Thus, such, and so prepared with sufficient context, we redirect our attention to the evening which was consequent of our lesson riding, and the sky-glider: which flew as foretoken of ends we could not (as of yet) divine.

My hair was clean and cut. Auntie Mabel Jeminee had (as even with one hand, she was most nimble to the task) set to me with her left and the fine set of shears: bronze-shine-sharp and fit only for special occasions. I approved of the preciseness and dark of my mullet; with its trim sides and full trailing curtain, I thought I struck a genteel appearance on the whole. The color of my eyes had the soot-brown look of bistre (against my preference), but my chin was strong, and my skin pink from good hot water and the scrub of the ox-bristle brush. By that same treatment, the whole of my organism was steeped with the medicinal aroma of rosemary, garderobe, and anise hyssop.

To some degree, I had come to think it natural to consider dust to be a constituent and necessary layer of the epidermis. So, standing at the face of a tarnishing vanity mirror in my Aunties’ narrow powder-closet, I buttoned up the cuffs on my finest white shirt and did my utmost to overcome the sensation of having been stripped of a necessary part of me. I resisted the urge to muss the civilization from my combed hair, or to paw through the lilliput chorus of glass bottlettes which contained my Aunties’ preservatives, restorations, and beauticaments. Though it was none of my business to notice, some of those colors (I could swear) had been forbidden.

Well, if they had their secrets, I might as well make a few of mine.

“Ma’am, I’ll have need of a jacket, I do believe,” I shouted through the closed door. “Mine is not so fine, and I’ve since outgrown the velvet for sake of Coop.”

“I know we have the tweed and the grey!” Auntie Seung-Hee’s hollered reply was near to the loudness of regular (which we ought call modal) conversation, and I leaned my ear towards the shut door to receive it.

Once her footsteps convinced me I’d at last delivered myself from the terminal of my minders, I cleared a narrow space on the bureau with a rattle of clinks and hiked up my satchel with a grunt of effort. The bag had endured some past attention from gnawing moths, but it was endeared to me by its good firm canvas, precise seams, and possession of a wide aperture. From there, I unpacked my preparations while my heart fluttered in doubts of inventory.

There was nothing in the world which I lacked more grievously than fresh, unmarked writing paper, and so the broad and uneven notebook I produced first was taupe and jaundice from the skin of various piglets, calves, fawns and ewes. Some pages had different sizes, and they were all secured at so bitter a cost that I might not afford to square them neatly. It was not unfair to say I had bled my barters into the securement of vellum with a proportional dependency that my cousin had achieved her nicotine, and I treated the cord-bound volume with reverence and a minute parsimony of handwriting: such not to squander the lives butchered and stretched to receive my alphabet.

From habit, I lovingly curled a page corner to reveal a peep of ink, then let it free to withdraw a blue-buckram and paperboard hardback; in contrast to my own stationery of horrors, its bright, copper-powder ink type winked as it slid from its carrier. I set down the fat mythology and stacked it up with slender accompaniments, dense critiques of the Hellenic classics and one translation of Levantine poetry which was contemporary to the smelt of iron. Strips of torn news and scrap paper hung like fronds from my books, a thick foliage of notes and addendum.

What else had I’d have packed? I remember a sad cluster of withered olives out of season. I’d also have tried to concoct a substitute for sea-brine, as I recall pitching out a jar of saline as failure. Surely, there was more?

Ah, bird feathers in particular, were a disappointment. We had such stacks of duck plumage in overabundance, packed (and likely rotting) in cellar drawers, with grouse and pheasant and turkey, and some pinions of a falcon that smelt a wisp of ‘Vader cinnabar. But we did not have owl that I knew of, and nothing less would do.

But my ink! Ah, I’d not appreciated how true and sacred a treasure that was. Auntie Hektor’d helped me mix it for my birth-day: with powder from the char of duck-fat lamps, slaughtered ox-bones, and iron-salt stripped from the graves of sport-utility-vehicles. To that, she’d stewed a gall from a dryad in holler berry-wine to the point of foulness, and we bound them all with knuckle-joint glue, flax-oil, and the white of a goose’s first winter egg.

How many rayles must have been hidden in those phials without my knowing? Good glory, there was a time I might gladly lose a finger off at the joint in exchange for such a pregnant substance. Anne Hektor of all people must have known its value, a woman of her cunning and art? She must have.

Well I laid down one glass jar of that ink in solvent, a sharp quill, and lastly every brittling yellow copy of El Chisme del Pueblo I’d come and kept to own. Though my cumulation was weighty enough in sum, I could not bring myself to be satisfied. As I packed them all neatly away again until the strain of my satchel, I regretted the void of every cubic inch which a sharper man might’ve sought and supplied with the proper votivery.

But the hour of my appointment would not wait for me longer. I pushed the door open into the ladies’ common, which was a large open room that had been partitioned with curtains and folding screens. Vibrant fabrics hung across and over dividers, and in folded bales atop stray furnitures. Thick carpets were stacked in layers across the floor. I could, where the ceiling stretched further than the temporary walls, spot various decorations and conveniences that my Aunties had affixed for their comfort or pleasure.

“I am ready, Ma’am,” I called out, with the strap of my bag digging into my shoulder.

Seung-Hee Kim was a woman of resolute and determined strength. She did not possess the bright flash of character of the sort which demanded attention, but she was instead driven by a grim and tenacious optimism. Momma had once told me Seung-Hee reminded her of the old country, and the Orthodox conviction of its peasantry.

Even in her compliments, I swear sometimes, Momma had not the sight to see she was being unkind.

Anyway, my Auntie appeared again, galumphing in from the hall with a selection of suit-jackets which she held up high and in a count in excess of her promise. “You look so handsome,” she declared. “And you’re getting so tall! Taller than me, now. Yep.”

She thrust my options forward and I picked out an unfamiliar single-breasted navy wool coat. The tweed was a class of its own, with darling leather patches at the elbows, but was a poor match for my slacks. The grey was serviceable and proper. But I was in a mood for blue and felt its rightness, and draped the article over my arm. Then she planted a kiss in the air to the right of my cheek and delivered a jolly kick to my rump, and so ejected me from the room and out of the house.

I debarked from the foot of the stair, and Saleena Jeminee waved to me with her dustpan as I passed and so unhappily undid her chore. Cooper Hektor looked up to me from sharpening a knife in the sundry overflow, though I could not spare the time to wonder or worry why he was left without a minder. Auntie Vaunda laid out bowls onto the dining room table; she swayed as she did to the steps of a dance that only she could remember, and singing softly from four letter words I ought not repeat.

Then I passed out of the back door into early dusk and wide sky and the company of Ms Anne Hektor. She was sat on a high-back chair aside the entry, with her dress carefully hiked to her shins to avoid the wood bucket that was between her shoes and full of dark phenolic sludge. Rows of tins filled with muted powders were open along the rungs of a low folding ladder beside her. With a frown and her grey hair tied back practically, she mouthed as she read from a neat, yarn-bound square notebook of uniform parchment.

“Oh great goodness,” Ms Hektor groaned as she caught sight of me and the tilt by which I supported my burden, and she set her journal down. “You and my daughter, both.”

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist to avoid her hands. Then she took her book back up and waved me off.

“We’ve only got six in the tabernacle. Assuming you know what you’re doing, and if you’ve conjured up someone we don’t know, just make sure to add their sign to the icons.”

“Ma’am,” I schooled my features as the best I could, which is to say: as much a camouflage as stripes on snow.

Auntie Hektor screwed a look on her face like she’d sipped from her own bucket. “Go on then,” she dispelled me, “just know that if you commit at cross-odds to Her Lady, there’ll be hell to pay. Trust you’ll be savvy to know that.”

With a “yes, ma’am” to excuse myself, I continued up the back hill and across fresh threshed grass. The hands laid it out sometimes near the house to combat the dust, though they were proscribed from such favors during any hour in which Auntie Vaunda enjoyed her sunbathing.