2. Just Think How Sane We’d Be if it Weren’t for the Heat #4
“Alistair is a doo,” JR said, holding the flapping pigeon out to me with astounding …
I don’t even know what to call it. Unlike me, JR was almost never sarcastic or condescending—qualities I’d learned from my mother.
“It’s another word for a pouter pigeon. Well—” JR paused, fluorescing a bit pink. “Alistair is a pygmy pouter, actually.”
“So there are other kinds?” I didn’t actually care about Alistair, but the effort to try to imagine the outline of a person who did was a reasonable achievement on my part, given that JR wasn’t supposed to work that day but would have to take over for me if I headed out for my audition.
Then JR said many things I couldn’t possibly be expected to remember about the various kinds of pigeons and why Alistair was specifically intended to lure a mate, something I audibly voiced felt problematic. “It’s consensual,” JR assured me. For efficiency reasons, I said sure.
I did not know then the amount of time JR would ultimately spend handwringing about Alistair’s size and/or scouring the sky, which was apparently the point of pigeon seduction.
I was busy with inventory, which included a lot of candles I’d grudgingly shot promo for the previous day in exchange for not being harangued to the point of insanity.
So far, with my mother’s attempts to augment the mystical aspects of the store’s offerings, the primary draw remained functionally the same: Tita Linda.
She and Grandma had always worked the store together—two chismosas on the proverbial front porch, gossip that was only circumstantially foretelling.
Now, Mom called these sessions “readings,” and she charged per minute, to make up for the rent that Tita Linda otherwise ignored.
Who could say how accurate the readings were, or whether there was inherently some fraudulence at play in commodifying the mystic?
Certainly not in Tita Linda’s mind; she believed in her own proximity to the supernatural without a hint of doubt.
It had been Grandma and Tita Linda who told me I would be a star, that my destiny was ripe for the taking, a sweet and tempting fruit.
In my mother’s mind, a specific fruit: the apple from Eden.
She had always resented that I chose to believe them over her.
After a while, as noon came and went and then one and two, I gave up a little on my phone.
A few people stopped in to poke around, asking to use the bathroom (CUSTOMERS ONLY!
read my mother’s sign), chatting with me about the weather, pondering sage’s effectiveness at aural cleansing (I was a skeptical believer, meaning I performed my grandmother’s rituals without any faith in their efficacy but performed them nonetheless, which was functionally the same as being a believer).
JR had temporarily calmed Alistair and was researching something called a “doocot” on the internet, specifically how to build one (he should have been reading something about how to convince my mother to love a pigeon in the first place, though admittedly that was niche).
I was sorting the crystals and dusting the jewelry we kept up at the counter next to the sign that read TAROT READINGS SPECIAL!
PAST PRESENT FUTURE $20 in my mother’s painstaking calligraphy when a gust of wind blew the front door open, like someone opening the jaws of fate.
The door never shut all the way unless it was latched, so it usually just flapped like an open mouth, yawning whenever it saw fit.
But this particular gust was a scream, followed by a burst of air so dry and hot it almost felt imaginary, like the beginnings of a coma or transcendence from this plane.
I wandered over to close it, observing the way the heat rose off the asphalt in the distance, like a cartoon vision of an oasis. I distinctly remember feeling like the coyote right before the anvil came down.
“Anya Morris?” someone called out to me as I was struggling to shut the door against another burst of wind.
There were dead palm fronds littering the street, a pile of leaves already forming at the cove where the door had flung open, the tinkle of shop bells frantic and shrill.
Sometimes when the wind blew like that I got a feeling of severe unease, like something undetectable was coming.
My grandma always said the full moon made people crazy—only marginally less so than the Santa Ana winds.
My heart was pounding, unrelated to anything really, just the frankness of the wind, the utter everywhereness of the heat.
There weren’t too many other sensations like that, the kind where the Could I Survive It?
game depended so heavily on outlasting an unsurvivable condition.
Not clotting a wound or adjusting, but simply enduring.
It had nothing to do with the person calling out to me, though I couldn’t have known then what that coincidence would set in motion.
The way that it all just blew in with the wind.