He was supposed to call Jenny when he wanted a ride home, but first he was going to find a present for Mr. Anabin. He went into a shop he was fairly sure hadn’t been there before he’d died. It had handblown glass newts and salamanders wearing crowns and top hats, tea towels and pillows embroidered with book quotes. That sort of thing. It was the pillows that made him go in. They made him think of Mr. Anabin’s T-shirts. Was the acquisition of this present supposed to require some magical ability? Should Mo feel magically drawn to one thing or another? That, too, seemed likely. don’t panic seemed like a good choice, a solid choice. If Mr. Anabin really needed a throw pillow, these were a possibility. That quote he recognized. There were weirder quotes, too: the younger people, with the ache of youth, were eating all the cheese. Was that really from a book? Who went to all the trouble of embroidering something like that on a pillow? Or look at that moon. potato weather for sure. He liked that one. But not in a magical way. At least he didn’t think so.
There was a display of polished stones on a shelf. Feldspar, striated rose quartz, granite. Mo picked up one that was perfectly palm-sized and realized it wasn’t a stone at all. It was porcelain, glazed so texture and color gave it the appearance of a stone, but so light it must have been hollow. Mo turned it over and saw where the artist had signed their initials.
There was no meaning to something like this, except that it was not the thing it seemed to be. It made Mo want to go straight home to work on a new piece of music. But instead he put the porcelain stone down and picked up another. He held this one up to his ear and listened. All objects collected and organized sound and silence and whatever lived in the uncanny territory existing between those two states, but a hollow object collected and organized silence around itself in a way that was different from a solid object. There was the silence inside the shape, which neither listened nor spoke. Nothing dwelled there. Mo was not held a prisoner inside it, he was free. His silence was not silence: it was made up of his breath, his stillness, his busy thoughts, and his steady heartbeat. Listening, he became aware that in the silence someone was observing him. This, too, was a sound.
When he turned his head, he saw a woman behind the counter. She was in her forties, he thought, a white woman. She wore a stack of hammered silver bangles, the kind that would make noise when she moved. She had her hand on the counter beside her cellphone.
“Hey,” Mo said. He put the stone back down. “Cool stuff.”
She said nothing so Mo tried again. He said, “I’m looking for a birthday present.”
“I saw what you did,” the woman said.
“What I did what?” Mo said.
“You put one of those in your pocket,” the woman said. Her tone was not friendly. “I saw you.”
Mo said, “What? No. Seriously? Look.” He patted his pockets, pulled out his own cellphone. His wallet. He made his face as open as he could while inside him everything was closing up protectively. “Nothing else in there, okay?” He backed toward the door.
“Where are you going?” the woman said.
“Taking my business elsewhere,” Mo said. He went back out into the snow. White retail ladies had not been a problem while he was dead. Somebody embroider that on a pillow.
To his dismay, the woman followed him outside. She said, “What a fool you are. Back from the dead for not three days and already with Malo Mogge’s breath on your neck.”
“What?” Mo said.
The woman wasn’t wearing a coat, and snow powdered her shoulders, her hair. She said, “Give it to her. Or you’ll be sorry.”
“I don’t have it! And I didn’t steal anything. I just wanted to find a present for my music teacher so he won’t send me back to hell! You know?” Mo said. He turned and began to go swiftly down the street. Wind spat snow into his face, into the gap of his unbuttoned coat. There was too much whiteness in the world. It did not love him, but he would not leave it. When he turned around, the woman had gone back inside her shop.
Mo walked briskly until he came to the tiny Lovesend bookstore where the black cat slept all day long in the window. He could go into the bookstore, he could get Mr. Anabin a book. A self-help book. But in the window, yes, here was the cat; here, too, were his grandmother’s books. Here was Lavender Glass in the arms of the man who loved her and tormented her and left her and returned to her and saved her. The Lavender Glass series had been repackaged three or four years before Mo died. The new male model was handsome enough, but Mo preferred the old design. Before he was old enough to read his grandmother’s books, he’d been entranced by their covers. He’d thought the man on the cover was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen. Hair painted by an artist who had used at least eight different shades of yellow and gold, a face that conveyed yearning so consuming there was no energy left over for a morning shave or even putting on a shirt all the way, and the kind of six-pack that required a personal trainer and an unpleasant (though unlikely in the sixteenth century) diet.
Of course, Mo had only had these realizations later on. For many years, he’d only imagined what it would be like to be held by someone as the man held the woman on the cover. He still had a thing for blonds who let their hair get a little too long. He still imagined what it would be like to be held so tenderly by a hot, kissy-lipped guy with sleepy eyelids and big hands falling out of the shirtsleeves of an unbleached linen lace-up shirt.
The guy on the new covers was also hot, kissy-lipped, and protective. No one cared that Mo missed the way things had been.
In the corner of the window was a copy of Ashana’s Heart. That, too, had been repackaged in the 2000s after Avon released Beverly Jenkins’s Night Song and publishing realized that Black women, too, bought romance novels. Wanted romance novels with Black heroines. Thank you, Beverly Jenkins, thank you, Night Song, fuck you very much, publishing. The new edition had had a modest success. But Mo’s grandmother never wrote another book like it, and Mo had never asked her why. He’d always thought the girl on the repackaged edition of Ashana’s Heart looked a little like his mom did in the framed photo his grandmother kept on the bureau in her bedroom. He’d never asked his grandmother about that, either. He’d always thought one day he would.
On the back of Ashana’s Heart was a photograph of his grandmother. There was no author photograph on the back of any of the Lavender Glass books, not even the reissues.
Mo stood in the snow outside the bookstore. He thought, If the cat wakes up and looks at me, I’ll go in.
But the cat remained asleep and his grandmother was still dead and Mo’s grief surged up from whatever low, interior space it had made its home. He could have fallen over right then, only you shouldn’t just lie down on the ground and give in to misery, no matter the relief such an action would give you. Even the man who carried the terrible burden of loving Lavender Glass managed to get his shirt halfway on most days. Mo had been set a magical errand, and therefore he would accomplish it. Magic, like grief, could come welling up. The difference was how grief slammed into you without any kind of ceremony or invitation. Magic you could use. Grief just used you up. So Mo thought of what it had been like in the music room when he’d named Bowie into boy from bird. What it had been like to make roses bloom at night. He drew on magic, asked it, What should I give to Mr. Anabin? What does that asshole want for his birthday?
Magic didn’t answer him. No book knocked against the window or suddenly caught fire. Instead, as Mo stood in the street, a heavy wet snow falling down, he saw how in the bookstore window there were two cats now, not one. The second cat was perched on a high shelf. It was the largest cat Mo had ever seen. The tip of every white hair bristled with menace. Its tail swung slowly back and forth, and its eyes were fixed on Mo.
Here was magic. The cat stretched languorously and began to stroll along the shelf.
Its eyes never left Mo, but when the white cat came to the edge of the shelf, it leapt from its high perch, falling upon the sleeping bookstore cat. It buried its teeth in the other cat’s neck and shook it like a rag, staring still at Mo.
Mo fled into the slushy street. The day was growing darker fast: the snow as it fell was mixed with bits of black soot. He could not see the source of the fire, but ash continued to fall with the snow as if something invisible and very large was burning and could not be put out.