The Spell

The one about finding a dead dog’s hair in a pair of scissors. Dispatch 28 begins during another power outage, with the narrator working by candlelight and searching for a good pair of black-handled scissors. When he finally finds them behind the computer, something caught between the blades stops him: a tiny tuft of fur belonging to Mango, a dog long gone. For a moment, he can smell her. He knows perfectly well that old hair should not carry the scent of a dead dog. Nevertheless, there she is. The discovery sends his mind wandering through the ancient history of scissors, the peculiar fact that they are plural, writing, truth, and the strange power of arranging ordinary objects in the correct order and expecting something to happen. A sentence does it. A recipe does it. And, apparently, so does a spell. That leads inevitably to Naïka. The self-declared witch has told him there are ways of recovering the “essence” of something from its hair. Against his better judgment—and with considerable awareness that he is acting against his better judgment—he calls her. Soon the candle, water, ginger, Mango’s hair, and scissors have become the ingredients of an experiment he cannot quite admit he believes in. But Mango may not be the only reason he continues. Naïka agitates and attracts him in ways he cannot explain. Her indifference to how improbable she sounds seems to loosen something in a man accustomed to asking how things work. Perhaps he is under a spell. Perhaps wanting to believe that is part of the spell. At its center, The Spell is about the seduction of not knowing. Grief, attraction, memory, superstition, and writing begin to resemble one another: ordinary things placed carefully together in the hope that something absent might appear. Then the electricity fails completely, Winston disappears with it, and the narrator is left alone with the candle and his little arrangement. After a lifetime spent learning how things work, he decides, just this once, to see what remains when he doesn’t.