Her name was Deb (Miss Debbie to the staff), but everyone at SALON LA BELLE called her Clockwork, a covert nickname one of the children had coined one long, interminable afternoon while waiting in the backroom for the salon to close.
As nicknames went, it was a clever one. Every four weeks, on every Thursday of that fourth week, in walked the formidable and foreboding Miss Debbie.
3:45 p.m. Sharp.
Like clockwork. Just like Clockwork.
It was a good time, as time went: after the school rush, but before rush hour, which she, Miss Debbie, in her words, abhorred.
“Aiyah! Why would she call any of us that? I’m a good woman with a clean life!” bemoaned Auntie 1. She reached beneath her sweatshirt to readjust her bra, an off-white underwired relic that was venturing dangerously into “heirloom” territory for one of her two adult children.
“‘Ab-hor,’ Auntie,” the youngest, most clever child carefully enunciated from behind the register where she sat, head just visible above the countertop. “It’s one word, not two. It means she hates it.”
“What? Traffic?” replied Auntie 2, pinched face shining under her thick-rimmed glasses. “Who doesn’t?”
“No one, I guess.” Youngest Child returned to her book, a slow burn epic she swore was definitely educational (therefore not forbidden), prudently keeping its Valkyrie-adorned cover tucked against her chest.
Auntie 3, one hand tucked inside the pocket of her fleece vest, snipped the air with the cuticle scissors in her other hand. “So,” she asked (snip, snip), still very much stuck on Deb, “why say anything at all?” (snip, snip).
“Why not?” answered Auntie 6, eyes fixed on her bedazzled Samsung, resin rhinestones sparkling gold and silver. “No choice for us but to listen.”
“Who’s listening?” Laughing, Auntie 2 pointed a perfectly polished finger at Auntie 3. “Who?”
There were five Aunties of varying ages, temperaments, and talents at SALON LA BELLE. But there was no Auntie 4 because four was very inauspicious and none of the Aunties had the requisite karma to carry the payload of such a name.
The Aunties, relishing a rare lull at the salon, chattered on, laughing, gossiping, shrieking with delight, shouting in dismay, snacking on the snacks they usually had to hide away from the more critical eyes of their assorted clientele.
Auntie 1 slapped her chest. “If one more white woman interrogates me about my xi muoi, I’ll pumice her face!”
“Better yet,” said Auntie 6, “tell her they’re heads!” She was still scrolling, the light of the screen illuminating her eyes.
“Heads?”
“Little heads!”
“Baby heads,” added Auntie 2 in a low growl, teeth flashing.
The Aunties scream-laughed, full belly cackles seldom heard outside each other’s company. All the Aunties except, of course, the ever-serious Auntie 5, Youngest Child’s mother, who remained at her workstation, eyes locked on the door.
“Aiyah! Are you just going to stay there like a lumpa-dump?” Auntie 3 approached and offered her some haw flakes, which she rejected with a scathing, half-lidded look. “I hate it when you make my face tight balled like that!” Auntie 3 batted her eyes and pursed her lips. “Do better, huh?”
“And I hate it when you say that,” replied Auntie 5, watching as her twin mirror-mouthed the words at her.
Auntie 3 finished off the sweets, chewing ruminatively. “No need to send the girl to the backroom yet, okay? There’s still time.”
“I know that!” replied Auntie 5.
But she didn’t.
Because there wasn’t.
The silver bell above the door jinglejangled, and her view of the park across from their little strip mall salon was obliterated by hulking form and darkest shadow.
3:21 p.m.
Miss Debbie had arrived.
• • •
And yet, while that would have been enough to send anyone scrambling to accommodate her untimely arrival—indeed, the routine had been to have Miss Debbie’s specially-reserved chair waiting with her favorite polishes, magazines and selection of specially-brewed teas (which she never drank but expected anyway)—seasoned as the Aunties were, they were quick to realize that today would not be like any other. Today, forces beyond them had intervened, and if they did not therefore wish to be relegated to the sidelines of their own lives, they’d better move—really move—and more quickly and smoothly and fearlessly than ever before.
Oh? Did you not think such a thing possible?
Listen then: with their visors and vests and their big, honking purses, clunky eyewear, big hair and heavy jewelry fit to coldcock a man, the Aunties were not just an assemblage of superbly-clad women but a family.
Not just a family but a gang.
So, Auntie 6 (Angie), who was the nimblest, young-but-old Auntie (or as the children thought of her, the adult among them, but the youngest of her own siblings and subject to their merciless teasing), shot out from the salon and, arms and legs pumping, jade bracelets clack-clacking, shot on toward Morningside Elementary to stop the children from coming there after their after-school activities.
Auntie 1 (Wendy), the oldest Auntie, in her regalia of emerald green velour, silently backed both herself and Youngest Child into the backroom, locking the door after them with a barely audible click.
Auntie 2 (Dolly), the second oldest but also, with her gigantic perm and Dame Edna glasses, appearing for all intents and purposes as if the oldest Auntie, slid herself sideways from her position pinned between Deb’s blouse-draped back and her workstation, and on to the safety of the opposite wall, then through a beaded curtain and down to the basement.
Auntie 3 (Sandy), wiry, unassuming, and sharp minded, leaped to the windows and dropped the blinds (just because the Universe had decided to intervene did not mean the world had to watch).
Auntie 5 (Sylvia), even sharper minded, svelte and severe and clad in a muted blue vest to compliment her twin’s bright orange one, steeled herself and stood her ground.
Her smile, as she summoned it, was magnanimous, her voice the smoothest silk. “And what can we do for you today?”
Deb scowled at the beauticians. She took a few heaping steps forward, eager to reprimand them for their unpreparedness in receiving her.
So what if she was early?
Had she deigned to turn her slightly overlarge head over her sunburnt shoulder, Deb would have realized Sylvia’s question had not been addressed to her but to the one standing behind her.
But then, the Universe (or call it Fate, or call it Destiny, or what have you) seldom calls to everyone, and certainly not all of us at once.
• • •
A word on Fate, on Destiny, the Universe.
Or what have you.
Had it been calling on Deb that day, do you think she would have listened?
• • •
The fact of the matter was, Deb did not turn her head, did not break the nasty glare she wielded at the Aunties with such ease. She must have convinced herself that the massive fucking shadow overtaking her own was from a passing cloud or (perhaps more likely, knowing Deb) cast by her own commanding presence.
But while the light had always sliced through the cracks in Deb’s uneven frame, it was no match for the unassailable bulk of the newcomer to SALON LA BELLE.
Years later Youngest Child (Annalee) would still wonder at it. How Deb could have remained so oblivious to the miraculous happenings that transpired before them: the attentive silence of the world outside, the dreary day plunged into oblique night, the sweet sickly scents that infused the air, thickened it, emanated from the fearsome four-footed monster who entered their lives, suddenly and without mercy, and as Annalee was shut in the backroom, opened his mouth to speak:
“I AM ALISTAIR CATFISH!”
His voice boomed so raucously across the salon that Deb stumbled out of her sure stride.
Propelled by his six-toed feet, the couch-sized catfish pushed past her—because there was nothing in her manner that suggested he might not push past her—stopping with a gallant swish of his fanlike tail just shy of where the Aunties stood.
“I REQUEST A COSMETIC TREATMENT OF THE FEET AND TOENAILS!”
“Yes. A pedicure,” said Sandy, pleasant as ever, smiling, smiling.
“A pedicure,” Alistair Catfish, immense, replied. “Yes.”
Debbie had seen catfish before, back when Bill kept a tank full of the beady-eyed bottom-feeders in the front room of their Boca condo. They made good company, he stated. Plecos, they were called. How she loathed them.
Bill. Good old reliable Bill!
Bill was dead. Truth be told, his demise had come about eight years after that of their marriage, and with her time truly hers again, Deb, a widow now, was less alone than she had ever been when he was alive.
But what to do with it all?
It was, frankly, a question she shouldn’t have had to ask.
“French tips today?” Sylvia asked the catfish, helpfully pointing to a nearby poster. His eyes followed her. In them she glimpsed the sweeping, fathomless cosmos; in all that swirling, liquid black, she witnessed eternities in the making.
Eyes that then sparkled with glee. “Please!”
Plecos, Deb recalled, were exceedingly ugly fish. But at least they were small, at least they were silent; at least they remained, even with all their ridges and protuberances, of-this-world ordinary.
Not this fish. With thick swaths of mahogany skin running over heaps of knotted muscle, a bastille head constituting a third of his body, and a mouth, wide as his head, brimming with wickedly jagged teeth, he was a walking affront, strutting around on those naked, human-esque feet.
“And,” continued Sylvia, finally addressing Deb, “spa pedicure for you, Miss Debbie.”
Alistair Catfish’s twin barbels buzzed. “Spa?”
Sandy risked a wink. “Comes with a deep massage.”
Alistair Catfish rumbled in approval. “Then spa it must be. Proceed!”
Usurped, and of all things, by a catfish? Very rarely in her life had Deb encountered such disregard, least of all in a place such as SALON LA BELLE. “I … I was here first!” she blurted, face flaring.
“Hm! Whereas I have always been.” With that, Alistair Catfish reared up on his back feet and rose mightily above them, lips grazing the overhead ducts high above.
The great expanse of his cream-colored belly flashed bright, and the Aunties and Deb saw things writhing beneath that no mortal eyes should ever behold: hoofprints, pawprints, claws and beaks, a bicycle tire, a flapping wing, the unsettlingly cherubic outline of a chihuahua’s head, a fully kicking, fully human leg … and something coiled and very angry, with the hard embossed scales of a massive serpent, made so much smaller by the abdominal undulations of the catfish’s colossal stomach.
Peristalsis, Deb, a former nurse, trudged up the word from her mind, of an unholy magnitude.
Anyone, even you, would be woefully mistaken to assume that Sylvia hadn’t seen a thing or two in her life (she’d seen a face behind her reflection in the mirror; she’d seen wraith-like figures frolicking in the fields outside her childhood home; she’d seen their dead father, not yet dead, beckon to her from the bottom of the stairs, only to wake up to the news of his death).
Sandy, who knew very well that she could have easily been consigned to the unenviable lot of being “Auntie 5” (with its spectre of that dreaded 4) had she not come into this world three minutes and fifty-nine seconds before her twin, deferred to her younger sister’s authority. Not having seen the things that Sylvia had seen, she therefore knew them to be true.
While it was true that a giant, cantankerous land-defying catfish pushed against the boundaries of the reasonable for Sylvia—as did the fact of his two pairs of feet—it was nothing she couldn’t work with.
Truth be told, she’d encountered much nastier things in her line of work—things that defied reality as well as the imagination (not to mention all established notions of propriety and good fucking taste)—and anyway there was a certain hideous symmetry to the catfish, a kind of monstrous aesthetic, that was undeniable.
Besides, she reasoned, if she could handle the likes of Deb, she could keep her cool around this Alistair Catfish.
Who settled himself in a chair, into which he did fit, but only just. He dangled his bottom feet over the edge (his extremities were, after all, more foot than heel, more heel than leg), and bounced his top feet against the precipice of flesh that comprised his aforementioned underside.
Bounce, bounce, went the feet.
Bounce, bounce.
That’s my chair, thought Deb, a little stupidly, as Sandy ushered her into another.
Guests settled, the Aunties set to work.
And, oh, what pleasures washed over Alistair Catfish as Sylvia soaked his feet in jet-powered baths, as she clipped and reshaped his gargantuan toenails, cut away his unruly cuticles and flakes of dead skin, wore down his mammoth calluses till they lay tamed on his heels, applied exquisite creams in the hard-to-reach spots between his multitudinous toes …
… all this Deb watched with a ringing in her ears under Sandy’s skillful-yet-not-as-skilled hands. But when the Aunties dried off their feet and started on the much-awaited deep foot massage, the catfish let out a beastly moan that sent ripples of revulsion through Deb’s very core.
She yanked back her feet, sending a bottle of red polish spattering across the hummocky terrain of her upturned soles.
Drip, drip, dripped the viscous liquid, fat droplets falling to the floor.
Drip, drip.
Alistair Catfish howled with glee. Even the Aunties tittered a bit.
And if there was a nervous edge to their laughter as they thought of the other Aunties and the children, Deb (being Deb) did not notice, and Alistair Catfish (being Alistair Catfish) remained unbothered.
Surely, big sister Wendy, the wisest and toughest among them, had hidden Annalee somewhere in the backroom. But had she barricaded the door with something other than herself?
Angie, the youngest and loudest among them, complained so much just completing everyday tasks around the salon. But there was no one who could be counted on more to get real life shit done (like corralling the children for safety)!
Unless Jon, the oldest child, Sandy’s son, decided to take his cousins along yet another shortcut through downtown instead of the usual route to the salon.
As for anachronistic Dolly and her humongous hairdo, how they were faring in the basement was anyone’s guess.
Was that …? Was that a scuffling sounding from down below?
This is why it’s best not to even think of Dolly and her helter-skelter ways unless absolutely necessary, Sylvia chided herself, watching as her similarly sharp-eared sister moved to block the beaded curtains from view.
“Deb, O Deb! What is to be done with the likes of you?” Alistair Catfish asked when his laughter died away. “Deb, O Deb! Dreadful Deb! Desperate Deb! Disgraceful Deb,” he went on, her name a gob of phlegm dislodged from the quivering well of his throat. “Miss Debbie.”
Rage and indignation roiled within Deb, flooding the already overcrowded space between her ears, spilling nastily into her mouth, gushing into the solitary chamber that housed her fragile heart. But a well-honed reflex allowed her to re-center herself in a world that she knew—deep, deep down—could never be hers alone (for Deb, being human, had layers of being, even if they were just slightly differentiated manifestations of D-E-B).
“They call me that out of respect,” she said with such saccharine solemnity that even her absent (or largely imaginary) ancestors—and certainly the Aunties—cringed.
“Fear, you mean.” Alistair Catfish waggled an aromatic big toe in Deb’s face, rendering his demigod-like denouncement as hints of lavender wafted by her nose. “Deb, you monster!”
Deb bristled. The audacity of this fish!
“Of course, they would have called you by your name, whatever name you chose, without the fear. So it’s nothing special.”
Venom pooled at the base of Deb’s tongue and incredulity numbed it. Meaning that I’m nothing special? Tears stung her eyes without her having to do much, this time, to summon them.
Ah, here they come, thought Sandy. Right when she’s lost her precious high ground. Right when she’s painted herself into a corner. Right on cue. She glanced at Sylvia and read her thoughts as easily as if they had been screamed through a bullhorn:
It’s not enough for us to serve her literal hand and foot.
“Meaning, therefore, that in demanding such things, you are nothing special,” Alistair Catfish finished, sounding just a little bit bored. “Deb, O Deb! You wish to captivate! You wish to dazzle!” He voice dropped to a low rumbling chuckle, gaze falling to her crimson-soaked feet. “Not so, in your current state.”
“How dare you!” Deb leaped off her seat, ruining the floor where she stood.
“NOT EVER ONCE IN YOUR LIFE. All sixty-seven years of it! HM!” Deb flinched as Alistair Catfish snapped his behemoth head to the side. “Pardon me. SIXTY-EIGHT! It is, on this day, your birthday, is it not? Yet, you insist upon laying claim to a paltry fifty-two. How droll! How ludicrous! How human of you!”
Alistair Catfish dismounted his chair, a powerful headlong plunge like the crashing of a cliffside into the sea. He landed with a resounding thump on his glorious feet, roaring, spitting, gnashing those oh-so-sharp dagger-like teeth.
Plecos, the more fact-based, oft neglected part of Deb’s mind remembered, defended themselves with their plate-armored skin and spiny fins. Alistair Catfish had no such wicked accoutrements.
Yes, he had his bulk, his bombasticness, but was he anything more than a freak? A farce?
“You don’t know me! You don’t know ANYTHING!” Deb heard herself scream, a yowl that made her own ears ring. “YOU’RE NOTHING!”
Is that how she really sounded?
“Yes and no,” answered Alistair Catfish. “To ears not yours, your caterwauling is so much worse.”
It was, indeed, nothing the Aunties hadn’t heard before. But today, they were grateful for the cover Deb’s one-woman racket gave to what could no longer be dismissed as innocuous noises—crashes, bangs, and clatters—sounding from the basement.
And there were eyes. Peering through the gap between the wall and the window that the blinds could not reach. Sandy counted three familial pairs before they slid from view.
Jon, she thought, don’t.
Thursdays. 3:45 p.m. In thrall to the day’s mounting absurdities, Sylvia had forgotten that on Clockwork Days the children went down the back alley and into the salon through the basement, from where they quietly emerged and sneaked past Miss Debbie to the sanctum of the backroom.
Jon, 12, slight and slim like his mother and her twin, a shadow’s shadow who was quick on his feet, with an accompanying quickness of mind that, alas, made him more impulsive than clever, more like audacious Angie than sensible Sandy.
Second eldest Linda. At 11, she was tall, taller than the Aunties, but not so very tall, and already as tall as she’d ever be—a joke, or a punchline perhaps, that she relished with manic aplomb and an irrepressible hyena laugh, which the Aunties had long ceased reprimanding.
Darling, soft-spoken Michelle, 10, with her bobbed hair, big eyes, and round face finely sprinkled with freckles, an adorableness that belied her fast and fathomless temper.
Another crash from below, followed by the static crackling of lights.
Angie, Sylvia realized with horror, had not corralled the children elsewhere; she’d enlisted them into battle.
Deb stopped herself to take a breath. She struggled to do so, sputtering.
Alistair Catfish regarded her with the bemused derision of a being of immortal magnitude. “You are hungry, Deb. You are starving. Yet, every time you eat, your hunger grows worse.” He paused, lost in memory. “Alas, I know something of your pain, something of your self-inflicted suffering.”
And so, in earnest he began: “In the time before time was rewritten, there was a catfish. Great were his powers, and he himself so vast. And it was known throughout that land, that time, that those able to capture him must be granted a wish by him.
“How did they know? There were rumours that the catfish himself had let this be known. That bound by human desires, he willed it, and it was so. That he remade himself, over and over, to ensure it was so.
“Ever the captive, ever the captor. How else had he become so vast?
“Or had he simply always been so?
“It is hard to say, to know, that time being so long ago.
“But the meat and the truth of it remains: here that fish. And here you, Deb, one who has so captured his attention. Who is more desirous than you, O Deb? You and your like-minded ilk. It is,” Alistair Catfish licked his lips, “most gratifying.”
Deb’s face tightened with understanding. “Does this mean—”
“I am Alistair Catfish! What is your wish?”
Deb did not hesitate. “More! Everything!” She was no fool. She knew that Alistair Catfish knew what she meant.
What she didn’t know (what Alistair Catfish knew, as did the Aunties) was that what Deb wanted, she already had in abundance. In excess.
What she should have wished was to keep it.
“I am Alistair Catfish,” proclaimed Alistair Catfish. “Your wish is granted!”
Change can be difficult, often unpleasant. But when Deb emerged from her wish, she felt utterly refreshed, and thus all the more deserving of her fate.
The Aunties looked away. The catfish waited. Finally, Deb looked where they looked, and it was down.
Her eyes beheld something her mind refused to fully register.
Gone was the red polish, replaced by bristly hair and two additional toes.
“What … what are those?”
Alistair Catfish grinned, supremely pleased. He addressed the Aunties. “Tell her.”
Sandy and Sylvia exchanged looks.
“French tips,” they answered.
“FRENCH TIPS!” confirmed Alistair Catfish.
The lights cut out.
And then it was Alistair Catfish’s turn to scream.
An enraged primeval roar that knocked Deb on her ass and only spurred on his tormentors. She was the sole witness as the LA BELLE gang descended on its target.
Yet, the sight before her—the sparks raining down from the blown out lights; the two, three children of varying sizes and wildness clinging to the catfish, this one wrenching a barbel (Jon), this one chomping on a pectoral fin (Linda), this one punching and punching dense fishy flesh (Michelle); the crazed woman who exploded onto the scene in a hail of bright yellow bamboo beads, pummeling his face with a dried out mop (“Get him, Dolly! Get him!” she huffed between blows); the other, even more crazed woman, her hot pink cat-eye glasses askew on her face, circling the monster as he whipped and wailed, a blade in each of her hands, stabbing all the while (“Got him! I got him! Angie, watch yourself!”)—proved much too much.
Deb fell in a dead faint. Were it not for Sylvia’s and Sandy’s quick reflexes and presence of mind, she would have smacked her forehead against the cracked ceramic floor.
• • •
Deb would wake up many hours later, cradled in the branches of the enormous oak tree that held court in the park across the street.
The afternoon sun warming her feet, she would find as she flexed her multitudinous toes (twelve in total!) that, actually, she didn’t mind the sensation at all.
The flex of her newfound muscles was exquisite; the pop and crack of her joints satisfying in a way she’d never felt in all of her fifty-two (sixty-eight) years. She yawned, she stretched. She brought her hands to her face …
… and clumsily butted her cheeks not with her pillowy palms but with two things flat and tough, though with a certain suppleness at the center, a softness that belied their crushing strength. Things so alien yet intimately familiar.
And with a distinct odor—a musky, briny funk like the bottom of a recently emptied out pickle jar, the bare, scraped-down walls of an old dumpster, the microwaved shells of twice-frozen shrimp.
She realized that she had miscounted.
Six toes on each foot made twelve. There were not twelve but twenty-four.
A snatch of a boisterous catfish basso profundo floated to her on an easy breeze:
ALL THE PEDICURES YOU COULD EVER WANT, O DEB!
“Well.” Screaming, Deb knew, would only bring the kind of attention she could no longer easily afford. She was more feet than woman now, more foot than Deb.
Ah, if only Deb knew! Mortals cannot handle the grandeur of the feet (four of them!) with which Alistair Catfish had graced himself.
And therefore any approximation of such, even when bestowed by the aforementioned catfish himself, invariably goes awry. For while Alistair Catfish’s feet were fine—enviably so—simple scrutiny revealed that Deb’s crude clubs were badly hewn, as if from warped wood by an amateurish hand.
“Well, then.”
They were gauche, ugly, in a word, nasty. So ungainly, so gross and indecorous and something to be utterly—
“Enough!”
—abhorred.
And so there Deb remained, suspended between the intractable earth and an unreachable sky, knowing all the while that by the time she was discovered, it would be much too soon, whatever time it was.
• • •
Earlier, in the salon, after dragging Deb behind the register, Sylvia and Sandy raced to the backdoor while the children, Angie, and Dolly brought the unruly catfish to his proverbial knees.
Sylvia rapped a precise tattoo on the door’s peeling particleboard face. Wendy, standing sentry, heard the code, opened the door, and, with her enormous hands, pulled Sylvia and Sandy by their shoulders into the backroom.
“Aunties, run!” cried Jon, the terror in his scream undercut somewhat by his excitement in screaming at the very top of his lungs.
The great fish threw him, Linda, and Michelle off and against the backdoor, forcing it open; a screaming Angie and the almighty crown of Dolly’s perm (followed shortly by Dolly herself) came in after them.
(After all, boards from basement storage, a hockey stick from school, an old mop, and scissors wielded like slaughterhouse blades could only do so much to keep Alistair Catfish down).
Angie, bracing against what remained of the doorframe for balance, was first to her feet. “He’s coming!”
How what happened next happened is hard to explain.
Suffice it to say, the Universe shrugged, the Earth shook, and the walls of SALON LA BELLE trembled.
Suffice it to say, in moments of cataclysm, the mundane forgets itself and becomes impossible.
A liquid black eye, its pupil rivaling Linda at full height, filled the ruins of the doorway. It blinked, winking at them.
“AUGH!”
Has that accursed catfish always been so large? thought the family LA BELLE.
Why, said the Universe, he’s the same as he ever was, as awe-inspiring as he ever saw fit to be.
So when it seemed impossible that Alistair Catfish should fit through the doorway, he did; when the salon seemed on the verge of collapse, it did not.
If the wounds riddled throughout his great self had healed—well, of course they had.
And while it seemed inconceivable that the family should then find him towering before them, there he, naturally, stood.
What he said next was nearly as inconceivable:
“Annalee Nguyen! Show yourself!”
Were those lines of exhaustion pulling down his cavernous mouth? Was there a defeated slump in his massive flank? It would remain a topic of intense debate among the children well after their children were grown.
Crouched behind the old TV in the corner, Annalee stilled.
“I am Alistair Catfish!” pronounced Alistair Catfish, rather confounded by her silence. “What is your wish?”
At this, the Aunties clamored their dissent.
“No fishy wishes!” screamed Sylvia.
“No deals with fish!” screeched Sandy.
“Wahhhhhh!!! Aiyah!” squealed Wendy.
“I saw what you did to Deb,” shouted Annalee, silencing them. Slowly, she stood and approached, until she was face to face, toe to toe, with Alistair Catfish.
“That was Deb.” His expression grew somber. “You are the cleverest child.” Alistair Catfish shot the walls double-barrel eyefuls of catfish disdain. “Yet you hide, and are hidden. You, also, wish for more.”
The backroom was a world unto itself—a refuge from the salon, yes, but also a cramped room with stale air, few books, and the same three movies that played on a loop on their thrift store TV or VCR—a place where the children grew, quickly, quietly, out of the way and into their secondhand life.
On good days, it was barely enough.
But, it dawned on Annalee, just having a wish to wish was a wish fulfilled in itself, wasn’t it?
That devilish gleam in Alistair Catfish’s demeanor returned. “Mortals want so much. You, Annalee Nguyen, want so little, but with a yearning that surpasses all others. Deb was a distraction compared to you!”
Annalee took her time. If Alistair Catfish could not be dissuaded, he would have to be deferred.
“I don’t have a wish for you today,” she said at last. “You’ll have to come back when I do.”
“I WILL NOT!” roared Alistair Catfish. Shockwaves of irritation tinged with admiration rocked his ancient frame. No one had ever refused him.
“Didn’t you stab him?” Angie demanded of Dolly.
“I did. A lot.” Dolly held up her duct-taped hands, bloodied scissors poking out from where they had been lashed to her wrists. “A lot!”
Angie nodded. There was, noticeably, a box cutter in her hand now instead of a Samsung.
While Sandy gripped a brick.
And Wendy clutched a staple gun.
“Hm!” Alistair Catfish had never before been surrounded by such preternaturally determined mortals. His whiskers buzzed, his feet twitched.
“You’re outclassed, Catfish,” said Linda, brandishing an incongruous length of rebar, steady laughter reverberating from deep within her gut.
“Nowhere good for you to go from here,” hissed Michelle, grasping an impressive length of chain in her white-knuckled fists.
“HM!” Alistair Catfish considered this. Being stabbed was excruciating and inconvenient and he didn’t care for it.
He did not wish to be stapled.
But having insisted upon the splendor of his powers, he could not leave wholly thwarted.
“HMMM …”
Daylight continued filtering weakly into the room even though the membranes between time and space had been shifted and shaken.
(Funny how, from the Universe’s perspective, a world turned on its side was still a world unto itself. Still extant. Still home.)
“NOT A WISH, THEN, BUT A BOON NONETHELESS, CLEVER ONE.”
And so their world was refreshed, and there they were. And the books.
Stacked against the walls, pressed against the windows, backing into the backroom itself. Hardcovers, paperbacks, scrolls, leather-bound tomes. Some yet to be written, some formerly lost. Some that were Annalee’s very favorites.
As for the catfish himself, he was gone.
“Aiyah!” cried Sylvia, dropping her crowbar. “Annalee!”
She knew her mother wasn’t blaming her, not exactly, just as she knew she’d have to stash as many books as she could before the Aunties threw them away.
She smiled. “I’ll see you again, Alistair Catfish,” she said, not for the first time, knowing even then just how right she was.
• • •