Midnight Sonata

By Michael Cain

"Do I know Stacey's parents?" Hayden could hear the click of a lighter and the intake of breath as her mother lit her cigarette on the other end of the telephone connection.

"Yes. You met them at the Stowe basketball game."

"Really?"

"Yes. Stacey's mom was stamping hands..."

"Oh," Grace said, "the woman with the horrid frosted hair and sea green nails..."

"Yes, Mother..."

"... and beige .... well, beige everything?"

Grace could be so mean sometimes. Hayden looked over at Mrs. Rankin, grateful she couldn't hear what her mother had just said. The nails were a dull pink now, and she had adopted pastels for her summer wardrobe — but they were still dull! But her mother was wrong about her hair. Hayden liked it, so light and wispy — never a follicle out of place.

"Yes, her." Hayden said. "So it's okay, right?"

The only sounds she could hear from her mother's end of the connection were the wind chimes on the front porch. They were there to ward off evil spirits but alienated the neighborhood instead.

"Mom?" Please, please, please! God damn it! Don't make me beg. Hayden cringed at her own slip. She had stopped calling her Mom two months earlier. It sickened her to have said it, even under duress.

"All right. But don't eat any sugar or red meat..."

"Okay. Bye." Hayden precisely hung up on her mother before she said anything more.

She looked around at Mrs. Rankin's kitchen. Stacey was so lucky to have a mom like her: Normal, sweet, neat, organized, cheerful and always there for her family. Mrs. Rankin's kitchen reflected all these attributes: sparkling clean and clutter free. Even the walls spoke volumes, freshly painted the most lovely shade— a cool, creamy key lime green — like a dessert.

Hayden envied Stacey her family. Her beautiful and competent mother, not to mention her handsome and successful father. Mr. Rankin was the best looking father in town and a successful accountant to boot, with his own firm and associates underneath him.

Hayden wished every day since she'd first met Stacey's family that they would adopt her.

"And what would you like to drink?" Mrs. Rankin asked. She had a way of smiling the moment she laid eyes on you, as if you'd just won a prize, or maybe that you were the prize.


Not that life with Hayden's Mother was all that bad. Especially for the twelve years before she knew what normal was. No, before that she had lived in blissful ignorance. She thought that everyone wore used clothes, that no one had a television, that everyone had a house full of cats, that not having a father was the norm. And that everyone's mother was a witch. Right?

Not that Hayden's mother had magic powers. She just had odd ways, ways her mother had taught to her, as far back Hayden could fathom.

Hayden's mother had taught these ways to her, too. About nightshade and Belladonna. About violets grown on the windowsill, for happiness, and ginger and mint grown by the gate of the garden for good luck. She taught her about the wind, about dreams and nightmares, of how the rays of the full moon could tickle and soothe and even heal.

When she was very young, Hayden and her mother had lain out on beach blankets, naked, no shame at all, under the glow of the moon. Now, at the age of twelve, Hayden couldn't imagine doing that again.

Grace also taught her to look for signs in everything. How to pick them out and what they might mean (for every sign had more than just one meaning).

And until then, Hayden hadn't concerned herself at all with the way her mother supported them financially. She just knew she was sought after for her talents, and that people paid for her advice. She read tea leaves, tarot cards, did palmistry, and could even divine the sex of an unborn baby with a short length of string and the mother's wedding band. (For unwed mothers, she would place a cat's eye marble at the top point of their stomach and let go. It didn't matter which way the marble rolled; it was the way it rolled that told Hayden's mother what she wanted to know.)

She didn't do love spells, though. Instead, she gave out sunflower seeds. They were from her own garden, and she told young women to place one seed in the shoe of the man they wanted to marry. Unfortunately, for some women, they were more than just skeptical; they would intentionally place the seed in the shoe of the most unattractive or hated man they knew. Invariably, though, a year latter you would read in the Review about their impending nuptials.

It was Grace's best spell. For the sunflower seeds were dipped in dove's blood and then kissed by a broken-hearted woman — namely herself.