Daseer charged what she considered a reasonable price for her word magic—per word, of course. She had office space in Hudson Yards, setting up shop on the same floor as a consulting group, a venture capital firm, and a psychic for dogs. Her hours were from 10–4, Monday through Friday.
“Practical” magic had slowed business down for the past two hundred years, but Daseer didn’t mind much. The fancy of horse-drawn carriages; then, factories; and, later, the weapons trade made men think they could conjure their heart’s desire. It was cute. Even then, there were those who hungered for power and knew how to acquire it. No matter how “self-sufficient” people’s wealth production was, a select few would always seek out a diviner—someone like Daseer to assure their future promised more. Whatever the economic weather, Daseer could always rely on an above-average income.
Daseer typically liked to live by the standards of each generation. It kept her invested. Sometime in the ’90’s, Daseer had maxed out her 401(k). She lived in a Parisian loft in the Upper East Side. At this point, divination was getting old. Besides, every new generation found a way to get on her nerves. This millennia: greed, implacability, and an allergy to the phrase “thank you.” Still, Daseer kept going with her business. She told herself she was saving up for an elaborate retirement party.
If people were going to make the trip to “One Word Wonders,” Daseer would rather they be polite—and earnest—first. Earnest. Daseer couldn’t remember the last time someone had come in on their knees, begging for remedy. People used to purse their lips and drag their teeth for hours just trying to settle on the right word. Now, clients came with notes, ready to argue with her about her own magic. The facts were simple: the process was a one-time exchange. Words in, effect out. The more words a client could afford, the more specific form her magic would take. The fewer, the less her magic had to interpret. No, there wasn’t a way to “game” her magic’s results. No, there wasn’t a way to predict the effect a single word would have. There wasn’t a way to wish for infinite wishes.
The nouveau jeune were too calculated for Daseer’s liking. It was like their parents were a bunch of neurotics. They’d felt the money in their mouths since birth, no room to suckle off romanticism. No one rushed in heart-forward anymore. Except Helly.
She came in on a Tuesday at 2, as if she had spent all of Monday and a bit of breakfast debating whether or not she should make the trip. Booked an appointment online and everything. Daseer didn’t have a secretary back then, so she used to take appointments right where people walked in, in the large space that was now the waiting room. The second room was for storage. Pierre didn’t even have a real purpose back then—Daseer had bought him as a joke to deter customers who were looking for the dog medium.
“SQUAWK! Welcome to One Word Wonders! How may we help you?”
A young woman approached Pierre and lifted a finger to his perch.
“Try not to pet him below the neck. It can sexually arouse them.”
The woman jolted back. She curled her other hand around the one finger, imprisoning it. Curiously silent, she stepped past Pierre, towards Daseer’s desk in the middle of the room. Her hair flipped up around her shoulders, and she wore a modest long-sleeve blouse and brown pencil skirt. Several charm bracelets dangled from both of her wrists. A small iridescent barrette clipped back some of her bangs.
“Your name?” Daseer asked.
The woman took this as confirmation to sit. She made a circle around her throat and mimed for something to write with.
“Oh, no,” Daseer waved her off. “My magic is verbal only. You’re not sick, are you? Otherwise, no luck.”
Fervently, the woman made a few butterflies in the air with her hands. Again, she motioned for a pen.
“Yeah, again. I’m not trying to be rude, just efficient. My magic doesn’t work if you can’t speak what you want to say.”
Still, no dice. Daseer sighed. The girl hadn’t made a peep, and she was already disputing how Daseer’s magic worked. As with all the others, Daseer let her have her way at first.
Her penmanship looked like several sticks stacked together into letters.
“You have written the word,” Daseer stretched the paper out before her eyes like a fortune cookie reading, “‘word.’”
In confirmation, the woman drew her hands up to her chin and nodded.
Slowly, Daseer dragged her gaze around the room and raised up her hands. “See that? Feel that?” After a moment, her hands dropped. “Because I didn’t. That’ll be five grand.”
Dissatisfaction bent the woman’s brows downward.
“Look. I don’t know how you’ve heard of me, but my magic works a certain way. It’s all worked out on the “What We Do” page on my website. You give me words, and my invisible magic hand does its thing. As always, I’m not sure how or when or where or on whom it’ll take effect. Basically, I’m not sure how the words will be received, but I can feel them go out there into the world. The more words you can afford, the better. All I can promise is that your words will get back to you. But they have to be said aloud.
“I usually don’t charge payment when someone doesn’t get it the first time. However,” Daseer held up the slip of paper, “I told you twice, and you still attempted to engage in my services. So that will be five grand, please and thank you.”
The woman didn’t immediately set out on another apology. She didn’t rave, gesticulating with the kind of frequency and urgency that would have made anyone fluent in her muteness. Crumpling forward like a flower, she pointed again and again at her throat.
“What are you—oh no, please don’t cry.”
For several moments, the woman zoned in on the ground, as if she were trying to hold back tears. Her eyes nearly popped out when she looked back up. She was shaking, massaging the sides of her throat. Every part of her elongated at once. It was like she was pulling back an invisible bow. Stretching a muscle that would never give.
“Are you trying to speak?”
One measly fricative escaped the woman before a bomb went off. A barrage of violet stars flickered around her, each expanding and disappearing with a flash. They detonated in unison, and the woman barrelled backwards onto the floor. Daseer leapt out of her chair and rushed to the woman’s side.
“How did you do that?” Daseer demanded. “That’s what my magic looks like. How do you know what my magic looks like?”
The woman rolled over, lucid. She glared at Daseer behind half-open lids.
“Someone cursed you,” Daseer mumbled. She sat back on her knees. “No one cursed has ever found me before. That’s not how it usually works.”
From her fetal position on the floor, the woman hugged her hands around her throat.
Now, Daseer was the one stumbling through an apology. There was no sure way to reverse the effects of her word magic. It had come from someone else. The best way was to find the same person to say some more words, but there was no guarantee those words would be the cure. Each word a client offered her had a miraculous yet tragic way of being reinterpreted.
The second time, Daseer caught the woman before she could try. Daser pressed the woman’s lips together with her hand.
“Hey, stop. It’s not going to work.” Daseer said. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes. Daseer was familiar. Usually the tip of a petulant client. All kinds of high important people had broken down in frustration in Daseer’s office. Mostly men. Either they had a complaint with the rules of her magic, or they didn’t like the way their own words worked. Corporate execs. Presidents. Priests with boring homilies. After all this practice, Daseer thought she was immune. Tears, after all, didn’t say anything. But, Daseer had never liked silence.
“Hey, look,” Daseer said. “I could pay you back. I know it’s not much, and I guess I wouldn’t be able to find out the exact cost of what the first guy coughed up. But maybe if you stuck around, I could try to find out who did this to you. It would take a while. I don’t really keep a record of my clients. I—I just hate to see someone like this. So quiet.”
At first the woman didn’t answer. The tears had stopped. Daseer prodded further.
“You got a job? If we wanted to engineer a filing system, I’d probably need a secretary.”
The woman shrugged.
“What does that mean? Are you in the circus? Is that what all those charms are about?”
Eyes hardening, the woman threw her hands over her wrists.
Daseer pinched the bridge of her nose. “What did you say your name was?”
Now the woman was pouting.
Daseer sighed. “Let me find a pen.”
Another stick fence to decipher.
“Feely? Heely? Heely?”
The woman shook her head. Her eyes drifted around the room and settled on the painting against the side wall. It was a life-size impressionist painting Daseer had found through Facebook Marketplace a while back to spruce up the office. A lucky find: big, eye-catching, and enough like Monet’s Water Lilies that it made good office talk whenever the connoisseur type came in, the kind who liked to preach about the cultural vanguard while he coughed up fifteen grand for three words just so her magic could rearrange his portfolio. Why he didn’t just ring his own financial analyst—or go next door, even—Daseer never understood.
Inspired, the woman jumped up and rooted herself at the painting’s center. She held out a finger. As if tracing the path of the sun, she drew an arc around her, where the paint strokes behind her coalesced into a colony of blue, purple, and white flowers. Around her face she brought out the path of long, green strokes that sprouted up like cattails. With a toss of her hair, she leaned back and stuck out her tongue.
The name didn’t come instantly. It was actually the empty blank that Daseer had drawn that got her thinking. A girl who didn’t speak much, dead, surrounded by flowers. Alone. So esoteric yet culturally relevant enough that the woman was trying to conjure the picture before her now. What picture of a girl silently drowning could be considered art?
“Ophelia,” Daseer hummed.
Ophelia clapped her hands.
“Feely—Heely for short? No? Helly.”
Helly’s smile went up to her ears.
“Well, Helly, welcome to the team. You know, if this doesn’t work out, you could be a mime. Or an artist, I guess.”
Helly flashed a pair of lukewarm jazz hands.
_____
Four months had passed since Helly’s first visit. Since September, Helly had introduced some sweeping changes to the One Word Wonders. First, they had converted the opening room into a receptionist space as well as a waiting room. Daseer had cleared out the boxes in the back room to convert it into a private office to meet with clients. This way, Helly had plenty of room for bookshelves, where they began to keep client files. Overall, Helly was a very scrupulous secretary. In addition to making herself at home with several desk knick-knacks, at the end of every month she liked to time how fast she could check someone in. The end of January was no exception.
“Ready, set, go!” Daseer clicked a button on her stopwatch.
Helly launched into her desk chair.
“Pierre!”
“SQUAWK! Welcome to One Word Wonders! How may we help you?”
“Oh hello, I’m just here to see the word magician,” Daseer bumbled up to the front desk. Apologetically, Helly put her palms together and pointed to a piece of paper taped to the desk’s surface. “Ah! I see that this secretary cannot speak!”
Helly then pointed to the page’s second line.
“Hm, but of course! My name is Steve Jobbs!”
Helly nodded and pretended to type the name into her computer. She waited a few seconds to account for buffer time before scribbling a few words in cursive onto a purple sticky note.
“I see that this reads that I have been checked in for my appointment at 3:45 PM and should take a seat in the waiting area! So far I am satisfied with my visit!”
Daseer sauntered over to the four chairs that made up the waiting area. She sat and crossed her legs. Once she had settled in, she clicked her watch a second time.
“Forty-three seconds. That’s a new record!” she announced. “Your handwriting’s gotten a lot better too. Much more ladylike.”
Helly bowed.
Daseer rubbed her hands together. “That wraps up end-of-month check-ins, right? Should we close up? It’s about five past.”
Helly nodded in agreement. She started packing up shop, stuffing her belongings into a briefcase that featured a bright pink bow.
From day to day, Helly was like a cat. She came in every day for work and did her tasks, entirely self-sufficient unless she had to ask Daseer a question about the computer or the copier. She disappeared for an hour around lunchtime and reassumed her position in her chair at 1pm on the dot. After 4, she usually lingered for a few minutes before scurrying off to some other part of the city. She never asked for updates about her curse. Oddly, the secretary life seemed to satiate her. Daseer found Helly’s contentedness grating.
“Hey,” Daseer caught her attention. It was about time she figured this girl out. “Would you want to get dinner? On me.”
The sun had set by the time they headed out. They walked about five blocks to one of Daseer’s favorite Italian eateries. It wasn’t authentic, but it was classic Italian-American. No high-top mahogany tables. No mason jars. Just red gingham tablespreads with rough brown paper on top. Crayons at each table for the kids. Instead of overhead lighting, the place used candles.
“So how have you been liking the job?” Daseer asked after they had ordered. “I hope the pay’s livable.”
Helly had picked up a crayon and was doodling the outline of a person on the table. At Daseer’s question, she paused and smiled. Folding her arms in front of her, she tucked her head into one shoulder. Nothing to complain about.
“I haven’t been able to make much progress on your condition yet,” Daseer admitted. “My mentor and I were not the kind of people to write things down. She forbade it, actually. She hated reading and writing words, funnily enough. She was the only other person who I knew had a power like me.”
Helly’s eyebrows knit together. Abandoning her first drawing, she leaned in and drew a circle next to Daseer’s silverware. She outlined the squiggles of continents in black and filled the space around them in blue. When she was done, she placed the crayon in front of Daseer.
Daseer didn’t pick up the crayon but answered aloud what she assumed Helly to be asking. “I used to travel a lot when I was younger. I was a bit of a nomad. By the time I was around your age, I was in Cumae. Near Naples. That’s where we met. She was a retired prophetess, you might say.”
Nodding, Helly retracted her crayon.
“I’ve been trying to remember the intricacies of what I learned—through clients mostly. Our magic is strange, because it’s part divination, part conjuration, but my mentor always insisted we were diviners. We couldn’t use our magic on ourselves, so we were vessels for what others put into us.”
Daseer picked up a fork and started twirling it between her hands. “There’s a lot I’ve done over the years. Technically, our magic should be limitless in its results. I don’t know which of us—if it’s the client or me—that does the interpreting. Or if it’s something in the ether. I guess I haven’t really been taking inventory. But the more I’ve been paying attention lately, the more my magic feels the same. There’s the stuff I’ve always known: that my magic gets better the more specific people can be. They feed me words, and in that moment, my magic yields something in the world. People are more willing to pay the more they can guarantee the result. And the kind of people that can do that are a very specific type of people. When I’ve been present about it, it’s like I can feel the exchange happening in me. Part of it feels sharp—cruel. The other part feels dull. I guess I’ve gotten used to doing magic like that.”
Helly picked up another color. A red curve and a dot at the end. A question.
“My mentor spoke very little, besides what she had to. She saw our magic as, well, a curse.” Daseer laughed a little at the irony. “Near the end of the things, I wondered if all the training she had given me was meant to contain my magic. So I didn’t go about taking in every little word. A butterfly flapping forward a tidal wave—that type of thing. I don’t know. I guess I’ve been trying to prove something. That someday someone would come in with as little or as many words as they had, and it would do something good.”
Daseer placed her fork back down. “Sorry, I’m ranting. I’m not used to talking about myself, so sometimes it comes out in waves. Luckily, I only have cats at home and not Pierres.”
Helly’s gaze was very serious. Frowning, she tapped the table a few times and pointed at her first incomplete drawing. First, she gave the figure hair, two red s’s on either side, each with a set of barrettes. After that, she dressed the person in a little coat with a fur trim. A little farther away, she drew three more characters, all dressed somewhat like yuppies. A mother, a father, and a baby.
“Quite the spiffy family you got there.”
Helly scrunched up her nose. Next to her first character, she outlined a man. Same type of clothing: a nice pair of pants and a silk tie. She gave him angry, down-turned eyebrows. Above their heads, she sketched out two golden bands. The yellow was hard to see, so she had to run the rings around several times over.
“You were married?”
Helly froze. She shook her head and pointed to her heart. To elaborate, she traced out a few more objects: a skyscraper, a desk with a computer, dollar signs. Helly and the man again, together.
“You were his secretary.”
Helly’s eyes flickered in the candlelight. She moved again to the rings and encased them in a large chat bubble that she traced back to her character. Her character was vehement, incensed. To contrast, the Helly sitting across from Daseer, with a stiff upper lip, drew a black circle around the picture of the mother, father, and baby.
In a later vignette, the girl had a purple X where her mouth used to be. She was running, three blue streams behind her.
Daseer searched for something comforting to say. “I’ve left worlds behind too.”
At that moment, their food arrived. Linguini with clams for Daseer. Lasagna for Helly. Their waitress made a big show of grinding the parmesan onto their plates. Clearly, she was working for a grand tip. She even commented on their drawings. While the waitress promised to check back in soon, Helly smiled bigger than ever. The moment that she turned her back, though, Helly impressed into the paper a blue shadow over all the pictures she had made.
“Where did you go after you ran away?” Daseer asked a little bit later.
Helly mimed juggling.
“The circus?” Daseer guffawed. At first she thought she had misinterpreted, but Helly shrugged shyly. “I guess that’s one option. After I left Sibyl—that was my mentor—I kind of just went with the times. Wherever the center of the world was. Figured if there was a chance of anything good happening, it might be there.”
Helly nodded knowingly.
“You know, I bet if you could speak you’d say something really good.”
Helly looked down at her hands.
“I guess we’ll just have to find the person who can make that happen.”
———
Helly’s curse came back for her the following Monday.
Daseer heard the door entry chime from the hallway. She usually kept her door open in case Helly needed something, which happened to be very good for eavesdropping on her own customers. She checked her watch. 3:45 pm. Was she expecting anyone else today? She hoped it wasn’t a walk-in. Monday was not the day to deal with a client fifteen minutes before close, a client who either had no knowledge of word magic or no respect for the work-life balance. Narrowing her eyes, Daseer removed her feet from the top of her desk and wiped mid-afternoon biscotti crumbs from her lap.
She tried to fast forward through the receptionist routine.
“SQUAWK! Welcome to One Word Wonders! How may we help you?” Security parrot. Then, mild confusion.
Instead, the client’s voice came in weary. “Hi, I had an appointment at 2. Totally lost track of time. Is there any chance you could take me now?”
Odd. The way they glanced past Pierre—it wasn’t every day Daseer had a returning customer. A returning customer who clearly didn’t remember how things worked. Sourly, Daseer bit down on another biscotti..
“Do you not need my name?” There was the confusion. So they hadn’t come back in a while. “What, what are you—? Ah, I see.”
Well, that wasn’t uncommon. A client who couldn’t bother to read the glaring laminated sign taped to Helly’s desk stating she couldn’t speak
“My name is Philip Owen.”
Helly’s nails stopped clacking against her keyboard. The wheels of her chair rolled against the carpet, and she must have bumped her hip against the desk as she got up. All of her trinkets—her vase of scratch-and-sniff highlighters, her LEGO flower bouquet, and her black cat bobblehead—let out a resonant rattle. Daseer planted her feet firmly on the floor. The next moment, Helly appeared at Daseer’s door, her hands contracting between fists and claws.
“Helly, what is it? Do we have a client?”
Helly nodded. She kept shifting her weight from side to side, the arches of her feet every so often peeking out of her heels. Her eyes were like full moons, staring down Daseer with quiet desperation.
Daseer sighed. She looked down at her watch. 3:50. Better deal with whatever was happening here quickly. She stood up, wiped her hands on her magician’s robe, and walked out into the hallway. Helly trailed close behind.
“Mr. Owen?” Daseer gestured into her office. “Please, have a seat.”
The three of them shuffled around the entryway. While Mr. Owen pushed right on through, Helly drew close to him like a wraith, and Daseer discretely had to push her out of the way. At the contact, Helly blinked. For a moment, she rocked forward, then pivoted to leave and close the door behind her.
“Helly,” Daseer called from behind her desk. Mr. Owen had draped himself over a chair on the other side. “Would you mind taking notes?”
Helly yelped and ran out of the room. She returned in a scramble, holding in a vise a pad of paper and a pink sparkly pen with a pom pom on top.
“Apologies for all the pomp and chaos.” Daseer offered her client a tranquil smile. “You caught us at an unusual time, right before close. And I assume this is your first time meeting my secretary, Helly.”
“Yes,” Mr. Owen breathed out a laugh, shifting slightly in his chair. “The last time I was here was a few years ago. But she’s very—energetic. I prefer my staff on the quieter side.”
Daseer raised an eyebrow. So it was a returning client. Must have deep pockets. “Yes, I hired her a couple months ago. Lovely girl. She came in as a client herself, wanting to reverse the curse that keeps her wordless as you see now. Discovered it was my own magic on her. And, well, I’m sure you know how the rules of that work. I kept her around, seeing if I could figure out some other way to cure her. It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“Awful,” the man parroted, frowning into his lap. “How could someone do something like that?”
“Well, Mr. Owen, as I’m sure you’re aware, that’s the risk of this procedure. You give me words to work with, and you never quite know how it’s going to take effect.”
The man hummed in familiarity.
“But enough about me. How may I help you today?” Daseer drew closer and folded her hands together on the table. “You may begin whenever you’re ready.”
Before the man’s lips formed around a syllable, Helly was on him. First, the pad of paper and the pom pom pen shot forward like projectiles, bouncing off the back of Mr. Owen’s head where he was just beginning to bald. Next came all of Helly, swinging, sobbing, scratching, strangling. Mr. Owen fell back into his chair, while Helly catapulted over him, her heels kicking like a bike. Determined, Helly twisted back around until she was again on top of him, her nails clawing at his mouth and throat. It took all of Daseer’s strength to peel her away from him.
“Mr. Owen, I am so sorry—”
“What the fuck, is she some sort of animal?”
Helly spit at him.
“Helly, what the fuck,” Daseer hissed, taking her to the side.
Frantic, Helly thrashed against Daseer’s embrace. She pointed at their client.
Mr. Owen’s attire was in complete disarray. His hair was mussed up, his button-up untucked, his striped tie hanging loose from its Windsor knot. He considered the two of them, his eyes especially trained on Helly in case she jumped at him again. He stared for a moment and then blinked very rapidly.
“Ophelia!” Mr. Owen exclaimed, straightening his tie. “I guess I didn’t realize it was you without your hands around my neck, screaming your head off.”
“I’m sorry, you two know each other?” Daseer said.
“We were lovers, once.” Mr. Owen finished rebuttoning his shirt.
Lovers. The word nearly induced vomiting. Even Helly reacted viscerally, mouthing the words and spitting them out in disdain. Quickly, a picture of the past came together.
“You.” Daseer pointed at the man.
“Me?”
“What did you wish for the last time you were here?”
“God, that was a long time ago. And I was being frugal.” The man pushed his hair back. Sitting on the arm of the chair next to him, he sighed. “I guess I wished for no one to hear about anything. Although I’d be paraphrasing.”
Helly made a noise like a dying cat.
At the sound, Philip cocked his head. “Ophelia, you’re so much nicer than I remembered. Why don’t you say something sweet to me?”
“Are you stupid?” Daseer said.
“Excuse me?”
“Did you not read the laminated sign? Did you not hear what I just said?” Daseer’s voice grew in volume. “You cursed her.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t have done that.”
“You gave me words, and this is what they did. You cursed her.”
“The way you’re explaining it, it sounds like your magic did the work. I hardly understand how I’m involved. This is the first time I’m hearing of all this. Ophelia, I’m sorry you’re not able to speak.”
“You. You’re the only one who can do something about her. Fix this!”
Mr. Owen crossed his arms. “What’s your name? Ms. Daseer,” he began, eyeing the plate she kept at the front of her desk, “I have come in with about one hundred thousand dollars to construct the perfect sentence, to benefit your business. I’m not going to waste a preposition.”
“What if I gave you an extra word, for free?” Daseer hated to do it, but something deep and black was building up inside her.
“And what would you want me to say?” The man leaned in, and Daseer felt her magic activate. “‘Sorry’?”
Expectant, Helly perked up. On instinct, she drew her hands to the base of her jaw and pushed down. She pressed but didn’t try to speak. After a second, she let out a wail, the best she could do. She slid to the ground.
“I’m sure that went out to something in the world that actually deserves my pity,” the man said. He turned to Daseer. “That’s how it works, right? My lawyers told me all about what’s on your ‘What We Do’ page.”
Daseer didn’t respond.
“After the assault I’ve faced here, I think I might take my business across the way. But Kirkland & Ellis will be in touch. Take care.”
Not even Pierre did his usual salutation on the way out. He must have sensed the animosity from the front door. Well, guess if Daseer was going to keep Helly on, she’d have to lawyer up. She hoped it was just another empty threat, that the papers would never end up being served. What would he allege anyway, battery? Or he was going to bring her to Salem and tie her to a stake? These clients just got more degenerate each year. But she couldn’t bear retirement. Not just yet. She checked the time. 4:25. She knelt next to Helly.
“Are you okay?” Daseer asked.
Helly couldn’t say.