Weather, Under The
Kellyann Ye
Penny knows she’s sick mostly because it’s raining. It always rains when she gets sick, almost always on accident.
She sniffles and clicks the window open with a snap of her fingers. Which, strictly she shouldn’t be doing, because even though there isn’t a Wizarding Ministry, there is a Magician’s Guild, and they are pretty focused on not letting the general populace know that magic does kind of exist.
But she wants to know how bad the sickness is, and since she can check the city’s weather and know, she might as well take advantage of it.
It’s a mopey sort of rain, the kind that dribbles down gutters and clogs them with leaves and candy wrappers and old parking tickets. It’s just a little stronger than the pretty misty kind that leaves you soaked without noticing if you stay out for too long, so she knows it’s going to be a horrible week at least.
Bartley swoops in, knocking his black-feathered head on the doorframe because he likes to pretend he’s tall. “Penelope,” he starts, the way he always does when something of no interest at all has happened and he wants to bother her, but then he interrupts himself to say, “You look like something I wouldn’t pick up off the streets.”
“Gross, Bart,” mumbles Penny, stifling a cough as she rolls over and tangles her legs in the sheets. “You’re a crow, not a magpie.”
“Hey, I just happen to like shiny things,” Bartley ruffles his back feathers in fake nonchalance, adding, “It’s not my fault there’s no exchange rate between leaves and any type of human money.”
“That’s because leaves are worth absolutely nothing and you know it.”
“Shush, you’re delirious,” says Bartley. “I’m going to close that window you so foolishly opened and then leave before you burn down the house.”
“It’s not going to burn down because it’s raining,” Penny means to say, but then somehow she’s got her face mushed into her pillow and it’s too much effort to lift her head.
Bartley keeps prattling as he glides over to the window and tugs it closed, “Remember that time when you were twenty-two and you got pneumonia? It snowed for two weeks in the middle of May and the entire school system was messed up.” There’s a hint of a proud smile in his voice as he adds, “The mayor tried to see you to complain, but you tried to make him go away and turned his tie into a live squirrel.”
“It was an accident,” mumbles Penny, but the mention of alive things reminds her that she has duties other than to her city. “Bart, can you make sure Bertha, Fred, and Henry are watered before you go? And Margret needs to be fed – I think the crickets are in the microwave from last night.”
“Oh yeah, sure, sure, leave all the plant care to the crow,” mutters Bartley as he dives out of the room, but there’s an undertone to it that means he doesn’t really mind.
Penny rolls back over and drapes the covers over her head, snorting and sniffling in an attempt to clear her nasal passageways. It goes less than well, so she resigns herself to breathing through her mouth and fogging up the air under the thick blanket her coverlet had suddenly become.
She only means to close her eyes for a little while, but she must have fallen asleep, because she’s woken (rather rudely, she thinks) by pounding on her door that implies that the occupant of her front step has been there for a while, and intends to stay there until the house burns down or the door opens.
Penny flails, coughs, and falls out of bed with a thump. A thump that is apparently clearly audible to the occupant of her front step, which turns out to be Maggie from the library, when her voice bursts through the door and shoots up the staircase, “Hello? Penny, are you alright?”
Oh buggering poodles.
It had been mostly an accident that Mr. Stevenson’s tie had turned into an actual, live squirrel that one time, but not completely. Penny lost control of her magic when she got sick just like any other magician. It was something about how her brain was occupied trying to fight off the sickness and therefore temporarily couldn’t be bothered to deal with the little matter of controlling her magic.
It wasn’t like she lost all control of it and went back to being three years old and magicking the greengrocer’s wedding cake into her kitchen because she wanted something sweet to eat and couldn’t quite reach the cookie jar. She had control of her magic, just not … fine motor control. Like she could walk, just not necessarily in a straight line. Or for more than say, two minutes.
Which was all a long way to say that she really shouldn’t be around non-magic people while she was sick because things might happen that would require her to move out of the city and also wipe the memories of every single person in the city.
“Penny?” Except Maggie was still there, and measures had to be taken.
She could pretend not to be there, except Maggie had already heard her fall out of bed, and probably heard her try to scramble back in, so that wasn’t really an option. She could fall asleep again and say that she’d meant to get up but had fallen asleep again before she’d gotten around ot it the next time she saw Maggie, which would get her out pretty much scot-free. Or, because she was going to go through all of the possibilities, not just stop at the best one, she could let Maggie in. But she kind of really liked Maggie, and if Maggie came in she would really not like Penny back. In any way, shape, or form. Which was in two words, not good.
So she tries to fall asleep, she really does.
But there must be some small (or maybe, she doesn’t want to admit, a not so small) part of her that wants Maggie to see her house and what she really is, just to see what would happen.
(After all, Maggie was the city’s head librarian. She spent her time trying to convince small children that magic was pretty much real. If anybody could deal with the rather large and inconvenient idea of Penny is actually magic, it would be her.)
Which was why Penny couldn’t fall asleep, even after Maggie had fallen silent. But Penny could tell she was still there, because her rock on the map of the city, this pretty sparkly one that was kind of black and gold, was sparking with proximity.
Penny finally gives in, shoves her feet into slippers and slumps her way downstairs, tripping over Henry’s new vine and jostling several star charts into disorder as she passes. As long as the crickets aren’t in the microwave and Maggie doesn’t go into her bedroom, she should be fine.
She opens the door.
“Oh, Penny, you look terrible,” says Maggie when she sees her. But then she stutters over her words in embarassment, “oh no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, you’re really pretty, but have you been eating? Or drinking? Or sleeping? Oh no, did I wake you? I’m really sorry, I was just really worried and I – I brought you some soup, but it’s gone cold, I can warm it up for you if you want, it’s not any trouble at all.”
She stops abruptly, without looking at all like she was out of breath and breaks into a tiny, hopeful smile. Penny definitely doesn’t find that cute. Of course not. Because denial is a thing.
Penny opens her mouth to say – she’s not sure what she’ll say, because on the one hand she’s a full-fledged magician and she can heat soup with a snap of her fingers, but on the other hand she’s sick, so that might work out less than well, and on the third hand she kind of wants to see Maggie’s reaction to the house. As an experiment, she tells herself, because she’s never let another non-magician see the inside of her house.
(Other magicians have, she knows, like that guy, Finn Whatsisname, in New York, but he was a special case. His familiar was a cat. Much easier to disguise.)
But luckily, in this scenario at least, she’s lost her voice sometime between ordering Bartley to water the plants and waking up again, and when she geos to speak nothing comes out.
Maggie, apparently, takes this as a sign that Penny is too ill to do anything, and goes inside.
Maggie’s polite about bursting into Penny’s house, but she’s also suprisingly forceful about it. “Alright,” she says when she’s toed off her shoes and dumped her purse-cum-satchel onto the hall table, “alright. Penny, go sit on the sofa or something, I mean, if you want. But. I’ll heat up some soup for you, and then go away again.”
And now Penny’s really glad she can’t speak, because it keeps her from saying something stupid like, “Don’t ever go away.” As it is, she makes a bit of a mumbling noise she hopes comes off as an affirmative, and then coughs.
“Your apartment is really nice,” says Maggie, and Penny freezes in terror, not relaxing even when Maggie continues, “Are you into astrology? I really like your star charts.”
The couch is scratchy, and mustier than she remembers, but it’s pretty soft, and once she’s sat there for a while, it’s relatively warm, too. She rests her head on the back of the soda and listens to Maggie puttering around in the kitchen. It’s really domestic, she thinks, and then wishes she hadn’t thought it.
Maggie pokes her head out of the doorway to the kitchen to ask where the pots are, and Penny almost absentmindedly tells Henry to show her. But that wouldn’t do, so she mumbles something that sounds like, “Dishwasher,” before turning to squint blearily at Henry in his new brown pot on the kitchen counter and gurgle, “No.”
Maggie comes out later with chickn noodle soup, the kind with elbow noodles that isn’t from the store in a bowl on a tray, along with a glass of water and another glass of orange juice. “Did you know some of your plants move by themselves?”
Penny chokes on her sip of orange juice, which recovers her voice enough for her to say, “Ye – no. They shouldn’t.”
Maggie laughs, and Penny’s going to be super stereotypical and cliched here and say it was a tinkling sort of laugh, but regardless of poor descriptors, it was a really pretty laugh, and Penny kind of really likes it. “Oh no, don’t worry, it was really nice. It showed me where the pots were.”
Penny doesn’t ask, or (in her opinion) do anything at all that would encourage Maggie to stay, unless gurgling helplessly and pretending not to know that the entire apartment is full of magic is bodice-rippingly sexy, but Maggie does. Sits down in the armchair with a book (Penny peeks while she tries not to slurp her soup. It’sThe Once and Future King) and unfolds a pair of thick-rimmed reading glasses and everything.
This is still really, really domestic, Penny’s mind reminds her, and she sort of doesn’t imagine the possibilities, because she keeps sniffling as she eats, and that is probably the singularly most unattractive thing a person can do, right up there with breathing through a mouthful of half-chewed food. Which she is also doing.
Which is when she remembers to wonder where Bartley is. She gives up that train of thought almost as soon as it starts, because the possibilities are endless and it takes too much energy, or at least more than she can spare right now, between eating soup without sounding like a heathen and very carefully not glancing at Maggie reading a book every so often.
Maggie leaves when Penny’s finished the soup and is curled on the armchair watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix nursing her glass of orange juice with a straw. But she takes the rest of the tray to the kitchen, and by the sounds of it, washes it and dries it, and puts it away, because she is some sort of amazing human being.
“I’ll see you soon?” asks Maggie as she leaves in what Penny thinks is a hopeful tone, though that might (probably is) just her projecting.
Penny nods, empathetically.
“Awesome,” says Maggie, her hopeful little smile widening to show her gums. Then she goes, waving to Henry when he waggles a green-striped leaf at her, and closing the door carefully after herself. The apartment seems really empty once she’s gone, the muted noise of the television doing little to help ease the silence.
Bartley chooses about then to jet down the stairs in a steep dive, pulling to a screeching stop half an inch from Penny’s face. She doesn’t flinch, because it’s been seventeen years since she’d started her apprenticeship in the Guild, and she’s gotten used to it.
“You’re a complete sap,” says Bartley, smirking, “Absolutely head-over-heels.”
“Shut up,” says Penny in return, by which she means, “I know.” She smiles a little bit to herself just thinking about it.
Kellyann Ye
Penny knows she’s sick mostly because it’s raining. It always rains when she gets sick, almost always on accident.
She sniffles and clicks the window open with a snap of her fingers. Which, strictly she shouldn’t be doing, because even though there isn’t a Wizarding Ministry, there is a Magician’s Guild, and they are pretty focused on not letting the general populace know that magic does kind of exist.
But she wants to know how bad the sickness is, and since she can check the city’s weather and know, she might as well take advantage of it.
It’s a mopey sort of rain, the kind that dribbles down gutters and clogs them with leaves and candy wrappers and old parking tickets. It’s just a little stronger than the pretty misty kind that leaves you soaked without noticing if you stay out for too long, so she knows it’s going to be a horrible week at least.
Bartley swoops in, knocking his black-feathered head on the doorframe because he likes to pretend he’s tall. “Penelope,” he starts, the way he always does when something of no interest at all has happened and he wants to bother her, but then he interrupts himself to say, “You look like something I wouldn’t pick up off the streets.”
“Gross, Bart,” mumbles Penny, stifling a cough as she rolls over and tangles her legs in the sheets. “You’re a crow, not a magpie.”
“Hey, I just happen to like shiny things,” Bartley ruffles his back feathers in fake nonchalance, adding, “It’s not my fault there’s no exchange rate between leaves and any type of human money.”
“That’s because leaves are worth absolutely nothing and you know it.”
“Shush, you’re delirious,” says Bartley. “I’m going to close that window you so foolishly opened and then leave before you burn down the house.”
“It’s not going to burn down because it’s raining,” Penny means to say, but then somehow she’s got her face mushed into her pillow and it’s too much effort to lift her head.
Bartley keeps prattling as he glides over to the window and tugs it closed, “Remember that time when you were twenty-two and you got pneumonia? It snowed for two weeks in the middle of May and the entire school system was messed up.” There’s a hint of a proud smile in his voice as he adds, “The mayor tried to see you to complain, but you tried to make him go away and turned his tie into a live squirrel.”
“It was an accident,” mumbles Penny, but the mention of alive things reminds her that she has duties other than to her city. “Bart, can you make sure Bertha, Fred, and Henry are watered before you go? And Margret needs to be fed – I think the crickets are in the microwave from last night.”
“Oh yeah, sure, sure, leave all the plant care to the crow,” mutters Bartley as he dives out of the room, but there’s an undertone to it that means he doesn’t really mind.
Penny rolls back over and drapes the covers over her head, snorting and sniffling in an attempt to clear her nasal passageways. It goes less than well, so she resigns herself to breathing through her mouth and fogging up the air under the thick blanket her coverlet had suddenly become.
She only means to close her eyes for a little while, but she must have fallen asleep, because she’s woken (rather rudely, she thinks) by pounding on her door that implies that the occupant of her front step has been there for a while, and intends to stay there until the house burns down or the door opens.
Penny flails, coughs, and falls out of bed with a thump. A thump that is apparently clearly audible to the occupant of her front step, which turns out to be Maggie from the library, when her voice bursts through the door and shoots up the staircase, “Hello? Penny, are you alright?”
Oh buggering poodles.
It had been mostly an accident that Mr. Stevenson’s tie had turned into an actual, live squirrel that one time, but not completely. Penny lost control of her magic when she got sick just like any other magician. It was something about how her brain was occupied trying to fight off the sickness and therefore temporarily couldn’t be bothered to deal with the little matter of controlling her magic.
It wasn’t like she lost all control of it and went back to being three years old and magicking the greengrocer’s wedding cake into her kitchen because she wanted something sweet to eat and couldn’t quite reach the cookie jar. She had control of her magic, just not … fine motor control. Like she could walk, just not necessarily in a straight line. Or for more than say, two minutes.
Which was all a long way to say that she really shouldn’t be around non-magic people while she was sick because things might happen that would require her to move out of the city and also wipe the memories of every single person in the city.
“Penny?” Except Maggie was still there, and measures had to be taken.
She could pretend not to be there, except Maggie had already heard her fall out of bed, and probably heard her try to scramble back in, so that wasn’t really an option. She could fall asleep again and say that she’d meant to get up but had fallen asleep again before she’d gotten around ot it the next time she saw Maggie, which would get her out pretty much scot-free. Or, because she was going to go through all of the possibilities, not just stop at the best one, she could let Maggie in. But she kind of really liked Maggie, and if Maggie came in she would really not like Penny back. In any way, shape, or form. Which was in two words, not good.
So she tries to fall asleep, she really does.
But there must be some small (or maybe, she doesn’t want to admit, a not so small) part of her that wants Maggie to see her house and what she really is, just to see what would happen.
(After all, Maggie was the city’s head librarian. She spent her time trying to convince small children that magic was pretty much real. If anybody could deal with the rather large and inconvenient idea of Penny is actually magic, it would be her.)
Which was why Penny couldn’t fall asleep, even after Maggie had fallen silent. But Penny could tell she was still there, because her rock on the map of the city, this pretty sparkly one that was kind of black and gold, was sparking with proximity.
Penny finally gives in, shoves her feet into slippers and slumps her way downstairs, tripping over Henry’s new vine and jostling several star charts into disorder as she passes. As long as the crickets aren’t in the microwave and Maggie doesn’t go into her bedroom, she should be fine.
She opens the door.
“Oh, Penny, you look terrible,” says Maggie when she sees her. But then she stutters over her words in embarassment, “oh no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, you’re really pretty, but have you been eating? Or drinking? Or sleeping? Oh no, did I wake you? I’m really sorry, I was just really worried and I – I brought you some soup, but it’s gone cold, I can warm it up for you if you want, it’s not any trouble at all.”
She stops abruptly, without looking at all like she was out of breath and breaks into a tiny, hopeful smile. Penny definitely doesn’t find that cute. Of course not. Because denial is a thing.
Penny opens her mouth to say – she’s not sure what she’ll say, because on the one hand she’s a full-fledged magician and she can heat soup with a snap of her fingers, but on the other hand she’s sick, so that might work out less than well, and on the third hand she kind of wants to see Maggie’s reaction to the house. As an experiment, she tells herself, because she’s never let another non-magician see the inside of her house.
(Other magicians have, she knows, like that guy, Finn Whatsisname, in New York, but he was a special case. His familiar was a cat. Much easier to disguise.)
But luckily, in this scenario at least, she’s lost her voice sometime between ordering Bartley to water the plants and waking up again, and when she geos to speak nothing comes out.
Maggie, apparently, takes this as a sign that Penny is too ill to do anything, and goes inside.
Maggie’s polite about bursting into Penny’s house, but she’s also suprisingly forceful about it. “Alright,” she says when she’s toed off her shoes and dumped her purse-cum-satchel onto the hall table, “alright. Penny, go sit on the sofa or something, I mean, if you want. But. I’ll heat up some soup for you, and then go away again.”
And now Penny’s really glad she can’t speak, because it keeps her from saying something stupid like, “Don’t ever go away.” As it is, she makes a bit of a mumbling noise she hopes comes off as an affirmative, and then coughs.
“Your apartment is really nice,” says Maggie, and Penny freezes in terror, not relaxing even when Maggie continues, “Are you into astrology? I really like your star charts.”
The couch is scratchy, and mustier than she remembers, but it’s pretty soft, and once she’s sat there for a while, it’s relatively warm, too. She rests her head on the back of the soda and listens to Maggie puttering around in the kitchen. It’s really domestic, she thinks, and then wishes she hadn’t thought it.
Maggie pokes her head out of the doorway to the kitchen to ask where the pots are, and Penny almost absentmindedly tells Henry to show her. But that wouldn’t do, so she mumbles something that sounds like, “Dishwasher,” before turning to squint blearily at Henry in his new brown pot on the kitchen counter and gurgle, “No.”
Maggie comes out later with chickn noodle soup, the kind with elbow noodles that isn’t from the store in a bowl on a tray, along with a glass of water and another glass of orange juice. “Did you know some of your plants move by themselves?”
Penny chokes on her sip of orange juice, which recovers her voice enough for her to say, “Ye – no. They shouldn’t.”
Maggie laughs, and Penny’s going to be super stereotypical and cliched here and say it was a tinkling sort of laugh, but regardless of poor descriptors, it was a really pretty laugh, and Penny kind of really likes it. “Oh no, don’t worry, it was really nice. It showed me where the pots were.”
Penny doesn’t ask, or (in her opinion) do anything at all that would encourage Maggie to stay, unless gurgling helplessly and pretending not to know that the entire apartment is full of magic is bodice-rippingly sexy, but Maggie does. Sits down in the armchair with a book (Penny peeks while she tries not to slurp her soup. It’sThe Once and Future King) and unfolds a pair of thick-rimmed reading glasses and everything.
This is still really, really domestic, Penny’s mind reminds her, and she sort of doesn’t imagine the possibilities, because she keeps sniffling as she eats, and that is probably the singularly most unattractive thing a person can do, right up there with breathing through a mouthful of half-chewed food. Which she is also doing.
Which is when she remembers to wonder where Bartley is. She gives up that train of thought almost as soon as it starts, because the possibilities are endless and it takes too much energy, or at least more than she can spare right now, between eating soup without sounding like a heathen and very carefully not glancing at Maggie reading a book every so often.
Maggie leaves when Penny’s finished the soup and is curled on the armchair watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix nursing her glass of orange juice with a straw. But she takes the rest of the tray to the kitchen, and by the sounds of it, washes it and dries it, and puts it away, because she is some sort of amazing human being.
“I’ll see you soon?” asks Maggie as she leaves in what Penny thinks is a hopeful tone, though that might (probably is) just her projecting.
Penny nods, empathetically.
“Awesome,” says Maggie, her hopeful little smile widening to show her gums. Then she goes, waving to Henry when he waggles a green-striped leaf at her, and closing the door carefully after herself. The apartment seems really empty once she’s gone, the muted noise of the television doing little to help ease the silence.
Bartley chooses about then to jet down the stairs in a steep dive, pulling to a screeching stop half an inch from Penny’s face. She doesn’t flinch, because it’s been seventeen years since she’d started her apprenticeship in the Guild, and she’s gotten used to it.
“You’re a complete sap,” says Bartley, smirking, “Absolutely head-over-heels.”
“Shut up,” says Penny in return, by which she means, “I know.” She smiles a little bit to herself just thinking about it.