Witching Hour

“Sarah, please come in,” the manager said. 

Sarah, who now shut the door behind her quietly as she entered the room, wore her blue button-up and black pants to blend in as much as anyone else, but whether it was her fly-on-the-wall personality or her bright red hair that she had to wear tied back in an aggressively tight bun, she couldn’t help but feel always out of place. Bryan, her manager, was a prime example of what she should’ve looked like; tall, well-dressed, collected, charismatic, bold, and with hair that was always well managed. By comparison, Sarah felt like she was always putting on more of a costume to fit in, a gingerbread man in clothes, she liked to jest. 

“I know you applied for the sales role,” Bryan started as Sarah sat, “and a lot manager role.” Bryan set the forms down and looked across at Sarah. “Unfortunately, we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates. I think you do good work as a service representative, but we want to see more from you.”

Sarah could only nod and sit, listening to one of the fifty conversations she had rehearsed in her head. 

“When we think about our salesmen, they have expertise in what we offer, and they can read the customer like a book. I think you’re good at being personable with our clients, but we’re still working on anticipating what they need even before we connect them to our salespeople. You’ve told us you work as a waiter as well, this isn’t about that, but I think better proactivity and greater commitment to your role when you are here can really help you go a long way here with us.” Bryan gave her a soft smile, maybe trying to encourage her. Sarah just had to nod. 

“I understand, thank you.”

“Of course, and do you have any other questions for me?” Sarah shook her head. “Alright, well your day’s almost over, but I’ll see you after the weekend, and we can work on next steps for you. Why don’t you relax a bit and use our benefits at the Windrose Country Club?” Bryan said as he pushed himself up from his seat and opened the door for Sarah. 

“Yeah, that could be good,” Sarah said, trying to put some kind of convincing into her voice. They wouldn’t work her on the weekends, so realistically that just meant there was more time for her second job, not golfing. 

Sarah returned and looked down at her desk. The half-filled cup of lukewarm coffee, the spread of a few unfinished papers, and the dying laptop, its clock reading 4:48 p.m. and its battery reading red. With a sigh, she downed the rest of the coffee, closed her laptop, and shoved both into her bag. She filed the papers away and capped her pen, tossing it aside onto the desk, and then went to the time punch and clocked out. 

“I’ll see you Monday,” she said to Thomas, the other representative, four years younger than her, but probably on track faster than her. 

“See you Monday,” he said, still engrossed in his work. 

Barely thirty minutes later, Sarah was clocking in again at Radford’s Diner, and she knew it was going to be a long night when she overheard her first table, a young man and woman on a date it looked like, say “I’m not really that hungry, you want to just get a slice of pie?” One of her four tables for the night and an hour and a pie slice later they left her with a $1 tip. 

The rest of the night passed in a blur, and though the tips afterward weren’t terrible, sometime between her eighth and her ninth table, she found herself dropping a plate from her tray, spreading a square of lasagna and ceramic shards everywhere with an impressive crash. When her shift ended at 11, her manager, Robert, called her back. 

“Sarah, what happened out there? You dropped a plate, and then after that I got complaints from two more tables that you messed up their order or forgot to check on them.” The last two were news to Sarah, she vaguely remembered one of the patrons slamming the check down once it was time to pay. 

“I don’t know. I’m sorry,” she said slowly, her vision coming back as she saw the round, sweaty face of Robert looking down at her. He only huffed and shook his head. 

“Take the weekend off. I can see you need a break.” That actually was the opposite of what she needed. 

“I can’t take a break. I need the hours,” Sarah said, hesitating. “Please, Robert. I don’t work at the dealership tomorrow. Let me come in.”

Robert dismissed her with his hand. “You need the sleep. Take tomorrow off, and then come in at night, as a customer, and I’ll see how you’re doing then for Saturday.”

“But-!”

“No buts. You’re not working tomorrow.” Then that was it. Sarah could say no more as she gathered her bag, the diner door closing behind her with its shrill bell. 

She stood there, unmoving, until after several minutes she found habit and routine being all that moved her. She counted her tips, not even reaching $50. Her feet started moving as she folded the cash into her purse absentmindedly, the street lights making her path to the bus stop. When her feet found the overhead and bench, she came to a stop and looked down at the time. 

“Oh, come on!” She shouted into the night. It was somehow 11:47, two minutes late for the bus and leaving her with only the midnight bus, the final run. At first, she watched the time tick by, but two minutes felt too long, and she forced herself to look away from any clocks, wandering aimlessly around the stops’ overhead while her mind raced with questions and potential answers with more questions. She realized her hair was still tied up, and so she finally let it down, the breathing of her scalp almost making her lightheaded as she shook it loose. 

When she looked up, she froze, blinking at the dimly lit sign in front of her. 

Arcane Artistry

“Huh.” She rubbed her eyes and blinked, but it still remained in her view when she stopped, a sign made out of what looked like a kind of seashell plate, its lettering made from what looked like black ivory. 

She had seen the Arcane Artistry shop before, always right across from the bus stop, but it was a jewelry store, as typical and forgettable as any of the shops on this street, sleepy and slow. This time, its new eclectic sign was only the start of the anomalies; its windows were a dark purple, its frame solid mahogany wood. Her feet found their way to the door, her hand to the gemstone handle, and she pulled the door open and was swept inside. 

What greeted her was almost an attack on her senses with overstimulation. Shelves lining the wall, the most normal looking one a bright red wood, but past that she saw one made of what looked like compressed sand, another out of coral, another out of what she could only see as mushroom “material”, and so on. Each shelf was littered with various items, jewelries, books, clothes, lightbulbs, cog trinkets, and still more. On the floor, which was solid marble with some cut outs where deep water pools were filled, were tables or stands of equally various composition and items, and at the back the desk. A glass box that moved, no, inside moved, deep dark smoke, almost like clouds. They even had streaks of electricity coursing through on occasion, and as she was focusing on the desk, she saw movement from atop it. Her eyes followed, and lying on the desk was a lizard of black and yellow, almost four feet in length, but she couldn’t see the rest of its tail dangling over the other side of the desk. It raised its long neck, its head wearing a flat newsboy cap, and looked at her, slithering out a blue forked tongue. 

“Erhm…” it seemed to croak. 

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” a voice echoed from the back, covered by a silk curtain that faded at the bottom to nothingness. From behind it came a short woman, maybe not even taller than the lizard was long. Her hair was black and grey, let loose and flowing behind her almost like the curtain she came behind from. She wore a sleeveless linen shirt tucked into a pair of what looked like seal skin pants, and around her shoulders was a shawl of waist that was a kind of cape made of bird feathers with a waist cape to match. She was cleaning a pair of round glasses when she came out, putting them on and looking at Sarah. 

The older woman blinked once, twice, and then her face twisted and scrunched. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“I—” Sarah started to say. 

The older woman exclaimed and threw her hands up into the air, “See? Again! Another wanderer! I told you, Shveen, we’re just going to keep getting more and more of these!”

“You’re telling me like it’s my fault,” the lizard said, its voice human sounding, though its mouth and lack of lips moving unnaturally. “I didn’t decide the witching hour anymore than you did.”

“Witching hour?” Sarah repeated. 

The older woman grunted with frustration, turning about and patting her pockets and running her fingers through her hair. When she finally stopped moving, she brought her fingers to the bridge of her nose and grumbled. 

“Alright alright, make this snappy,” she said to herself. “Congratulations,” she said unenthusiastically, “you found Arcane Artistry, my humble small business where I, Severvescent, work with my familiar, Shveen, to sell you the best in magical wares. Need a charm to help with that first date? We’ve got it. Need a spell to go with that curse? You bet. Need a—and so on and so on, my sales pitch isn’t for you.”

“You—”

“No talking, you’ll hopefully have fewer questions by listening. My shop is designed to be easily sought by those looking for it, the crowd desperate and eager for mystical solutions to their mystical problems. You probably stumbled in here because you are just looking for solutions, and you happened to do so at the hour of midnight right outside my shop.”

“It’s midnight?” Sarah suddenly asked, looking down at the time, reading 12:07 a.m.

“Unfortunately, this seems to be a more common occurrence,” Severvescent said, going back to searching her pockets, “caused by an anxious bunch of night owls. Fortunately, I’ve got a solution…somewhere…” she said, fiddling with her garments. 

“Did you use the bottle from ‘39?” The lizard, Shveen asked. 

“Yeah?”

“That was the last of it.”

“Confound it, Shveen! You’re supposed to tell me these things!”

“I did.”

“Look, uh, Severvescent?” Sarah interjected. “I’m not supposed to be here, I have to get home, and I missed the last bus. I can walk away and pretend this never happened, I just want to go home.”

Severvescent clicked her tongue. “See you can’t though, I know your type. You saw my business because you wanted a solution, and now as you go about whatever’s bothering you enough to see through my mist, you’ll keep thinking back to my shop.”

“I could eat her,” Shveen suggested, only half seriously. Severvescent shot him a tired look. 

“Well, do you have a solution then? Something that would have me stop worrying about your shop?” Sarah asked in half hope. 

The old shopkeeper sighed. A long sigh that inflated her chest and left her staring down at the marble floor. 

“Look, kid. I’ll be honest because you’re not my target market; my business is struggling. Running an arts and craft shop by day as a front gets me little to nothing. Selling my magic wares by night gives me less and less hours, and the customers still come in, but wouldn’t you guess it, they’re reporting less satisfaction. I used to sell a pendant to hang on the scarecrow to yield a better harvest. Now, people want me to placate their bosses, speed them through traffic, or the worst of all, put more hours in a day just for them. The easiest things I get these days are just energizing charms and potions, and then people don’t even sleep and say it’s not working.” 

Severvescent shrugged and threw her hands up in the air. “I’m a witch, not a miracle worker! The body has limits even I can’t surpass, and do you know how hard it is to try to manipulate the grander area around someone consistently and effectively? It drains me, and then they won’t even pay the price.”

The shopkeeper started to pace, shuffling around in the limited space of her shop, but when Sarah tried to look over at the lizard Shveen, he only seemed to be nodding and shaking his head in agreement. 

“Why do you sell magic solutions still anyway?”

Severvescent looked back up at Sarah. “It’s what I’m good at, or used to be. I’ve forgotten more spells and charms than most wizards and witches will ever learn at this point. It used to be fun and rewarding to share those with people who needed them. Heck, I’d do it for free if I could, just for the satisfaction they could get, but now if I want to stay here, I have to be able to pay the lot and property taxes, and I need paperwork to have a valid business. I’m telling you, kid, it didn’t used to be this hard.”

Sarah was at a loss. She hadn’t planned on walking into this shop; she should’ve been on her way home by now, but then the thought of having something that could fix her with just magic was presented, just to be snuffed out. She didn’t know what she would do if she left, and she didn’t know what to do if she stayed. 

“Since you’re here, I can sell you something, but I can’t promise satisfaction anymore, and there is no money back on only that.”

“Choose wisely,” Shveen said. 

“I don’t even know what all you sell…” Sarah said. 

“Just tell me what’s got you all bothered, and I’ll find something.” Severvescent said with a crack of her knuckles. 

“Well, I can’t make any progress at my one job; they denied me for two roles. I just don’t have what they’re looking for, I guess. When I go to my other job, I’m tired and can’t focus. Now they won’t let me come in. I missed the bus, and now I can’t even leave to go home and sleep.”

“Getting you home is easy enough,” Shveen offered. 

Sarah shrugged. “If you could do that, I’d be satisfied.”

The shopkeeper had a look on her face that changed through three different faces. First, she looked downcast, then relieved, and finally bright as though she had some kind of idea. 

“Right! I can’t get you home. You have 30 bucks, right?” She asked, shooting a sideways glance. 

“Yeah,” Sarah said reluctantly, pulling out a $20 and $10 bill. She partially felt bad for Severvescent; an Uber home would’ve worked too. 

“Great! Shveen?” 

The lizard stood up on its legs, reached its long tail around the two bills, and grabbed the two bills from Sarah’s hand, tucking them into an open drawer. 

“Do you want a receipt?”

“I also have this for you,” Severvescent said, bringing a small necklace to Sarah. “It’s just one of my small projects, but it’s nice.”

“What does it do?” Sarah asked instinctively. 

“Oh, uh, it, um…” the shopkeeper started to stutter. 

“Oh! It’s lovely,” Sarah said quickly, holding the small silver necklace up. “It is very lovely. Thank you.”

Severvescent smiled, a genuine look in her eyes as she looked up at Sarah. “Now, are you ready to go home?”

Sarah took one final look around the shop and all its weird intricacies. “Will I be able to come back?”

The shopkeeper and lizard looked at each other and then back at Sarah. “Well, we’re not erasing your memory, we’re out of that, but no refunds.” Severvescent said cautiously. 

“No refunds,” Sarah chuckled. “Just to visit.”

The shopkeeper relaxed. “Sure, you can come back, if you need.”

Sarah put the necklace on and braced herself. “Alright, I’m ready.”

With that, Sarah saw a swirl of bright purple lights around her, enveloping her. They blocked her vision, Severvescent and Shveen being covered from her view as she saw them both watch her go. For a moment she felt almost blinded, till in a sudden blink, all the lights were gone. It was pitch black, but as her eyes adjusted, she saw she was in the dark of her house. 

She stumbled through and found the lights, turning them on and seeing the comfort of her home. It seemed so suddenly mundane, and she reached a hand up and felt the necklace on her, reassuring her. There was a calm that came over her in both seeing the familiarity of her home and feeling the reminder of the necklace. 

Her mind moved to tomorrow, and what it would bring. No work, but maybe her boss was right. Maybe a break was what she needed.