Pagan Writers Community

Now it was Monday and she was back in the classroom. The only thing left of Friday night’s adventure was a lightness in her heart. Her smile came more easily as did her patience. She took the moment of quiet while the children were at recess to tidy up the classroom. She went through the aisles, picking up trash and straightening desks. A bottle of glue had overturned on one of them and she stopped to clean it up.

“Oh Allie,” she laughed, thinking of the messy blonde angel whose desk she was cleaning, “Will you ever make anything without making a mess?” When the desk was clean again, she screwed the cap back onto the glue and opened the top of the desk to put the bottle away. That was when she saw the pouch. Soft green leather with a bit of gold ribbon knotted at the top made this particular pouch unmistakable.  There was even a hint of glitter pressed into the leather.

She tried to remember where she had left this one, but came up blank. The pouches had been placed at random. She couldn’t remember the specifics of any of them. She only knew that this particular pouch should have been three cities away in some other child’s desk or pocket, not here, in her own classroom. Not that there was any harm in it. It was just strange. Serendipitous, Justice would say. Maybe it was a sign that the Goddess had acknowledged her actions. Maybe it was nothing. She had just lifted the lid of the desk to place the pouch back where she had found it when a voice startled her.

“Miss Samantha?”

Two big blue eyes peered out at her from beneath a tangle of blond hair. If this wasn’t serendipity, she didn’t know what was.

“Allie,” she said, surprised, “shouldn’t you be at recess?”

“Miss Erica said I could come talk to you,” Allie said quietly, “Oh, you found my pouch.”

“I saw it while I was cleaning,” Samantha said, handing the pouch to Allie. “Where did you get it?”

Allie toyed with the ribbon that tied it closed.

“I found it at the store when I was visiting my daddy,” she said. “It’s for wishes.” She looked down at the pouch and her expression was troubled. Samantha had been around children long enough to tell when one needed to talk. With another child, she might have directly asked what was wrong, but Allie was different. As messy as she was with her art projects, she chose her words carefully and only spoke when she was ready. Samantha knew better than to push her.

“Want to tell me what you wished for,” she asked instead, keeping her tone light and kneeling so that their faces were nearly level. Emotions flickered across Allie’s face too quickly for Samantha to read them. Abruptly, she straightened, turned her face up to Samantha’s and pulled up the sleeve of her shirt up to her elbow. Beneath it, the skin was an ugly purple color just starting to yellow at the edges of the bruise.

“Oh, honey,” Samantha said, fighting tears at this clear sign of abuse. Allie’s eyes were dry but her voice trembled.

“There’s more,” Allie said. “It wasn’t the first time.”  She gripped the wish pouch in her fist as though it could save her from the one who had hurt her.

“Did your daddy do this to you,” Samantha asked gently. Allie nodded and this time there were tears in her eyes.

“I don’t want to go back.”

Samantha straightened, composing herself so that her voice would be steady.

“You know that no one should ever hurt you like this,” she said and Allie nodded.  “And because you showed me this, I’m going to have to make a phone call. Then someone is going to come and talk to you about this. I know that talking to someone you don’t know about something like this is hard and a little scary but if you tell them what happened, we can make sure that it never happens again. This is a big thing, Allie. It’s more than a little wish pouch can handle.”

“I know,” Allie said, surprising her. “That isn’t what I wished for.”

“What did you wish for, then,” Samantha asked.

Allie smiled a little and set the little pouch on top of the desk. “I wished to be brave enough to tell.”

–

Brinna Blaine is a writer, pagan and sometimes artist from Texas. She makes mead, writes fantasy fiction and spends too much time online. She is a firm believer in serendipitous magic. You can find her at www.brinnablaine.com and on facebook.

Samantha stared at the little pouch of lavender colored leather in the palm of her hand. It was bound with a piece of gold ribbon, but she didn’t need to open it to see what was inside. Three small polished stones, a tiny yellow feather, a pinch of glitter and a note on a folded slip of paper nestled together at the bottom of the little pouch. She knew this because she had made the pouch and six others just like it three days before. What she didn’t know was how it had found its way to her student’s desk, over an hour’s drive from where she had left it.  She remembered the evening clearly.

It was a Friday and the moon was full. Only a year ago, the full moon would have been enough to lure her outside, but she hadn’t so much as noticed the moon’s waxing this month. She had been drawn outside by nothing more magical than a cigarette and the chance to spend a moment outside of her cramped apartment. It had been a long day of herding and teaching a classroom full of second graders and she was exhausted. She had gone into teaching to make a difference and change lives.

Who had she been kidding?

She considered each day a success if she managed to cover more than half the material in her lesson plan before sending the kids home for the day. She could hardly remember the days when she couldn’t wait to get to the classroom. Now she couldn’t wait to get home, pour a cup of hot tea and have a cigarette. The weekends didn’t come fast enough. What had happened to her?

She leaned against the outside of her door and looked up at the night sky. The moon was full and bright but her heart didn’t rise to it like it used to. Disappointment filled her throat and she suddenly wanted to cry. She was a daughter of the Goddess, a magical being. She had danced beneath the full moon with her Soul Sister, Justice, and invoked the Goddess with prayer, candles, incense and love. Back then, she had seen the Goddess in everything. The changing colors of the seasons, a cool breeze on a warm day, the light in a child’s eyes, and even in her own face in the mirror, a little pale but with big green eyes that even she admitted were pretty.   Back then, a night like this, where the sky was clear and the moon was full would have brought her true joy. She would have found some way to celebrate. But this night, she didn’t feel like celebrating at all. She felt like hiding in her room and sleeping away the rest of the month.

“Get a grip, Samantha,” she said, surprising herself. “This isn’t who you are.”

It wasn’t who she wanted to be, either. She thought of Justice with her beads and charms perfumed in incense and earth. Justice had probably never had a mundane day in her life. If anything, she was outside right now, wherever she was, laughing and dancing, making magic or love beneath the light of the moon.

“Sister of mine,” Samantha said to the night sky, “what would you do if you’d lost your magic?”

Something crazy, most likely. Justice was a well of random acts and fun. She was always finding ways to bring a little magic into the lives of everyone around her. Maybe that was it. Instead of focusing on her own problems, she should try to make a little magic for someone else. What had Justice called it? Serendipitous magic. That was it. So what could she do?

Only minutes later, she was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by art supplies and various ‘magical’ items she had collected over the years; bright colored gemstones, plastic feathers, glitter, markers, parchment and bits of dyed leather and ribbon. She could make wish pouches and leave them in random places to be found by strangers. She smiled at the thought. This was the sort of project Justice would have jumped on, but this time, it was all hers.

She sewed the pieces of colored leather into seven rough little pouches, and filled them with gemstones, feathers, and glitter. Finally, she took seven slips of paper and wrote the same sentence on each with a plain black marker.

“The finder of this pouch is entitled to one wish.”

She had to admit, she felt a little more magical already. She gathered up her wish pouches and drove to a city an hour away. She had to be anonymous; that was the point of it. She couldn’t risk running into someone she knew, even at this late hour. The long drive didn’t bother her and she was surprised to find she wasn’t even tired anymore. The feeling amplified as she carried the pouches to the places where they would later be found, on the sidewalk of the post office just under a tree, beneath a newspaper stand in front of the grocery store, at the top of the slide in the park and so on, until they were all gone. She felt giddy and a little nervous, sneaking from place to place quickly and quietly, so that she wouldn’t be seen. Each time she left a pouch, she wondered who would find it and what they might wish for. It made her think of being a child herself and finding a bright colored stone or little toy in an unexpected place and wondering who or what had left it there. A fairy maybe, another child, or simply someone who knew that she would be by sooner or later to find it. She grinned as she set down the last pouch. Tonight, she felt like all three of those. As she got into her car, she caught a glimpse of herself in the rear view mirror. There was a mischievous glint in her eyes and a smile on her lips that would have made Justice proud.