Sour Spell

by Shin Yu Pai

SOUR SPELL

SHIN YU PAI | SEPT 2022 | ISSUE 18

Ylva Mara, a two-spirit Romani witch, gave me verbal instructions on how to cast a spell to solve what was vexing me. I’d found them on the internet. They ran an apothecary down the street from my house, where they practiced both acupuncture and spell casting.

I needed to expel a man from my life. Someone besides my husband to whom I’d grown attached. Burning the red thread that symbolically bound us together, though cord cutting hadn’t kept him from coming at me. I needed something more forceful, like a sour jar. A spell to freeze him out.

The hex involved writing his name on paper and burning it with something he had given to me — like a drawing or a poem. I had both. Placing their ash in a jar and mixing it with piss or vinegar. For extra chaos, she suggested shattering pieces of mirror into the brew and shaking it up. I could freeze it in the ice box to cool our connection or seal up the jar with wax to prepare it for disposal.

When Ylva got to specific directions on disposing of the jar, I put down my pen and stopped taking notes. I could slip the jar into a freshly dug grave, bury the jar at a crossroads at midnight, or sink it in a body of freshwater. I pictured the Jewish graveyard off the bike trail north of my house. Walled off by fences and towering trees, access seemed challenging. Washelli Evergreen, where I like to go running some mornings, posed an option too. But invading someone’s gravesite with a sour jar felt desecratory. I couldn’t summon the nerve to hike into a public park by moonlight to bury the jar at a crossing. I’d be irrationally anxious about someone coming upon me in the middle of the night and demanding to know what I was doing. My last remaining choice was a body of freshwater. And like all things, that would take some thought and planning.

Hidden Lake is a manmade lake sited on the grounds of Shoreview Park, five miles away from my home. Created in 1920 as a private fishing pond and hatchery, it’s probably a misnomer to call it a lake. Mostly, people hike past it after lingering for a quick water view. Park visitors sometimes allow their dogs to swim in the murky waters of Hidden Lake which are heavy with sediment. I’d been there dozens of times on family hikes with my husband and son. In Spring, brilliant yellow blooms of Scotch broom shrubs brighten the trails. Ferns and mosses dot the landscape in abundance. A wooded trail descends onto the isolated shores of Hidden Lake. And rising above the lake is a single mid-century modern home with an enormous deck. On days when the owners are out on their patio, their voices echo across the water.

With a disposal plan in place, I burned the requisite elements: a poem of mine that he had copied out by hand and proceeded to “make better” through his edits and erasures; and a pencil drawing of a many-tentacled octopus, a monstrous creature rendered into something cute and harmless. I charred these materials to ash and shoved the jar into the back of my freezer. But instead of dealing with burying the jar a week, or even a month later, I let it sit there for nearly five months. I wasn’t completely ready to let go. And so the man showed up in my dreams begging me to let him back into my life. And one after another, I ran into our mutual friends. My hesitation in completing the spell had created an opposite effect. I’d frozen him to me.

On a spring day near his birthday, I spontaneously decided to visit Shoreview Park and hike down to Hidden Lake. On the way, I almost got t-boned by an oncoming car at a routine turn. By the time I arrived at the park, I was disoriented. I wandered around the grounds and took two side trails that were false starts before locating the familiar trail leading down to the water. When I got to the lake, a family of hikers lingered, exploring the overgrown grassy shoreline. Clouds gathered above us, threatening rain. After 15 minutes, the family left.

I approached the water and hurled the jar with all my might into Hidden Lake. But it didn’t sink. It floated. Calling out to me, like a lover, desperate for attention. Part of me wanted to wade back into the water to retrieve it. Tie a rock around it and bury it for good. But the toxic algal growth in the lake repelled me, and my health concerned me more than the jar. So I turned around and hiked out, while the jar continued to cry out at me.

Two years passed. I went to couples counseling. I avoided the lake. Then a few weeks ago, I attended a fundraising dinner at a socialite’s home in a nearby neighborhood. Something seemed familiar. From the deck of the hostess’ home, I noticed a construction crane and a constant gurgling noise down below. Pools of water dried out beneath her patio alongside mounds of earth that had been carefully sculpted. A waiter told me that the lake beneath the house was being drained to allow for the restoration of Boeing Creek. The noise we heard was water being pumped out continually from the vanishing lake which had a name.

For a moment, I thought of what the draining of Hidden Lake might expose. I pictured the detritus of other people’s lives besides my own. Beer cans, underwear, maybe a waterlogged phone. Nothing too toxic, unlike the inland seas, like Salton or Salt Lake, where as water disappears, toxic dust enters the air which local residents take into their lungs.

The crew working on the creek restoration will find a Bonne Maman jar with blackened liquid sealed inside and gleaming shards that catch the light. Break the wax seal and they’ll get a nose full of sour stink. His name has been burned to cinders and the lake has washed away my prints. But traces of obsession linger. Last year, a colleague mailed me a copy of a literary journal with a poem of mine they’d wanted to publish. Printed opposite my piece is a poem on taking vows, written by the man I hexed. He’s married now to a Chinese woman who is not me. Love is harder to shed than we can imagine. So I welcome a little extra magickal support from the universe. Leave the creek restoration crew to complete the narrative. Let them pour out and dissolve the contents. Repurpose the jar, if they think it’s worth saving. Or throw the whole thing in the stink of garbage to be trucked to a landfill, where it can stay hidden. Be buried.

Shin Yu Pai is an award-winning writer and visual artist based in Seattle. She is a 2022 Artist Trust Fellow and was shortlisted for a 2014 Stranger Genius in Literature. Shin Yu is the author of eleven books of poetry, including most recently Virga (Empty Bowl, 2021). From 2015 to 2017, she served as the fourth Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. Her essays and nonfiction writing have appeared in Atlas Obscura, NY Times, Tricycle, YES! Magazine, The Rumpus, Seattle Met, Zocalo Public Square, Gastronomica, City Arts, The Stranger, South Seattle Emerald, , International Examiner, Ballard News-Tribune, Seattle’s Child, Seattle Globalist, and ParentMap. Shin Yu’s work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. She is host, writer, and producer of The Blue Suit, a podcast for KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate. She is represented by Tyler Tsay at The Speakeasy Project.

Guest CollaboratorSeptember 29, 2022