At fifty-three, petite Calliope Carre didn’t look a day over forty. In fact, with her perfect smile and extra curly brown locks, she could often pass for a much younger woman. To her, it was all about the energy. If she put a bounce in her step and shook her shoulders just right, she could make people believe whatever she wanted them to believe. Ce-ce, as she was called by her friends, had a special power.
All her life she had known she was unique but she didn’t realize just how unique she was until she began divorce proceedings, five years prior, from her abusive husband, Franklin. Towards the end of their marriage, she could feel the force welling up inside her, like water building up behind a dam. Then it happened, she was able to release this pent-up inner energy and direct it into something useful.
It was six years to the day, beneath this very oak tree, that she finally let her gift loose upon a little grey squirrel. It was the sixth of January, La Befana, Sister Basil Philipa would tell her later: The Feast of the Epiphany. The small rodent darted across the road in front of a car. The vehicle passed over it but its excessive speed created a whirlwind that pulled the animal from the pavement to be hit by the transmission housing.
Barely alive, the wounded creature managed to crawl across the road to the sidewalk, only to die at her feet. Her heart welled with great sorrow and she knelt down to stroke the squirrel's grey fur with her finger. When she made contact with the animal, it was as if she was being electrocuted and could not pull her finger away. But this was no electric shock. It felt more like heartburn, only it originated from her hips and slowly made its way up her torso to her left arm.
Horrified, she thought she might be having a heart-attack. Her thoughts flashed back to her parents, her timid mother and abusive father. Did he have a history of heart disease? But he was not her real father, she recalled, as her niece revealed to her ‘the secret’ surrounding her birth. She could feel a tiny bubble traveling along her bicep towards her elbow, to her outstretched finger. She saw a dim yellow light, like a flame, spread over the chest of the lifeless body. Suddenly, the squirrel popped back to life, looked at her, terror stricken, bit her hard on the finger and ran off.
“Ow!” she yelped. Startled but glad to be free. Her finger smarted but there was no blood. Uncontrollably, she burped, loudly, and a small puff of dark smoke escaped her mouth.
She remembered the euphoric feeling she experienced after the incident and that she grew so tired she had to sit down on the low wall where she now sat. Her blue and white Volkswagen Eurovan was parked in front of her on the street. Blue was her color, Sister Basil told her. It anchored her power and helped her direct it more easily. Her mind went to the elder woman who was now bedridden in an apartment near Bryn Mawr Park, where she also lived.
It was Sister Basil who approached her on this very day, two years ago, as she sat on a bench amongst the grove of large oak trees in the park. It was near to the house where she rented an apartment from her friend, David. She was waiting for a locksmith to come and open the latch that no longer worked with her key. She found this odd because the lock had never given her a problem before.
An old woman, garbed in the dark blue habit of an order of nuns she often spied walking around this urban preserve. All was covered by the thick azure cloak except her wrinkled face and gnarled hands that clutched a rosary of wooden prayer beads.
Staring straight ahead at the trees in the glade, the old woman spoke, “La Befana.”
Her accent was thick and Ce-ce would later learn it was Italian, of a dialect spoken by people who dwell in hilltop villages of the Abruzzo province in central Italy. She remembered their first exchange with incredible clarity; that was the day she found out she was a witch.
“You no can get in? Si!” The aged crone barked at her.
“Yes,” Ce-ce replied, surprised.
“You don’t know, yet, do you?” The old woman asked, cocking her head to the side and peering at her with her one good eye; the other eye was completely clouded over and teary.
Confused, Ce-ce couldn’t help but stare at how cracked the nun’s lips were and marveled that any sound could make its way through such deeply furrowed canyons, thick and crusty from dried saliva. She didn’t answer. Clutching her large brown leather purse to her chest, she gazed at the lumpy old bag in the blue outfit.
Sister Basil Philipa's body spasmed, her spine began to twist unnaturally and she let loose an incredibly strange utterance, “Arghabracalamacaloff!”
Ce-ce’s pursed changed color to bright periwinkle blue. The younger woman gasped and dropped her bag, letting it fall onto the bench.
For a brief moment, the old crow was no longer this bent-over shell of a human being. She sat straighter and looked at her with both eyes wide open, the cloudy eye was no longer clouded. The sun darkened momentarily and wind shook the leaves on the trees.
The sun brightened and Ce-ce could see she was just an old woman again.
Her voice tired and seeming spent, Sister Basil said, “This is your color.” Then she slowly rose and walked away.
Ce-ce recalled how mad she was when she finally called the locksmith and found he was not coming. She returned to her front door and was shocked to find the aged nun leaning against the wall of the alcove, counting the strands of straw on the broom used to sweep the steps. At this point, she was certain Sister Basil was crazy, probably schizophrenic.
The old lady ticked off the last few straws and shouted, “Ha!” as the door suddenly flung itself open.
The old woman grabbed Ce-ce’s arm, scaring her nearly out of her skin and demanded, in an eerie voice, “The present!”
Shaking her head in disbelief at what was happening, Ce-ce remembered that she had a vase in her handbag. It was a gift for her part-time roommate and landlord. It was hand-crafted by Navajo Indians in New Mexico. She reached into her purse and handed it to the old woman who would not take it. She merely motioned with her hand towards the open doorway.
Sitting on the wall beneath the large oak tree, the place where the squirrel had died, she rehashed the story, related to her by Sister Basil, about La Befana: The Feast of the Epiphany. She spoke of an old woman who refused to accompany three wise men following a star. A star that led them to the birth of the Christ Child. She told how the lady was condemned to an eternity of delivering presents to children, on the same day, every year since Jesus' birth.
During the months that followed, she found herself visiting the ancient nun in her apartment by the park and was educated in the peculiarities of her situation. The crone told her that, on the day of La Befana, she would not be able to enter a home if there was a broom out front until she counted all the hairs on the broom. A lot of strange events in her life were beginning to make sense.
Beneath the oak tree, sitting on the stone wall, she reached into her blue bag and produced a troll-doll dressed like a little nun wearing a blue habit. Standing up on the wall, she reached up and plucked a dried brown leaf from the oak tree and sat back down. Placing the doll in her lap, she crumbled the leaf into tiny pieces and showered them over the small figurine. Bending forward, she inhaled deeply and blew away all the shards with one mighty breath. She repeated this odd behavior, twice more, before she sighed and placed the doll back in her purse.
She got up and went to her van. Thank God, she said to herself as she climbed into the driver’s seat, that the curse doesn’t extend to car doors. She started the engine and turned on the heat full blast. She crawled into the back where her mobile massage table lay folded up. The table helped her earn a living as a licensed massage therapist.
She opened a cabinet door and pulled out another troll-doll. This one had blond hair and a big belly. Climbing back into the driver’s seat, she placed the blond troll-doll in a brown wood box. She threw two dried oak leaves from the tree into the box and closed the lid.
Ce-ce had been practicing witchcraft ever since she met Sister Basil. It was a slow process and the old woman was not very forthcoming with information. Apparently, being a witch was not tantamount to being rich. The little money she got from her divorce settlement helped her buy this van and the massage table but that was it. She barely made enough from her appointments to cover her rent and food bill.
Not so, she thought, for the other witches living around the park. There were at least four, that she knew of, though they never talked to her. They all lived in nice houses and were very well-dressed. She suspected they were witches because she saw them talking to Sister Basil, at one time or another. The oak trees in the park attracted witches, Sister Basil told her; the trees protected them and enhanced their powers. She tried approaching one of the other witches but was not even acknowledged by the other woman, who looked much like her: curly-brown hair, fair skinned and a bright smile. There was no smile that day.
Until now, Ce-ce had learned very few enchantments. One thing she did know was, on this day, her powers were greatly increased. The leaves from the oak tree, which she could now see in her rear-view mirror, also had a special effect on the objects of her affection.
The first troll-doll was for Sister Basil. The second, the one with the blond hair and big belly, was for a man she met dancing tango, a passion of hers acquired during the last years of her failed wedlock. She rarely found men she liked and this one danced tango. She wanted to see if she couldn’t create a spell that would keep him in her life.
This was the first time she had tried to craft an enchantment from scratch and it was a lot harder than making a good pie crust. This man, Edgar, was laid off from the phone company. She decided to try and use her power to get him a job close to where she lived.
She liked Edgar because she could control him. Not that she needed to be a witch to do that. She learned a long time ago that men were easily led. She often felt sorry for them. To her, men were like hungry dogs that couldn’t keep themselves from tipping over the garbage can. She liked them but they often made a real mess of her life.
Today was the final day of her seven-part incantation. Each day, she would come to the tree and pull two dried leaves from La Quercia, the Italian word for oak and the name she had given to this tree that seemed to have a special connection to her. Then she would drive to the headquarters of Philadelphia Cellular and circle the building seven times in her Volkswagen Eurovan, the troll-doll in the wooden box on the passenger’s seat of the vehicle.
Upon completion of the seventh revolution, her phone chimed with an incoming text from Edgar. Her heart leapt: success! She parked the van and pulled out her iPhone.
‘Guess who just got a great job? With Navajo Cellular! Yeeeehaaaw!’ It read.
“Dammit!” She said, and slammed her open hand on the dash. The spell had work but not the way she wanted it.
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