind, possibly a small melon. It was resting on folded newspaper with a wooden perch dangling above it.

“I thought Jessica was a potato,” said Hyacinth.

“Jessica is not a potato,” Bianca disdained. She brushed past Hyacinth and went inside.

“Welcome to magic season, everyone is nuts,” Hyacinth muttered. She raised her voice and smiled bravely, “Can I convince you to come inside, Kitty? It’s not so bad. We have chamber pots set up for our guests, and there’s always a lot of food because Mordecai likes to cook when he’s out of his mind.”

“Mr. Olivier warned us about the toilets, but I don’t like him very much and I do like Mrs. Taube,” Kitty said, with an air of someone reconsidering her life choices. She managed a shaky smile. “It… It’s very disorganized out here. I… I… I work in the stock room!”

“Well, if you want to sort out my shelves inside, I don’t mind, but you really shouldn’t stay out here,” Hyacinth said.

“Shelves!” Kitty said happily. She shooed a flying paper snowflake out of the way and wandered inside.

“Hang on, Kitty! You have to sing to them to get them to work!” Hyacinth called after her. “Bethany, come on!”

“I love magic season,” Calliope told Sanaam.

“Magic season at Hyacinth’s house is like a foreign country to me,” he said. “I haven’t been here in years. The people have changed a bit.”

“This is my first time!” Calliope said, grinning. She ran back inside.

Sanaam smiled grimly and clasped his hands, “Oh, boy.”

———

Kitty was happily alphabetizing the bookshelf and singing ‘I’ll Follow the Sun,’ Bethany was coloring on the dining room floor with the help of a hardcover book, and Ted and Steven were arranging the card table for the playing of cards when there came a knock at the door.

“Oh, dear,” Ann muttered, breaking away from the kitchen. “We really should have a sign. It’s open!” she cried. The invisible baby gate gave her a little extra boost and deposited her at the front door where she wanted to be, without requiring her to close the distance on foot.

“Thank you, Erik, dear!” she called, and she opened the door.

There was a slender pink gentleman in overalls on the front porch. He had short white hair, dark green eyes, and nicely manicured eyebrows. He was wearing a pair of candy apple red high heeled shoes. A rather intimidating pair of hedge clippers was dangling from a loop just below his right front pocket. He was still clutching his stamped bus pass.

“Cer… Uh. Ah. Charlie?” Ann said. Cerise was wearing her landscaping outfit. Except for the shoes. She wasn’t in any condition to pass as female in front of a roomful of strangers with various mental issues and unknown ideological ones. “Dear?”

‘Charlie’ dissolved in tears and wrapped both arms around Ann’s neck. “I don’t like the shelter on South Hollister, Annie! I don’t care about the toilets! You’re my only friend!”

“Oh, sweetheart, no, you have lots of friends!” Ann said. “It’s all right…”

“Pierre goes to the shelter on South Hollister and he is a shit!” Cerise declared. “He can’t even dance! I like Calliope, is Calliope here?” She pulled back with a weak smile. “She said I should come visit, you remember? Is she wearing her cute little trousers? You didn’t break up again, did you?”

“No, no, we didn’t,” Ann said. Technically, she had never broken up with Calliope at all, but Cerise couldn’t be expected to differentiate just now. She hugged the pink woman again, sheltering her from view. “I’m happy to have you here, darling, and she will be too. I’m just not sure what to do with you dressed like that. I think I can sneak you up to my room and loan you a dress if you want to look like yourself. Or would you rather be Charlie? There are people here who don’t know you, I don’t… I don’t want to introduce you the wrong way!” I don’t want any of them to try to hurt you for being a girl, she thought, desperately smiling.

Cerise looked down at herself. “Oh, I was going to get changed… Then I thought I’d get on the bus and I think I forgot… But these are my favorite shoes!” She stuck out one foot and turned it sideways. “See how tiny my feet look?”

“They’re lovely, dear. Really,” Ann said. “Would you like to come upstairs and borrow a dress to go with them? I have a red one.”

“I think…” Cerise said.

“Ann! Either let them in or tell them to go away!” said Hyacinth. “I’m trying to run a shelter here, I don’t need…” She did not get a chance to say ‘pamphlets or a vacuum cleaner.’

Cerise’s expression twisted. She pointed a finger. She wound up for the word like a professional pitcher aiming a fastball: “hhhhhhYOOOU!”

“Who…?” managed Hyacinth, eyeing the apparent gardener.

The apparent gardener erupted in pink flames and strode into the house, still pointing.

The mage lights stuck to the ceiling brightened and snapped out. The deck of cards which Steven had been shuffling fountained out of his hands and hung suspended in the air around him. The bookshelf fell over and landed on Kitty’s foot. She said, “Ouch!” In the kitchen, Mordecai’s chocolate soufflé fell, a split second before he could cut into it. He said, “Hey!” In the basement, Erik shuddered and drew both blankets around him when the radio crackled to life and snarled: I wanted to go to an outdoor cafe and insult people with you, you bitch!

Cerise shoved at Hyacinth’s chest with a single flaming pink hand. Hyacinth flew backwards as if she were doing a cinematic stunt, only instead of hitting a convenient airbag just off screen, she slammed into the wall beside the kitchen doorway and stuck there. Her skirt was flared out to either side, exposing her stockings, and her hair made a crispy blonde corona around her shocked face. Her shoes were dangling a foot off the floor.

She tried to step down and couldn’t. She tried to push herself away with a hand and couldn’t. The backs of both hands were affixed to the striped wallpaper, fingers splayed, and arms flung open wide.

She hung there like the old clothing Calliope had turned into wall art.

“Okay. Apparently I know you and I’ve annoyed you,” she said. She could still talk, miraculously. She wasn’t even winded.

“I’m just your fiancée, that’s all!” Cerise snapped.

“Oh,” said Hyacinth. “You don’t look half bad in drag, Cerise.”

“I look perfectly ridiculous and I know it!” cried Cerise. “Don’t try to sweet talk your way out of this! I know what you are, you… you eel in cheap shoes! You’re a… a… a bad friend!”

“I am,” said Hyacinth. “But I kinda have this storm shelter to run, so do you think you could…”

“You have an overinflated sense of self-importance!” Cerise said, pointing and still wreathed in flames. “What about my feelings? What about my needs? I can’t even talk to you!” She stamped past Hyacinth and into the kitchen. The invisible baby gate did not impede her in the least. Erik wouldn’t dare.

“I need chocolate and salty potato chips and I need it right now!” said the angry woman in the kitchen, stamping her red shoes.

Ann edged past the Hyacinth wall art with her hands raised in appeasement. “I’ll talk to her, Cin. I’ll talk to her. She’ll feel better once she’s eaten…” Ann paused and frowned. “But you know, Hyacinth, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place if you didn’t make friends with her and then abandon her. I know you have issues, but you didn’t bother to explain it to her. You wouldn’t even speak to her yourself. I had to make your excuses for you and I really do not appreciate that!”

“I really do not appreciate having this conversation when I’m glued to the wall, Ann!” said Hyacinth. “I have things I need to do!”

“Glued to the wall?” said Barnaby’s voice in the kitchen — but slightly muffled by chocolate soufflé.

“Oh, fuck me,” said Hyacinth. But all she could do was roll her eyes in anticipation.

———

Cerise was eating in the kitchen. Mordecai was cooking in the kitchen. Erik was sick in the basement. The babies were playing in the dining room. The occupant of Room 101 was silent.

Everyone else was in the front room staring at Hyacinth.

All the people whom, about an hour ago, Hyacinth had doubted could competently operate a storm shelter, were now displaying their incompetence in trying to dispose of a woman glued to a wall.

“Visually you’re just not very interesting. It’s too symmetrical. You lack depth and meaning,” Calliope said.

“I’m very sorry, dear,” Ann said. “Truly. It’s just the storm… And I am not invalidating her emotions,” she added. “She has every reason to feel injured, it’s just she’s having a bit of trouble expressing it. Her brain and her body are trying to cope with a lot more than just being upset — it’s like trying to be personable with a migraine headache! — and it’s not as if she’s hurt you, really…”

“What about a sledgehammer?” Sanaam said.

“I do not know enough about architecture to hazard a guess as to whether this is a supporting wall,” said the General.

Barnaby tutted and shook his head. “I did warn you about the wallpaper, Alice.”

“You didn’t warn me I’d be stuck to it!” snapped Hyacinth.

“I lacked context,” Barnaby replied.

“…I’m certain she’ll let you down right away once… once she’s feeling a bit better…”

“I can’t want for the storm to be over, Ann!” said Hyacinth. “What if I need to pee?”

“I will be pleased to nudge a chamber put under you, Alice,” Barnaby said, smiling. “Perhaps it will even amuse me to feed you a sandwich later!”

“If I could just pull out your skirt a little you’d look like a dancing girl…”

“Calliope, leave my goddamn dress alone!”

Maggie stood on one of the folding chairs and asked of the room at large, “Excuse me, is there anyone here who’s any good at countermagic? …And is colored,” she added, in deference to her mother. Brigadier General Glorious D’Iver would’ve experienced no difficulty whatsoever in removing Hyacinth from the wall, if not for the magic weather.

“Goddammit, what’s happened to Flo?” muttered Hyacinth. “If he were here he’d melt me out of this.”

“Mr. de la Fontaine moved away from our doss house quite some time ago and I believe he is no longer employed at the Hoppy Frog,” said Bianca Taube, with the birdcage. “They have posted a sign in their window saying they no longer serve colored people, so I doubt they employ them.” She nodded curtly. “Their lunch specials were quite reasonable. He used to come to our table and say hi.”

Hyacinth’s hope boiled out of the doors not unlike the decoys. The other ex-medic whom she could count on in an emergency and who had a fighting chance of peeling her off the wall wasn’t coming! She struggled briefly, not that you could tell, then cried out, “Doesn’t anyone know how to work materials at least?”

“I think I could get those stains out of your stockings If I tried, Hyacinth,” Maria offered her.

“I call Maria my ancient Xinese secret!” Steven said proudly. “Anything that I can’t get out with solvent!”

“Iliodarian,” Maria demurred.

“Mrs. Toussaint, I have a suit jacket that desperately needs your attention,” Barnaby said.

“Steve, can you do anything like starch on this skirt?” Calliope said.

“Everybody stop helping me right now! You’re all idiots and you’re going to burn my house to the ground out of sheer stupidity!” shrieked Hyacinth, vibrating like a taut string.

Kitty dropped a book about Marselline birds and began to weep. “I was only trying to get it organized!”

“Oh, dear, no, you’re doing very well!” Ann said. She put both arms around the yellow woman and spared a brief glance back in Hyacinth’s direction, “And you wonder why everyone leaves?”

“We gave you breakfast,” Calliope said with a frown. She walked into the kitchen. Even the baby gate didn’t do anything interesting.

“Hyacinth, I understand,” Sanaam said. He laid a careful hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. We don’t need to work on this right here.” He gathered his wife and daughter and returned to the dining room with the babies.

Barnaby clapped his hands. “Well! You seem to have sorted that, Alice! You know where I’ll be if you want a chamber pot or any help burning down the house!” He ducked into the kitchen too.

Hyacinth hung on the wall, alone and unattended. “We are all doomed,” she muttered, unheard.