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bodies.
    Out in the shed she pours a scoop of grain and waits for Pinka and Hans to come galloping. Hans nuzzles the mender’s crotch, and Pinka lifts a front hoof to be shaken.
Hello, beautifuls.
Their tongues are hard and clean. First time she saw a goat’s pupil—rectangular, not round—she felt a stab of recognition.
I know you, strangeness
. They will never be taken from her. They know to behave, now, after that mischief near the trail.
    Clementine brought black rockfish as payment. Her brothers are fishermen. The mender lifts it from the cooler, plops it into a bowl, picks up the littleknife. She feeds the flesh to Malky and crunches the bones in her own mouth. The eyes she throws into the woods. Malky needs protein for all the hunting he does. Gone for days and comes back thin. Fish bones shouldn’t be feared; you just have to chew them right so they won’t pierce your throat walls or stomach lining.
    “Your science teacher will tell you,” said Temple, “fish bones are pure calciumand can’t be digested by the human body, but let me assure you, that’s not the whole story.” One of the things the mender loved best about her aunt was “let me assure you.” That and she cooked regular meals. Not once while living with Temple did the mender have to eat sautéed condiments for dinner. Temple became her guardian after the mender’s mother left a note saying
Your better off with auntiedon’t worry I will send letters!
The mender was eight years old and herself not the best speller, but she noticed that the first word of the note was wrong.
    Temple said the things she sold in her shop, Goody Hallett’s, were props for tourists; but if her niece happened to be interested in the true properties of alchemy, she could teach her. Magic was of two kinds: natural and artificial. Naturalmagic was no more than a precise knowledge of the secrets of nature. Armed with such knowledge, you could effect marvels that to the ignorant seemed miracles or illusions. A man once cured his father’s blindness with the gall bladder of a dragonet fish; the beat of a drum stretched with the skin of a wolf would shatter a drum stretched with the skin of a lamb.
    The mender bottled her first tincturesoon after her mother left. Per Temple’s instructions, she gathered dozens of stalks of flowering mullein, yellow and shaped cheerfully. She picked the flowers and laid them to dry on a towel. Scooped them into a glass jar with chips of garlic, filled the jar with almond oil, left the jar on the sill for a month. Then she strained the oil into six small brown bottles, which she lined up on thekitchen counter—she was already tall enough—and brought Temple to see. Her aunt stood over her, aswirl with red hair, all that long, ropy, sparkling hair, and said, “Well done!” and it was the first time in her life the mender could remember being praised for doing something instead of for not doing it. (Not talking, not crying, not complaining when her mother took six hours to come back from thestore.) “Next time your ear hurts,” said Temple, “this is what you’ll use.” The promise of fixing and curing sent hot waves through the mender’s belly. Show them how Percivals do.
    When she wakes, the cabin is so dark from the rain and the trees, she doesn’t know it is morning. But it is, and Malky is scratching, and the door is knocking.
    She drinks a tea of horse-flavored ashwagandha. Eats brownbread. The new client wants nothing but water. Her name is Ro Stephens. Face dry and worried, hair dry and dull (feeble blood?), body thin (not perilously). She has lost people, the mender senses. A tiny smell, like a spoonful of smoke.
    “I’ve been trying for a long time with Dr. Kalbfleisch at Hawthorne Reproductive Medicine.”
    The mender has heard of Kalbfleisch from other clients. One describedhim as a NILF: Nazi I’d Like to Fuck.
    “So you’ve been taking their medications.”
    “A shit ton, yes.”
    “How’s your cervical