Page 17 of Potion Sickness

Hannah looks at Addie for a moment, then puts her palms against the wall, listening. “Huh,” she says.

She snaps a chalk line and cuts an arched doorway into the castle with a jigsaw while the girls provide unsolicited engineering commentary. I hold the offcut, and when the arch is cut and sanded and the wall goes back up on its feet, it stands, and it stands without a lean.

“It’ll still get braces before dress,” Hannah says, circling it, suspicious of her own success. “I don’t trust a wall that changed its mind. But that’s… yeah. Huh.”

“You’re welcome,” says Lily.

“For what?”

Lily points. The arch’s right-hand edge sits directly beside the lime green stone, aligned at doorway’s foot like a threshold marker.

“The magic stone,” Lily says. “It’s how you get in. I told you.”

* * *

The Byways piece is due at midnight, and I am working with the most difficult editor of my entire career.

“Read me the part about me again,” Englebert says.

He’s sitting on the table, his eyes just above the level of my laptop screen. He’s forgiven the household for the sunbeam tribunal, or, more accurately, he has ‘elected to rise above it’, which he continues to mention at frequent intervals.

“‘A source close to the production,’” I read, “‘describes the company as the finest ensemble assembled in Vermont in a generation.’”

“Good. And the other one.”

“‘The same source confirms the production observes every theatrical tradition, including the venerable prohibition on speaking the play’s name —a rule enforced, quote, ‘without exception and without mercy.’’”

“Without exception and without mercy,” he repeats, savoring it. “You may file.”

“Thank you.”

“The attribution is airtight?”

“You are a source close to the production. It’s technically true, and no one will be suspicious. Nobody reading a local interest magazine is going to think the source is a talking cat.”

“Their loss,” Englebert says. “Posterity will sort it out.”

I file the piece sometime after nine. Somewhere between the send and the confirmation email, Englebert relocates to the windowsill — the evening sill, the west one, which remains uncontested territory, a fact he has confirmed twice today — and Maude installs himself on the table, exactly in the spot Englebert just vacated.

The last candle is still on the table where Annabel left it. Her parting instruction was to not practice tonight. To just look at it while I do something else. To let it get used to me.

At some point, Maude crosses the table and plops directly on top of it.

Attempt fifteen can wait.

CHAPTER 5

The New England Byways article goes up online, ahead of print, early in the morning the next day under the headline ‘THE SCOTTISH PLAY COMES TO DUSKBORO’.

By noon it’s been shared to the town Facebook group multiple times. Most of the comments are arguing about whether the parking situation can handle success. By two o’clock, Vivian calls to inform me — or, really, to inform Englebert — that opening night has sold out. By four, so has Saturday. Within twenty-four hours, there’s a waiting list for all showings. A woman from Burlington offered Dorcas forty dollars for her comp tickets. My editor sent an email with the subject line ‘MORE!!’ in which she proposes that I write a short daily blog for the magazine’s website in the run-up to opening night. ‘Countdown to Curtain’ she wants to call it. Behind-the-scenes color, she says. The curse stuff killed.

Readers love the cat. Of course, they don’t know that he’s a talking cat, or that he’s been alive for the better part of a century. They know him as a perfectly regular cat who happens to live in the Community Center. The readers love the cat regardless.

The cat knows the readers love him. That’s the problem. He won’t stop gloating.

“You’re doing the blog,” Pru says. She’s at my kitchen table again, eating the last cinnamon bun from a box Dorcas sent home with her. “It’s money.”

“It’s twenty dollars a day.”