Dream Forge Demo 1995 February/df9502r.zip/DFD

Text File | 1995-02-01 | 15KB | 316 lines

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WISH BOTTLE
  Gay Bost
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  Cindy was, she reckoned, about 11 or 12 when she wandered far
enough afield to encounter the old woman they called Capia.

  She was somewhere in that vast and endless reach between little
girl and almost woman, gone bored and searching without knowing
what she was searching for. Most afternoons she wandered toward the
library or pestered Mrs. Larson at the Farfax Diner while the woman
moved back and forth behind the long formica counter, tidying up
from the lunch crowd, preparing for the dinner rush. Cindy had in
mind making friends with her, talking herself into an after school
dish washing job and generally making herself a part of the place
just in case there was a dollar or two to be had running errands.

  Cindy had plans and wishes. She wanted to be a Doctor or,
maybe, a Nurse, but she knew she'd have to help pay for college.
Her mama kept saying, "Think about all that hard work you'll have
to do before you ever get to see the inside of a classroom. Girl,
you just turn yourself around and think about a nice steady husband
instead."

  Cindy had wishes there, too, but they were less well defined.

  It had been one of those rare early Winter days of warmth and
windless calm that made an ambling walk a joy. Trees were bare.
Fields were plowed and the grey brown seemed to be everywhere, unless
you were lucky enough to have a pine tree or a holy tree growing in
your yard. One of the library windows looked out over a tiny flower
garden, but it was filled with grey green brush. The huge pine that
rattled against the window when the northerlies blew was her only
green spot this time of year.

  Or so she'd thought, until she ventured down a long quiet lane
chasing after a squirrel and found herself on the edges of a scraggly
yard surrounded by pine and cedar.

  "Looks like somebody likes growing weeds," she told the squirrel,
turning to look at it. It had scampered up a tree trunk and turned
to chitter at her from a bough.

  "Looks like somebody likes talking to squirrels," said a voice
crackling with dry laughter. "They be calling you crazy next thing
you know." A dried up old hank of a woman stepped out from behind a
line of holly bushes. She carried a basket on her forearm from which
dangled straw colored pods on dried looking vine things curling at
varied angles. The woman was picking the pods from the vines as she
walked, coming closer at a rate most old women didn't take.

  A sun browned, age spotted hand wiped across faded jeans that
looked three sizes too big and twenty years past the rag bag. The
hand struck through the air at Cindy. "You can call me Capia," the
woman said, looking expectantly at Cindy.

  "Oh," Cindy said, realizing with a little fright that she stood
face to face, or near enough, to what some people were calling a
witch. "Cindy Rather." She took the woman's hand and gave it a
quick shake, released it and wiped her own palm on her skirt.

  "It don't rub off," said the woman.

  "What don't rub off," Cindy asked quickly, suspecting the old
woman had read her mind.

  "Old. Old don't rub off that easy. If it did a lot more people
would have a lot more sense without having to pay years to get it."

  "Yes'm." Cindy looked at the basket. It was filled with the pods.
She let go a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding.

  Capia looked at the sky, measuring the day left, hefted her basket
higher onto her forearm and half turned to go. "You can come sit on
the porch and have some hot chocolate. I got tea steeping."

  Cindy blinked, looking further along to where the old woman
seemed headed. A weathered house stood 500 yards in the distance, an
open porch, beams protruding from beneath the roof overhang were hung
with wire baskets, old tomato plant supports, a few tireless bicycle
wheels and what looked like bird houses. It seemed harmless enough.
Cindy nodded, remembered her manners, said, "Thank you, I will," and
tried to take the basket from Capia.

  Capia pulled the basket away and frowned, a smile trying to break
through the leathery old skin on her face. "You 'gonna strip the pods
from the vines, too?"

  "Yes'm, if you need me to." Cindy thought about an hour's work, a
cup of chocolate and maybe a dollar if she pulled all the pods from
the vine and carried the heavy looking basket. It could have held a
load of wash ready to go to the line.

  "I ain't got no money to pay no stray girls for something I can
do myself." Capia turned her back and moved toward the house.
"Sides, what would a girl like you need with money?"

  "You can't read my mind!" Cindy exclaimed, catching up to the
woman and walking sideways along with her, letting her feet worry
about tufts of grass and half burried logs.

  That smile finally broke the surface. "I can't? Well, maybe I can
see greed in young faces, then. Maybe I can see little dollar signs
popping up like on a cash register. Maybe." Her wrinkled old lips
puckered. Her pale blue grey eyes brightened with a laughter she was
holding back.

  "I don't mind doing it for free, Miss Capia. And a cup of
chocolate." Cindy shrugged, giving up the little wish and tucking it
away for another day, maybe. She smiled her best smile and meant it.

  Capia laughed deep in her chest, her wiry old frame shaking.
"Girl! What would you want money for, anyway?" Her arm lifted and
described a wide arc in the air. "You got the whole world to pick
from on a warm winter day, and you can have holly leaves and berries
for your hair in the stead of store bought ribbons!" The old woman
twirled around, her arm still outstretched, dancing on quick little
feet for a moment.

  "I got plans and wishes."

  "Unh." Capia came to a stop in her dance and glanced sideways at
Cindy before resuming her hosueward direction.

  As they came up onto the porch steps an old grey tom cat moved in
his sleep, stretching from shadow into a spot of sun.

  "You can see he had plans too, but the sun done moved on him.
Now, if he was a smart cat he'd have wandered up on a nice big house
with a picture window facing the afternoon sun instead of piling up
on my porch and taking over my footsteps." She gestured toward an old
kitchen chair that leaned against the inside wall of the porch.
"Drag that over here," she instructed, pointing toward a table which
held dozens of the smallest Mason jars Cindy had ever seen.

  Capia dropped into a rickety rocker, the basket on her lap.
"You 'gon do this?" She pulled a tangle of pods and vines from the
basket, depositing them unceremoniously on the porch floor. At
Cindy's nod the old woman gave up the basket, too. "Just put the
stripped pods back in the basket then. And don't break the pods
open."

  She set one bottle toward her, scooped rings and seals into a
near pile and scooted right up against the table edge. Cindy watched,
fascinated by the ridiculous, as Capia carefully peeled most of the
pod's skin off, tore away the fuller end of the pod and released
hundreds of tiny brown seeds, each attached to a silky white quill
four or five times longer than the seed's width. Very carefully she
put the seeds, ends down, into the little mason jar. What had looked
like a pinch spread out in the air, like dandelion puffs captured in
a bottle.

  Cindy blinked, smiling at something that hadn't happened yet.
Capia repeated the process with more pods, long thin fingers taking
great care to get the seed portion at the bottom of the jar and the
fluffy white upright. She placed a seal atop the jar, dropped a ring
loosely onto the jar and pushed it aside.

  After what seemed like hours all the pods had been stripped from
the vines. The basket was near to full, again, and Capia had filled
ten or twelve jars. Cindy waited, not knowing why, until the old
woman had dropped a ring onto the latest jar and pushed it away.

  "Miss Capia?" she began.

  The old woman turned her head, smiled something like Cindy's own
mother did when she'd been called away from cooing over a baby,
swiveled her shoulders, old shoulders gone stiff. "My tea!" She
crowed, bouncing up. "And your hot chocolate." She disappeared
behind a screen door, the bang waking the cat from his shadowed nap.

  Cindy rocked forward with the chair, leaned her chin into her
hands and looked at the jars. The silky white threads, millions of
them, had spread open at the top to form a fanned solid mass of
glistening white. They gleamed through the clear glass jars,
reflected sunlight and bounced it off the shiny new seals.

  It dawned on Cindy, then, that Miss Capia was putting up weeds.
Pretty weeds, the deep rich brown seeds looking a bit like tiny
coffee beans, flattened though they were. The discarded pods lay off
to the side in a pile, a rare seed missed. Cindy stood, peered
through the screen door, listening, and picked up an empty pod. Two
or three brown seeds without an attached quill fell to the table top.
Cindy plucked at a gleaming white thread, freed it from its perfect
prison, and placed it on her open palm.

  The sky was still. No wind came to lift it off and carry it away.
Separated from its pod mates it had dried immediately. The weight of
the seed was just enough to keep it in her damp hand *if* she held
her breath. The feathery white drifted back and forth with her heart
beat. It came to her -- she had never seen white this bright. Not
brand new cotton slips, not her daddy's church hankies, fresh ironed,
not . . . anything.

  The screen door creaked. She let go her breath, saw Capia with her
hand on the door, watching, a soft smile on her face. "Caught 'ya,"
the woman said, an imp shining in her old eyes. She pushed the door
open and brought out their hot drinks on a bent and dinted silver
tray. As she set the tray down, slowly pushing the jars back a bit
more with the scalloped edge, she turned her head and looked long at
Cindy, bemused. "Well?" was all that she said.

  "What *are* they?" Cindy's vine dirty hand waved at the collection
on the table.

  "Well, child!" Capia exclaimed. "I thought you knew. Those are
wish bottles."

  "Wish bottles," Cindy repeated, her mouth suddenly dry. She
reached for the hot chocolate, gave it a glance to make sure it
wasn't steaming too much and sipped at it carefully.

  "Wish bottles." Capia sat, pouring cream into her tea, taking a
twist of lemon and a spoon of sugar, stirring while she watched
Cindy's face. At last she settled back down into her chair, sipped
at her tea, and smiled with eyes and wrinkled cheeks over the rim of
a chipped china cup.

  "Miss Capia," Cindy began, the tone of gentle warning one used when
dealing with a mistaken small child. "Those are . . ."

  "Weeds," the old woman finished, beaming. "A jar of weeds to be
treasured, a supply of wishes to fill a field for a hundred years.
You see, girl," Capia leaned forward with a deliberate slowness,
"wishes are like those weed seeds. You send them off into the air
and they fly away in winds you can't even dream of. They scatter like
somebody else's children and grow where and as they may. What you got
to remember when you wish, especially holding one of those weed-
wishes from one of these here wish bottles, is that once you release
that wish you ain't got no more control of it than you do those
pieces of fluff. You can't let those wishes float into somebody's
garden, cause that'll rile up most gardeners.

  "You can't set them free except in the wide open spaces where
weeds grow and wild wishes flow. Unless you're willing to risk the
ire of the gardeners and re-educate the world about the value of
weeds . . . and the power of wishes."

  Cindy sat silent, thinking about plans and wishes, thinking about
wandering after squirrels and finding . . . "Miss Capia? If I had
one wish and I planted it, one of those wish seeds, I mean, what
would happen?"

  "What's a seed for, girl?"

  "Wishes?"

  Capia chuckled. "What is a seed for, from the plant's point of
viewing it?"

  "Oh. For growing more plants."

  "So one wish weed, planted, never set free on the wind, would make
what?"

  "How many pods to a plant? How many pods never break open? How
many . . . ?"

  "Wishing is a complicated matter, aint it?"

  "Miss Capia!" Cindy cried, standing suddenly, looking at the ten
or twelve wish bottles with wide eyes, her chocolate sloshing from
her cup. She looked at the opened pods in the basket, the remaining
mason jars covering the table. "Do you *know* what you're doing?"

  Capia smiled softly, sipped her tea and sighed. "Do you know how
many people would *never* open one of those wish bottles, even in
the wide open spaces where weeds grow wild and wishes flow?"

  The old woman turned back to the table, hooked one of the bottles
with her fingers and drew it near. She pulled a length of ribbon from
her shirt pocket, tied it around the jar and finished with a bow. She
reached into the pile of pods and retrieved a piece of feathered
brown that must have come from the interior of the pod, and stuck it
behind the bow, looking like some fine carved wooden bird's tail
feather, and tightened the ring on the jar until her knuckles turned
white.

  She handed the jar to Cindy, touched the feather looking piece
which stuck up above the now secure lid and named it, "The Heart of
The Wish."

  "Which one?" Cindy asked without thinking, her eyes looking deep
into the pale grey blue of the old woman's bright vision.

  "You come back, Cindy," Capia said. "Bring your plans and your
wishes with you." She turned back to her work, reaching for a pod
with one hand while the other sought an empty jar.

  Cindy watched the old hands working the tiny seeds free of their
pods, watched the gleaming white quills dry, spread and fill the jar.

  The old tom cat sauntered over, batted at a pod that had fallen
from the basket, watched with patient interest as it tottered back
and forth, slit green eyes calculating. He pounced on it with both
feet, tree bark sharpened claws ripping through the paper thin case.
The white quills lay open to the air, drying, spreading to catch the
first drift of wind that might wander onto Miss Capia's porch.

                               {DREAM}

Copyright 1995 Gay Bost, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Gay is a Clinical Lab Tech with experience in Veterinary medicine.
From NORTHERN California, she's resided in S.E. Missouri with her
husband and an aggressive 6 year old boy, since 1974. Installed her
first modem the summer of '92, has been exploring new worlds since.
Her first publication, a short horror story, came when she was 17.
The success was so overwhelming she called an end to her writing days
and went in search of herself. She's still looking. Find Gay's great
stories in the best Electronic Magazines. email: [e-mail]
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