Part Six
“Do I want to know what happened to your keys?”
Tasha, my roommate, is standing in the doorway, a literal barrier between me and my room, and more importantly, my bed. She sounds tired, of course, it being after three in the morning and everything, but not like she woke up in the last five minutes.
“Do you want to know, or are you just being polite?” My shoulders sag, I exhale in a fashion that as non-sigh-like as I can manage. “Would you step aside, please? Thank you.”
To her credit, she does step aside, and heads back toward her room, which is the larger of the two bedrooms, but then again she’s the one with a steady job. Before she crosses into her space, she asks, “Did you get mugged?”
“No, just an asshole at the club who thought it’d be funny.” I dig into my pockets, pull out a couple scratcher tickets, both worth fifty bucks combined. “This should help with the rent, right?”
She walks over, takes the tickets, reads the amounts, and grumbles, rubbing her forehead with the tips of her fingers. “Sooner or later your luck has to run out, A.J. How the Hell do you keep picking winners, anyway?”
I shrug. “I have magical powers and I bribe a spirit who possesses a Halloween decoration with gay porn so I’ll know which ones to pick.”
She rolls her eyes. “Smartass. Seriously, though, you have to find yourself a job.”
I already have a job, it just doesn’t pay, but that’s not something you bring up when dealing with roommate politics. Instead…
“You’re up late. Did they win, or lose?”
“Win, but it was a bad win. Secondary gave up too many plays and they were saved by a bullshit call at the last minute.”
“I thought there’s no such thing as a bad win, if you win.”
She shakes her head with a smile. “Yeah, at the press conference. But bad wins can fill airtime just as easily as bad losses. I was finishing up edits when you buzzed, I didn’t even know you were gone.”
“I left during the game, had to go out for a while.”
She nods, but it’s a general rule that you can’t blame her for anything that falls by the wayside while she’s watching football. “All right, I’m going to upload the ep and get some sleep.”
With that, she vanishes into her room, shuts the door. She has to be up in four hours to go to work, while I get to sleep in. Because of this, there’s an unspoken agreement between us that I handle the dishes, set the timer on the coffeemaker, and make sure everything’s in easy access for her early morning dash through her routine to make her bus on time and still have nine minutes of wiggle room to breathe.
The sink isn’t overflowing, we’re not slobs, but the stains are dried on, and will require a thorough soaking to get rid of. Well, they would if I didn’t feel like cheating. Magic shouldn’t be used selfishly, yes, but petty rebellions against that rule are what keeps you sane.
I pull Pumpkin out of my bag, which thankfully wasn’t confiscated by Hades, and place him on the counter. “What’s the word I need again?”
Nothing.
I nudge the skull a few times, “Wake up, your Lordship, I’ve got a lot of dishes to do.”
Nothing.
With an aggravated sigh, I pull my tablet out of the bag, and bring up a website. “Fine. I suppose I’ll have to delete this bookmark to UnderTheMapleLeaf.com, a slash fiction site about the Prime Minister of Canada.” I hover my finger over the screen. “Too bad, too, looks like there’s a new chapter of Diplomatic Immunity.”
“Cleanse! Cleanse! Let me see it!”
I set the tablet on the counter, next to the skull, and tap the link so he can enjoy his “tastefully constructed speculative thinkpieces with progressive ruminations on alternate means of international trade”.
I’ve read it. Canada exchanges tariff agreements for a blowjob and a new riding crop.
A few deep breaths to center, and I hold my hand over the sink, letting the syllables roll around my tongue, my brain trying to work its way through the concept of a soft k and a hard s. It’d be nice if I could at least hear what the syllables sound like to the human ear, but part of magic is knowing it’ll work, not hoping it will.
“Cleanse.”
Magic is directed will, visualization and imposing it on reality. When the word emerges from my mouth in English, it carries with it that image in my mind of clean dishes, a clean sink, clean flatware, and my will is filtered through that image, the lens of that particular word, and then…
The dried food and stains and spots are gone, the sink is pristine as three hours of scrubbing could make it. I put the dishes away after that. There’s probably magic for this, if The Sword in the Stone is any indicator, but I’m no Merlin and I’m sure as Hell not singing “That’s What Makes the World Go ‘Round” after three in the morning.