Read Online Magic for Beginners: Stories by Kelly Link - Free Book Online

Clarinet. Mousetrap. Fiddlestick.
Tilly had a whole list of names for the baby. The real estate agent
would have approved.
    “Where’s King Spanky?” Henry said.
    “Under our bed,” Catherine said. “He’s up in the box frame.”
    “Have we unpacked the alarm clock?” Henry said.
    “Poor King Spanky,” Catherine said. “Nobody to love except an
alarm clock. Come upstairs and let’s see if we can shake him out of
the bed. I’ve got a present for you.”
    The present was in a U-Haul box exactly like all the other boxes
in the bedroom, except that Catherine had written henry’s present
on it instead of large front bedroom. Inside the box were Styrofoam
peanuts and then a smaller box from Takashimaya. The Takashimaya
box was fastened with a silver ribbon. The tissue paper inside was
dull gold, and inside the tissue paper was a green silk robe with
orange sleeves and heraldic animals in orange and gold thread.
“Lions,” Henry said.
    “Rabbits,” Catherine said.
    “I didn’t get you anything,” Henry said.
    Catherine smiled nobly. She liked giving presents better than
getting presents. She’d never told Henry, because it seemed to her
that it must be selfish in some way she’d never bothered to figure
out. Catherine was grateful to be married to Henry, who accepted
all presents as his due; who looked good in the clothes that she
bought him; who was vain, in an easygoing way, about his good
looks. Buying clothes for Henry was especially satisfying now,
while she was pregnant and couldn’t buy them for herself.
    She said, “If you don’t like it, then I’ll keep it. Look at you,
look at those sleeves. You look like the emperor of Japan.”
    They had already colonized the bedroom, making it full of things
that belonged to them. There was Catherine’s mirror on the wall,
and their mahogany wardrobe, their first real piece of furniture, a
wedding present from Catherine’s great-aunt. There was their
serviceable, queen-sized bed with King Spanky lodged up inside it,
and there was Henry, spinning his arms in the wide orange sleeves,
like an embroidered windmill. Henry could see all of these things
in the mirror, and behind him, their lawn and Tilly and Carleton,
stapling grass into their notebook. He saw all of these things and
he found them good. But he couldn’t see Catherine. When he turned
around, she stood in the doorway, frowning at him. She had the
alarm clock in her hand.
    “Look at you,” she said again. It worried her, the way
something, someone,
Henry
, could suddenly look like a
place she’d never been before. The alarm began to ring and King
Spanky came out from under the bed, trotting over to Catherine. She
bent over, awkwardly—ungraceful, ungainly, so clumsy, so fucking
awkward, being pregnant was like wearing a fucking suitcase
strapped across your middle—put the alarm clock down on the ground,
and King Spanky hunkered down in front of it, his nose against the
ringing glass face.
    And that made her laugh again. Henry loved Catherine’s laugh.
Downstairs, their children slammed a door open, ran through the
house, carrying scissors, both Catherine and Henry knew, and
slammed another door open and were outside again, leaving behind
the smell of grass. There was a store in New York where you could
buy a perfume that smelled like that.
     
    Catherine and Carleton and Tilly came back from the grocery
store with a tire, a rope to hang it from, and a box of pancake mix
for dinner. Henry was online, looking at a jpeg of a rubber band
ball. There was a message too. The Crocodile needed him to come
into the office. It would be just a few days. Someone was setting
fires and there was no one smart enough to see how to put them out
except for him. They were his accounts. He had to come in and save
them. She knew Catherine and Henry’s apartment hadn’t sold; she’d
checked with their listing agent. So surely it wouldn’t be
impossible, not impossible, only inconvenient.
    He went downstairs to