Spellcasting
By Claire Cao
I. The Shaman
During those early years, we made monthly trips to see The Shaman. Gifts filled the boot of the silver Toyota Camry: crates of pomelos, giant tubs of chicken salad. My twin Alan and I were relegated to watermelon duty, its hulking body sitting across our laps in the backseat, insides sloshing at every turn. After a thirty-minute drive (or a syrupy dream of streaking tar and curses flung out of windows in three dialects) we arrived in Stratty.
The Shaman lived in an oblong brick house, shrouded in tangles of white roses. Before we could reach the door, he would have already swung it open—just standing there, grandfather-clock tall, with his dandelion-fluff hair and rickety beige teeth. To kiss our cheeks, he had to bend clean in half. ‘Children, children,’ he greeted, ushering us into the foyer.
I remember that house better than I remember most faces. Vast carpet, pinkish and plush like an anemone; tall, severe wooden furniture, carved to resemble dragons and chimeric winged felines. A manicured yard with a hand-hewn birdcage at its centre, doors flung open because the lorikeets and Indian ring-necks knew to return by dusk.
For the longest time I called The Shaman ‘Gong Gong’ until Alan overheard and yapped with laughter.
‘Helloooo?’ He rapped on my skull twice. ‘Our grandpas are dead. Dude’s just a matchmaker that gave Ma and Ba cash to move here.’
‘How d’you know that?’ Our parents rarely told personal stories, and when they did, they were invariably about starvation, dysentery, other horrors—lessons in gratitude, or something. Alan shrugged. ‘Went up to him and was like, hello sir, what do I call ya? Wasn’t asking for his fucken life story.’
Huh, I thought. That’s who he is. It should have reduced him: after all my fancies, he was simply a man with a vault. Instead, magic seemed to thrum from him at a greater intensity. When he was near, I was staggered with the weight of it all—that without him, I was immaterial: with no parents, no country, not even a human form.
Once The Shaman caught me staring. ‘Kan,’ he mouthed from across the room. Watch. He reached into the pocket of his silk trousers and drew out a mound of silver coins. Bouncing his palm up and down, he demonstrated the heft. Then, in a fluid motion, he brought his hand to his mouth and swallowed the contents whole. Tremendous hacking sounds filled the rooms, his throat bulging and red. ‘Shu Shu!’ Ma and Ba exclaimed, rushing to his side in a panic, arms wheeling. As for me: I stood still. I watched. Slowly, The Shaman, spat out the coins, one after the other, the chunks falling onto the wooden kitchen table in metallic chorus of clinks and clatters. Cloudbursts of silver, falling from lips. Alan and I gaped at each other and, despite the furious commotion of our parents, we began to laugh and laugh and laugh.
The Shaman and Ma typically hogged the TV during these visits, watching André Rieu DVDs as Ba folded dumplings for lunch. Alan and I were abandoned at a copse of bookcases in the corner of the house, stacked with myths and fables: The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, gilded collections by Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated editions of Journey to the West with Chinese and English side-by-side. Ba sometimes came by to give us plates of sliced apples. ‘I learn English with those books,’ he said once. ‘Shu Shu let us stay here when we first came. Every night, your Ba studied.’
I looked down at the letters on the page, petite and clumsily printed, ink furred like tiny caterpillars. Spells for transmutation. Alan, meanwhile, let out constipated sighs every ten minutes or so, before finally grunting, ‘Why’s everyone so povvo and hungry? Now I’m hungry.’
He was right: almost every story involved stews, spices, gobbling, desperation. The Brothers Grimm’s ‘Cherry’ featured a brat who ate nothing but cherries, so her devoted Ma sneaks into the neighbour’s yard to steal. ‘Parsely-Girl’ also had a thieving mum. Caught by a brood of bloodthirsty nuns, she’s told she can keep the stolen parsley—as long as they get to boil her daughter in a pot.
Baba Yaga in the Russian fairy tale ‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’ was also big on girl-eating; she threatens to devour Vasilisa unless she does Baba’s laundry, separates poppy seeds from grains of soil, and makes dinner nightly. Luckily, Vasilisa has the help of an enchanted doll, who sorts, rinses and stirs alongside her.
The eating of Journey to the West was less frantic. Sung Wukong, the Monkey King, was charged with guarding the Heavenly Peach Garden. Every peach in the grove granted its eater 3000 years of life. Unable to resist, he eats one after the other, until he can no longer die.
Buddha flattens him with a mountain for his trouble.
When we were called to lunch I skidded between the real and unreal; a drowsy muddle of fictional foods and tangible smells and textures. At the centre of the table, the stone hotpot billowed steam. It looked like it could’ve held anything: fat mushrooms, cherries, parsley, vermicelli, the arms and legs of firstborn children. I drank the broth, slurped up the dumplings, as a heroine of a fairy story would—feverishly, like the meal would decide my fate.
At the end of lunch, Ma split the watermelon I carried here, flesh vivid and crumbling. As the pulp stained my lips and tongue, I closed my eyes, prayed to the house: let me have 3000 more years, and Alan, Ma and Ba too. 3000 years for us all.
On the last visit I remember—though Alan says we visited many more times after—The Shaman tapped me on the shoulder before I could cross the threshold. ‘Xiao mei,’ he said. ‘One day I will need someone to look after those books for me. You seem like the right person. What do you think?’
I frowned. I didn’t understand then why he’d ever stop looking after his books himself. The Shaman didn’t seem to exist outside the enchanted house, with its tales, ornate chairs and vibrant lifeforms. But I buzzed with the warmth of the offer.
‘I think it’s a good idea,’ I told him. ‘You can trust me.’
II. The Mulberry Tree
The summer after I finished year 9, I snuck into my neighbour’s yard.
I usually hated risk, preferred endless leaden days lying on mahogany planks—hours and hours of staring at ceilings, sucking on Icy Poles and binging episodes of Adventure Time. When Alan’s best friend Manny came over, we watched Japanese horror films on our Kevin Rudd-issued laptops. I liked that too. My screen was busted from the times I’d dropped it on concrete station stairs; the ghosts in Kairo regularly morphed into orange blots, the black well in Ringu an over-exposed tunnel of light. When we got bored of ghouls, we put on Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, Alan’s favourite.
Our parents worked six days a week—Ma and Ba as kitchen hands in Blacktown and Manny’s dad as a security guard at the local Target—so the school holidays became an endless coil of emptiness and sameness: of heat, flushed skin, hair damp and crimping with sweat.
‘This is boring as shit,’ Manny said on a Wednesday (or was it the weekend?) and leant heavily against the window sill. He was shirtless; the sun gathered in his collarbones, in the fissures of his silver necklace. Abruptly, he straightened his shoulders. ‘Woah, that dog is sick.’
Alan and I got up and joined him, looking out at the street. Our neighbour Mrs Ha was walking her White Shepherd Kiki, whose mammoth tail batted against our tin fence with resounding clang, clang, clangs as she padded by. ‘The beast has left the coop,’ Alan laughed, before his eyebrows slow rose. Oh no. His ideas face.
‘Oi, we could break in! I’m starving and the hag has a fruit tree.’
‘You’re always starving,’ Manny and I said at the same time.
‘Nah, nah, don’t be pussies. Look at that fence,’ Alan said. ‘It’s easy as to jump. And she takes forever to walk that mutt cos it takes twenty king-sized shits every time.’
Manny turned to look at me, exposing the livid flush of excitement crawling up his neck. ‘Come on, I’ll boost ya.’
I opened my mouth to snap, I’ve got half a brain. I’m staying put. Instead, I followed Manny and my brother out the window.
Ochre rust sullied our palms as we climbed down the steel pipe, nimble as King Julien the lemur. A cyclonic hunger was kicking around my intestines: maybe for the sweetness of ripe fruit, as we only had frozen Birds Eye fish fillets at home; or maybe for the way Manny’s hand folded beneath my worn sneakers, for the bright gasp of air when he launched me into the air and, for a second, I felt boneless and budding with the potential of a thousand stories.
‘Fuar, it’s bigger than I thought!’
Above us, leafy green folds of the mulberry tree fanned out in the wind, shedding small branches and buds—a shower of loose trinkets. Berries dotted the boughs, like plump, jewel-toned pill-bugs huddled in delicate broods. We sat in the shade, violating everything we found on the lower branches. My fingers were bruised with purple; my mouth was bursting with sweet and tart tangs.
Intermittently Manny would snort and point out Mrs Ha’s cracked gnomes. Look at the guns on that little dude! Do you think he could bench press me?
It went on like that for an eon—greedy kids dozing under a rich bounty, cocooned by the overgrown snarls of African violets, oleanders, common weeds. Though the flowers were lush, the yard was sprinkled with dry lumps of dog and bird turds; a chemical, Play-Doh-like smell fogged around us. Some of the mulberries tasted off, like a burst ulcer.
Abruptly, the calm shattered: a series of growls sawed through the air. Sharp and intent, they rumbled into barks.
I stumbled to my feet right as Manny and Alan began booking it towards the fence, clambering up its jagged posts. ‘What the hell are you on?’ Alan hissed, perched atop the boundary. ‘Hurry!’
But instinct rooted me to the spot. I stood in the dense shade, dead grass curling around my feet like the legs of a funnel web. A shock of white darted out from the flowers and dragged Alan down by his ankle. Brambles tore at his skin, stripped it raw. I wanted to yell alongside him, twin-brained: help stop it we didn’t mean to come here.
But the words were lodged in my windpipe like silver rungs.
What came next wasn’t ravenous nuns, or witches, or Buddha on a lotus. It was an old woman on a cane, her bones creaking with effort and she stumbled into the thrashing noise. ‘Kiki,’ she said, and the dog dropped Alan’s leg.
Kiki’s tongue lolled out of her mouth; she rolled onto her stomach. Gusts of air popped from my lungs.
Mrs Ha turned her cloudy gaze onto me.
I huddled by my bedroom window in pitch darkness, Alan by my side. His leg was patched up with Dragon Ball Z band aids, mostly fine now after Ba took him to get a shot.
In the distance, an enormous, moon-white fog was lumbering closer and closer, shining through the slats of the fence. White means death, Ma once told us. It means mourning. Endings. The haze hovered steadily, watching, until a murky shape broke off and approached our front door.
Ma’s slippers clapped down the hall. We listened to the click of the front door lock, the rattle of the fly screen, the furious stream of words:
—I call the police—no, we’re calling the—raise your son this way—kill that monster— breaking and entering— dirty little thief—
‘I’m going to jail!’ Alan whimpered, ‘I’m going to jail and I’m never gonna see Manny or watch TV again.’
‘I think some jails have TV,’ I said, trying to be comforting.
In the end: a stalemate. Nobody wanted the pigs around. To my surprise, neither Alan or Mrs Ha snitched. It was like I’d never set foot in that yard, never been anything but a girl watching cartoons all summer. Quiet in her room.
I looked at Alan, the tears beading at the corners of his eyes. Would it always be this way between us? Me never knowing whether he’d be malicious or loyal, if it was in my nature to go along with anything he did. Or maybe I did have a mind of my own, and that mind wanted to explore, to steal, to save my own skin.
Every day afterwards, on my way to school, I passed Mrs Ha sunbathing in her bamboo chair. Kiki panted at her side, coating her calves in slobbery licks. When I walked into their line of sight, two pairs of eyes fixed on me. But no hellos were exchanged; no gestures made. The reaching fingertips of the mulberry tree were slightly visible from behind the roof.
It became all that I’d dream of: that tree and its berries. Bright, pintsized puncture wounds against a corpus of deep green. Whether the dream took place in a schoolyard, an office, or a hotel room in Zhuhai, the tree stood stalwart in the near-distance, bursting from grey carpet and tar, leaves susurrating in greeting.
Sometimes I dreamt of being cooked in a cauldron instead, skin thawing from bone. I dreamt of gardens, groves and groves of peach trees, teeming with ripe globes. I was a pinned monkey, a child with a broken leg, unable to lift my head, scramble away. In those dreams, the mountain came down on my shoulders hard, cascades of rock and silt thundering onto my spine, the pewter sky cracking wide open.
Last summer a package arrived in the mail, addressed to my Chinese name: a stack of fairy-tale collections, pages browned with tea stains.
Before bed, I lit citronella coils to ward away mosquitos and night terrors. Drank a glass of warm water and read as many time-worn happy endings as I could till my eyes drooped shut. Lemony smoke wafted into the room, infusing my clothes, my hair, my sleep.
After that, I forgot my dreams the second I yawned awake.
III. The Witch’s Kitchen
Outside of visits to the local grocer and jogs around the block, I haven’t left the house in weeks. I’m fading in stages, the curve of my hips melting into sheets, pale toes translucent against wood floors. My days find shape in the rhythm of smells: morning of steaming coffee, afternoons and nights of sizzling garlic, bubbling soups. I get up, eat my fill, stumble back under covers. Stop, rewind, play, until one late afternoon, Ma flicks me in the forehead with her forefinger.
‘We’re going to Westfields,’ she says. ‘You make dinner. Remember to turn off gas after, or you die.’
The spot on my head stings—I’m not as formless as I thought. When the Camry squeals away, I pick up my phone, dial the number I know better than my own. ‘Get over here,’ I say. ‘I want to make Ma and Ba something nice.’
‘What’s that got to do with me?’ Alan’s voice is slurred and muffled. I imagine a mouth stuffed with jalapeno Cheetos, raining debris on the carpet of his new apartment. My toe rubs against an orange spot on the floor, a relic of childhood bedroom-sharing. ‘If you’re making sourdough I'm legit gonna cliff myself,' he adds.
‘I’m making noodles, dickhead, and I’d appreciate some support.’
‘From scratch? You should learn how to crack an egg first.’
After fifteen minutes of me whinging and Alan scrambling for his keys, my brother finally plods towards the car. Through the speaker, I recognise the timbre of his steps against pavement, the contours of his lazy gait. The invisible cord connecting us grows more elastic every day, looping across creeks and suburbs and bridges. But I never seem to stop tugging.
Making hand-pulled noodles involves taking lumps of dough—softened by oil and nutritional yeast—and pretending you’re back in pre-school, where days stretch out like putty in your hands. Alan and I twist, roll, punch the dough, hyper-aware we’re in a high-stakes showdown where either the ingredients or our bodies will submit. Flour dusts our noses; our sleeves are rolled up to our elbows. We exist only to knead.
We’ve been doing it since the age of six—a skill, like most of our parents’ skills, passed down vaguely from generations. A game of telephone, where recipes became crappier with each successive re-telling, until one day, my descendants will ask: why don’t I get take-out instead? Still, we avoid consulting Google for help.
‘Your mixture is off,’ Alan says, shaking his head. ‘Your technique is sloppy,’ I fire back—but our hands don’t cease the flow of constant motion.
There’s an alchemy to preparing food that I’ve always enjoyed: like spellcasting, it involves a balancing act of matter, measurement and hope. When we begin pulling the dough—looping it around our fingers and yanking it out, over and over again—I begin grafting my own hopes onto the patterns of our fingers. I’ll remember to call my brother more. Pull. My parents will enjoy this meal. Weave. The coming year will be only slightly shit. Yank.
Our parents arrive home as the noodles are boiling in a pot of lamb broth. Manny ambles in behind them, carrying a cheap bottle of Rosé. He works as a stunt man up in Queensland these days (‘If you’re lucky you might catch me starring as Chris Hemsworth’s ass’) and is only in the area every few months.
My hand twitches at his presence—as if the mundane magic of dough-weaving manifested him, not Alan texting him on his drive up.
At the table, we all wait with bated breath when Ba winds his chopsticks around the chilli-slathered noodles. He blows on the heap for a few seconds before bringing it to his lips. A few seconds of thoughtful chewing, then: ‘Bit soft.’
Alan, Manny and I whoop and cheer and clap each other on the back. The lack of itemised complaints was high praise. Ba coughs up a laugh; the wrinkles around his mouth deepen.
He winds his chopsticks around the noodles once again, gathering and gathering.
That night, I hear it: the clarion ringing of a tail against our fence. Peeping out the window, I spy a bottle-brush plume of white, hear the laboured breaths of Kiki’s old lungs. I’m glad Alan’s gone home already. He would’ve spiralled into theatrics, hissing, ‘That creature is still alive? Reckon she can smell my blood from here? She’s been hungry for more for years,’ like he did last time.
I prop my chin against the sill, watching the white haze liquefy into the shade of the neighbouring house. It’s part of the fabric of life around here—the reliable sounds of Mrs. Ha puttering around the yard in her thongs; the hoarse notes of Kiki’s howls when sirens whizz past our street. Such a fixture that I don’t know what I am without them.
When everyone has long gone to bed, the sky black and bottomless, I steal out of bed. I slip on my sneakers and pack leftover noodles into Ma’s Tupperware. Scribble a note on an empty envelope and tape it to the lid. Then, I’m off.
The walk next door takes less than a minute, only an alleyway separating our two houses. But the experience is dilatory, my movements slowed and cautious out in the cold. The wind nips at my cheeks; the eucalypts cocoon me with their animated whispers. All the streetlights are malfunctioning from a recent outage, so I switch on my phone torch instead.
A small shaft of light cuts through the dark, like the skull-lantern gifted to Vasilisa by Baba Yaga—guiding my way through the wood.
When I reach the Mrs Ha’s veranda, I deposit the container on her bamboo chair. It sits right under a clumsily laminated sign, reading: BEWARE OF DOG. SHE WILL BITE!
Laughter spouts from my lips, a puff of vapour that dissolves instantly.
On my way out, I reach out my palm. Tap it lightly against Mrs. Ha’s fence: clang, clang, clang. May all the bad spells be broken.
Claire Cao is a freelance writer and a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement. You can check out her writing in Filmmaker Mag, The Big Issue, Running Dog and SBS Voices. She tweets about her questionable fixations @clairexinwen.
