things that happened before you were orphaned

one day after school you told me you were wiccan, a real-life witch, and that you could do anything, so i hung up the phone, changed into all-black clothes, and ran down the street to your house. your alcoholic mother was placid, waxen, a pale sea creature in a muumuu sprawled out on the living room couch while you ate Lucky Charms for dinner on the kitchen floor. we watched your little brother burn his plastic army men on the mostly broken stovetop until they looked like Swamp Thing, little pairs of green arms reaching up from the dark hollows of the burners, and on the way up the stairs we edged past your five cats, the ash-blonde kitten that died of fever on my birthday. you drew a pentagram in chalk on the floorboards of your attic bedroom and lit some scented candles, raised them up on secondhand books, and i worried that the tattered covers would catch fire. we charred the surface of a hand mirror and checked the black smudges for symbols, for ghost-language, but all we did was wear a hole in our reflections, a black gap dead in the center that at the time seemed like nothing.