“I had no idea any of this existed.”
She winked. “I know. High school would’ve been a lot more fun if we hadn’t had to be careful about saying or doing the wrong thing in front of our very human friend.”
I sit back in my chair. In high school, I sometimes felt left out in our friend group. I’d always thought it was a normal teen thing, but what if I was wrong? So many moments from our past came back to me, and it’s like they’ve taken on a whole new light.
“Homecoming dance when you guys didn’t go shopping for a dress with me?”
She shrugged. “We had our own dresses magicked.”
Suddenly, my gaze snapped from her face to her knitting needles. They clicked and they clacked, but once Carol had set up the needles and yarn she'd withdrawn her hands. In fact, her hands were folded in her lap and her gaze was on me.
“Your needles are knitting on their own.” My voice sounded strange to my own ears, like it had risen an octave without my permission.
“Indeed they are.” She paused and when I didn't immediately reply, she added, “I’ve been keeping an eye on your brother and girlfriend.”
I nodded. “I know. I appreciate it." She’d emailed me a few times if she’d noticed anything she thought I should look into.
“I see them as my kids, in a way. His girlfriend is in my fabric shop quite a lot.”
We had kept in touch, but only for the big stuff. I knew she had a fabric store, Yards and Yarns, where she sold everything to do with sewing, knitting, crocheting, anything textile based. There wasn't a lot I knew about the actual shop or how it came into being, though. So I asked, "How's the store doing?" After all, my parents had raised me to be polite. Apparently that still stuck with me, even through my friends outing themselves as having supernatural powers.
Or maybe I just needed something normal to cling to so my mind didn’t explode.
"Oh, it's good. People are always trying to knit up here or teach themselves how to sew. It keeps me busy." She'd dreamed of opening this store all throughout high school and I was so happy for her that she was living her dream. A tiny part of me was jealous. I'd done everything I thought I was supposed to and got stuck with a shitty now ex-husband and the loss of my business and home. Although maybe the business would be mine again since he was a toad. Hell, I didn't even know if him being a toad was permanent. What if he popped back up and suddenly claimed everything as his again and just had a penchant for eating flies?
I realized I'd fallen silent so I said, “I think she sees it as a safe place. It’s one of the few places she doesn’t mind going. Henry and Alice generally spend time together at his home or hers, or more frequently on the internet playing games together. Neither of them go out a lot.” As I spoke, my mind raced a mile a minute, thinking about all the things I’d learned in just the last five minutes. “Magic is real,” I whispered.
“Indeed.” Carol twiddled with the yarn, and it changed color, going from a sparkly purple to a peacock teal to a bright golden yellow until finally she settled on a lavender color. Once she was satisfied, she tapped the needles and they took over again. “Do you have questions?”
“Uh,” I stuttered, unsure what to ask first as I was still having trouble keeping my gaze from bouncing back and forth between the talking cat and the color changing yarn. Magic was real. I'd just seen two very real examples, which only became stronger when I added in everything else I'd been writing off as weird over the last few days. Finally I blurted, “Yes, actually. What does it mean that I’m Karma? Beth said it’s rare and unusual, but that I’m Karma and showed me that book of an old woman I saved from being hit by a car back home. Well, what was my home anyway.”
Carol’s eyebrows raised high on her forehead, well passed the edge of her glasses. “Wow. That’s pretty cool. Karma, huh? I thought that was a legend.” She sucked in a deep breath and adjusted the yarn again, switching the color back to the sparkly purple it had been originally. “Well, most magic works essentially the same. You can learn to control most of it, but chances are when someone needs some karma near you, your powers will work whether you want them to or not.”
"So say for instance a woman got a smoothie spilled down her top. I caused that even though I didn't mean to?"
Carol snorted and pushed her glasses up on her nose. "You did that, did you?"
"I think so?"
"She must have had a reason to deserve karma to smack her on the ass." When she paused, I nodded. "Then that was just your powers doing what they are going to do. Magic is nothing to be trifled with. Learn how to control your power and you'll be able to at least subdue the effects even if you can't halt them altogether."
My brain rolled the ideas around as though they were a grain of sand and I was an oyster who was trying to protect itself from the offending thought. It wasn't going to work though. Something in me had awoken now that I knew magic was real, and it wasn't going back to sleep any time soon. Besides, I had a feeling that this was just the beginning.
And that maybe magic was exactly what I needed in my life right now.
6 Emma
