Glamour

She likes to keep her garden wild to see what the animals bring. The crows bring her glass and silver paper; the foxes bones and doorknobs and beautiful single shoes. A white fox jaw is a serrated ‘L’ as it slips it into her pocket.  These days the tools of magic fall into her lap.  

Inside, her husband sits stolid.  When she was still young, long-boned, she cast a spell on him without knowing, a speck in his eye that made him hers.

She shows him the jaw bone; makes him smell a wild posey, tries to make him drink a tincture.  His eyes search the room for something forgotten: confused; bewildered, as if something is missing. The spell binds him to her; a tethered ox, a butterfly in glass.

She combines words and objects; movements and signs. The glamour fails her.

‘I don’t know how to set you free, the steps and sigils are lost.’  She tries the new ways, modern magics of clothes and whispers and kisses she sees on television, but each day he is resentment.

Back on her knees in the dusk garden smell of earth and musk she whispers ‘please help me remember the spell.’