For an ETERNITY that passed in the next minute I thought that she might kill me, but then she spat out this big laugh and said, “Oh, it’s on, witch,” and she said “witch” exactly like she meant “bitch” so I decided that I liked her. I traded her a Percocet for cigarettes and that sealed the deal. Trans solidarity is fucking BEAUTIFUL.
We went outside to smoke. Everything on the grounds was crammed together on a slip of a sandbar with the dormitory and a shed back toward mainland and this menacing black lighthouse called The Sin Seer at the far rocky precipice over the sea. One more big hurricane and the whole place was obviously going down like frown. The church itself even looked like an overturned ship with this massive wooden arch and stained glass porthole windows. Once upon a time people made boats AND buildings this close to the water out of wood which seems insane because I’m pretty sure wood melts???
Bert and I sucked through half a pack and watched the waves flop on the thin, clumpy, petrified “beach” until that flaccid support group got out and dispersed like an infection. Apollo or Olive Garden looked at me and started to come over. They waved and smiled, in the way of sick confused little children who run back towards conflict because it gives them meaning, and I thought, what the hell: life is short, treasure moments of radical vulnerability and speaking my truth, so I tossed down my cigarette and flipped them off with BOTH of my hands.
Bert and I got to talking some more. We had very different kinds of terrible lives and not really too much in common but she NEVER once called me valid, THANK GOD, and that’s why we were best friends.
I didn’t like to spend a lot of my days off work at Fatima’s hanging around Our Lady of Good Voyage because it bummed me the fuck out. There was a huge dark painting of Mary in the chapel. Everything about the picture was severe. The clouds looked like packing foam and the folds of her blue cloak were rigid as a bendy straw. It made me miss my mom and feel bad about my abortions.
Father Gaspren said all that stuff about a totally accepting and welcoming community but he still had all these posters outside his office about “forgiveness” for all the shit people do to their own selves. One HUGE purple one with a crying lady on it gave a number and a website for a “Christ-Is Pregnancy Center” and you know what it even advertised “grief counseling for men” but SOMEHOW I KNEW that they didn’t mean me, a man who terminated a fetus or two in my day and maybe HYPOTHETICALLY could be interested in counseling from all the GRIEF everybody gave me about it! Like if people NEED TO BE FORGIVEN for their own private business then they aren’t really being taken exactly as they are SO WHICH ONE WAS IT?
I was at Sunday Mass feeling sorry for myself and not allowed to nibble the bread or sip the wine and NERVOUS because that week Father Gaspren found and confiscated my drugs and I was staring at the Sad Mom Painting and the horde of sweaty parishioners praised and prayed along when Father Gaspren announced the end of a partnership between the local diocese and a tenant’s rights group because of their “lack of support for the unborn.”
“There is a tragic sense of lost opportunity,” he said. There sure was! Even the free donuts and coffee would not fill up the bottomless pit of lost opportunities going down in Our Lady of Good Voyage.
Bert looked plain bored. I whispered to her, “Let’s go literally anywhere else that isn’t here,” and she nodded, arms crossed like the opposite of crucifixion, and we strode out from the room not even pretending we had to pee or anything. I told her, “I have a new activity plan. Let’s hex the gentry.”
Bert shook her head. “Won’t dignify that mumbo jumbo.”
I explained that a good hex requires objects that have had a lot of direct contact with the intended victim, which meant helping me gather supplies also meant I’d show her some especially good residential trash picking spots. THAT at least was secular enough for her, plus she got an unopened pair of socks out of it. Meanwhile I got all the sneaky little personal items I could find, and we took the spoiled spoils back to the eroded beach outside Our Lady and I drew a ring in the crappy sand and placed the junk within it.
“Circle of rubble; refuse of gentries,” I chanted. “Now I set my intention.”
Bert frowned harder than normal.
“A curse on every opulent flip, eviction renovation, up-and-coming investors-take-notice neighborhood renewal, be it by land, sea, or sky. May the benefactors, be they knowing or unknowing, have bathroom doors that open the wrong way and get banged up on the sink.”
“Heh.”
“May their desalinators break in the middle of a feast day. May they forget their passcodes and microwave their dermal chips and replacement is a lengthy and costly process. May their virtual assistants transcribe them wrong in all sensitive matters and sext their bosses. May they discover as each light breaks—no wait, I have a better one than that: may all their sentient vacuums and talking dishwashers and robot nannies malfunction and need parts that are no longer in production.”
“Leave the robots alone,” Bert muttered.
“What should it matter who I curse? I thought you didn’t believe in any of it anyway.”
“Leave them alone even in your delusions.”
“Bert, you used to be a trucker!”
“Still a trucker.”
“Well you’d still be driving A TRUCK if you hadn’t been replaced with a machine.”
Bert sat down on the rocks.
“Machine didn’t take my rig. They don’t take nothing from nobody. They do what they’re set in motion to do.”
“See, that’s what I’m saying. The just-following-orders thing is why everything is so terrible. Everyone cries automaton.”
“Thought about getting a few augments myself, just little cyborg stuff like new driving ankles, but I never had the money.”
“Yeah, but that’s different.”
“How’s it?”
“Cause THAT’S extremely cool.”
“I worked sixteen-hour days every day, and robots can do twenty-four straight. Nothing wrong with that. No self-driving semi ever called me a he-she or pulled a knife out to ‘show me’ at a rest stop. My navigator was good at getting us where we needed to go and had a no-bullshit attitude built right into her. Nah, I like computers.”
She kicked at the garbage circle.
“It was a person who had me finance the thing myself just to get the gig,” she added. “And it was a person that seized it right along with all I’d paid when I couldn’t afford a repair. It don’t matter if they replaced me with a living spaceship or a fleet of oxen. A person set it up that way and a person followed through so it was people that did that to me.”
“Bert, you should be, like, an organizer.”
“Oh, there’s a mass movement, all right. Industry is banding together to make it illegal for anyone more’n half machine to do their crap jobs so they can have their crap jobs back exactly the way they were.”
“Hm.” It all made sense now. “You have hatched us a much better scheme then curses. The intention of this spell needs to be more potent.”
“I did not say that.”
I snuck over to the church offices and stole the entire Christ-Is Pregnancy Hotline poster and brochure box and ran them back to the circle before anyone had time to notice. I rolled some up like proper witchy herb bundles and Bert was pissed but then once she read what they were she held out her lighter. We lit them all for ceremony and then we added little sticks and drift junk until we had a proper bonfire going. It started to drizzle grease but every drop that fell near us poofed right up. While an INDIVIDUAL witch such as myself does not have the power to halt or reverse the world’s ills, we did do that one TOGETHER, so it was a VERY powerful spell.