Mail Order Magic

“Obia wa sodo mi

mu oro ati ere fun mi

gbẹsan ati—”

“I think it’s fún wa”

“Are you seriously correcting my Yoruba right now? When the hell did you become fluent?”

“Your agba always liked me more.”

“My god I’m quaking at your linguistic genius. Oh wait, no I must be thinking of someone else since you just called my grandma a barrel. It’s iya agba.”

“Stopppp you call gran, mother barrel? That means I can call you baby barrel from now on?”

“Would you shut—”

“Oh my little barrelette I always knew you couldn't be so round and plank-like for nothing.”

“I am going to k—”

“Enough! My ass is starting to freeze to the ground and if you two don’t stop bickering like a couple of old hags I’m going to break the circle and curse us forever in exchange for my car’s heated seats. Capeesh?”

To be fair my cheeks did feel like they were solidifying and molding to the frosted patch of moss we’d decided was perfectly ritualistic. But interrupting was more for the preservation of friendship than any real concern about the spell. The correction Lucy made in her translation seemed hopeful but wrong. Ecy had ment mi not wa because that was how her brain worked, she thought only in first person me not us or we or even you. And Lucy and I knew this, yet as we aged the acceptance of her selfishness got harder and harder to rationalize.

Ecy’s grandmother had emigrated from South-West Africa in the 50s so she wouldn’t be imprisoned for giving birth to a half white baby during apartheid. She’d taught us all a sprinkling of Yoruba along with the folklore that inspired us to start our evening witchy group meetups out in the backwoods of Ecy’s property. I had hoped some of gran’s selflessness would rub off over time but so far the only characteristic she seemed to have inherited was an interest in the supernatural.

“Let's just finish the chant and bury this dickbag’s jersey.”

“Fine, now no interruptions. I have got to repeat it five times otherwise my asscheeks will have gotten frostbite for nothing.”

“Obia wa sodo mi

mu oro ati ere fun mi

gbẹsan ati ogo…”

Obia come to me

Bring me wealth and reward

Revenge and glory

I opened my eyes on the second chant expecting to roll them in solidarity with Lucy’s at our chantress’s unchanged tune, ready to voicelessly mimic “me, me, me” across the shallow pit to one another. Instead her eyes were closed as well so I found myself, like an atheist at a Thanksgiving family prayer, open eyed and gazing round at my friend’s faces stilled in concentration. The freckled button nose and circular slightly pinch-faced brunette in front of me and the muttering chestnut-skinned dread haired girl to my left both sat unmoving as I peered around. Perhaps my disbelief would ruin the spell but honestly, how could a handful of Yoruba words and the burying a mildewy jersey curse someone?

Inhaling deeply and trying not to sigh the cool air from my lungs I watched the aspens swaying in the last of their golden shrouds. The one lane dirt road leading down to the house lay about a thousand feet off and Lucy’s orange prius shown like a beacon, a conductor of color as the foliage fell, skirting the tires. Frost coated everything, even our rising breath misting the air, being swept away to join the leafage sporadically dancing to autumn’s final encore. On the last chant my eyes find the paper near my thigh and I smile slightly at the instructions we’d glanced over five minutes before, the blood from a paper cut I’d gotten when pulling out the rule book still staining a corner. Leaning over to see better I read the small print by the red blotch,

“Sacrifices not provided:

*please provide two human sacrifices and the blood of the spell recipient.”

Ummmm, what?

But before I could continue reading, Ecy uttered the last “ati ogo” and all my blood seeped from the page. I watched in confusion as the paper shriveled, absorbed by damp moss and I heard for the first time the lurching step of the thing we had summoned.

5 minutes before:

“How can you not want to read the instructions?”

“My glistening generational intuition that's why. I don’t need direction when I’m manifesting this hard. Besides, we didn't use instructions for the spell jars.”

“That's because we were putting some herbs and rocks in jars. Throwing some rose quartz and dried rose petals together sealed with wax is a bit different than summoning the actual Devi—”

“Oh please we are not summoning the Devil, iya agba said the Obia was just a malevolent spirit who took sought out revenge for the summoner—”

“Just a malevolent spirit, well now, let me pull out my Thesaurus and oh would you look at that. You just defined. The. Devil. And I think you left out the little bitty part where it skins people and wears them like COATS.”

“Soooo dramati—”

“And AND the spell jar for love, which you didn’t follow the directions for, ended up bringing Jake into your life. The very dick who we’re currently hexing the shit outta because he shared your nudes with half the school!”

“Do not bring He Who Shall Not Be Named into this sacred space. If your so gung ho about the damn instruction why don’t you shove them up—”

“Okay both of you shut up, I’m reading them right now. Ouch!”

In yanking the paper out from inside the cardboard box it’d been sent in I had slit my thumb deep enough to douse the lower right corner of the page with bright red blood. I switched the paper to my other hand and stuck the thumb in my mouth like a toddler.

“Daumn.”

“You alright Deena?”

“Ya fine, can you read this Lucy?”

“Wow why are there so many pages? Since when do mail order curses come with this many details? Where’d you even get this?”

“Saw what I thought was a prank pop up ad in my iya agba’s email—”

“Why were you going through gran’s emails?”

“She asks me to clear her inbox sometimes, get off my back Lucille. It was right after the Lord Asshole incident and so I followed the ad to some Jamaican website selling Obia curses and bingo bongo—”

“Did you even ask gran about this? You know how she feels about blood magic.”

“It’s not blood magic—”

“How bout we read the basics and figure out what is needed then. Lucy, please?”

“Welp to summarize we pick someone we want harm to ‘fall upon’ and say what we want from them.”

“Guys, guys, I’m not an idiot. I skimmed the first page and already have the spell lined up. We’re wishing for Jake to break something important and preferably permanent and to get all his money. I mean do you have any idea how much this trust fund prick has? Everything’s been checked off; the shallow pit, at least three practitioners, and an item from ‘whom the revenge is sought upon’. Triple checked ladies, trust me.”

5 minutes later:

The phrase “trust me” is rippling through my head like echoes over an iced pond, stunningly loud in the cavern of my mind, now empty of all thought except for what I’m now watching move across the road.

He, or it, though the thing had a burly body clothed in what appeared like the old camo of a hunter, moved as if he had a limp. Yet with each side-scrap of the foot he lurched forward, tipping almost to the angle where a faceplant seemed inevitable before whipping the other foot around to catch himself. A strange four beat waltz across the gravel of shkk-shkk-shkk-dun, the dragging coming in pulsating movements before the final heavy step. At first in the shuffle of leaves you didn’t notice the speed, rustling sounding to the side-tracked ear as merely nearby leaves jumping amongst each other. But on the barren dirt and gravel the step was alien, so wrong in its repetition and pace you couldn’t help but look towards the sound.

The thing hurling itself quickly, so quickly, towards us hunched over and then looked up for the first time. Stared right at us and I could see it’s, his, flaking face. No eyes in the sockets, no nose over bone and yet he stood still and seemed to see us where we sat and the skin of his lips flaked off as he barred the black expanse of protruding teeth and inhaled through them, as if to taste the air. No longer able to gaze at his face and trying to slowly detach my hands from the clasp of my friends, my eyes found the widened stone grasped in the thing’s gangly gnarled paw. Long and flat it appeared like a medieval tool I’d once seen in a museum labeled under flaying knives.

As he jolted forward again I moved too, wrenching my hands out of their holds, trying to shake Ecy and Lucy to get them to move, to even open their eyes but they were still as death, rooted to the cold ground as if in a trance.

Breathing hard, I yanked Lucy up by the arms attempting to drag her away, wake her up in any way but there was no budging, not the slightest move. Like newly grown stone the friends I’d known since 4th grade became inanimate, locked into place by whatever horrible mail ordered spell we had just cast and I was alone. Time slowed to the shkk-shkk-shkk-duun of the slouched creature no more than a hundred feet beyond me and I thought of the kid in the Andes who bore the weight of his friend for an hour before cutting the rope. How long could I bear the weight? Could I fight it off? With what, for how long? Were my friends still even alive in their frozen sightless trance and if they were, wouldn’t we all die anyway?

So I cut the rope. I ran hard, through the brush and downed trees, slipping on aspen leaves slick with hoar frost. I hadn’t noticed but when the last words were uttered it’s footsteps became more obvious because every other sound had stoped. Not one leaf fell as I ran, not one horned owl cried. The forest held its breath as night came too early and the chill claimed the air, burning my lungs with each inhale. Light from Ecky’s house glared, guiding me to safety but as my legs pounded back onto the road, gaining traction, getting close enough to smell the woodsmoke, I heard a voice. In my ear and yet with the distant raspy echo of a lost soul it said;

The blood bound sacrifice

Was given for another’s wish

Now I bind myself to you

Till your dying wish comes true.

Rushing in I hugged iya agba tight, sobbing and gasping for breath, shaking in her arms. I tilted my temple to her shoulder hoping for some explanation to find me, an excuse to give her, a kind of prayer for a god I knew not of who’d undo the evil we had just brought into the world. Looking up, I saw as

her mouth peeled at the corner.