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“Wow,” says my friend, reaching, “What's this?”

“Careful,” I warn. “Pointing bone.”

When not downright effusive, witches tend toward the elliptical. Words, after all, have power: why waste them?

She draws back her hand, quirking an eyebrow.

“Well,” she says.

The bone was so perfect that at first, when I found it, I thought that it was one of those molded plastic bones that people strew around at Halloween. One touch was enough to tell me differently, though.

A longbone from someone's hind leg, long as my palm and long finger together, beautifully dry, with a pointed, crooked finger of bone on the end.

Whose bone it was, is anyone's guess. Larger than a cat, certainly.

Whoever you were, thanks. Every old warlock should have a pointing bone.

Just in case, you know?

Pointing bone, also called the finger of Maghu: a wand used exclusively in cursing. As an atlatl (spear-thrower) is to a spear—a force multiplier—so a pointing bone is to a curse.

Point, aim, fire. Struck, the target wanes mysteriously away and dies.

Not to be taken up lightly. Oh no, my precious.

“May I?” she asks, admiringly. I nod.

Well, Putin's gone!

We hexed him a year ago, not long after he invaded Ukraine. At Dark of the Moon, we baptized the poppet with holy water from a Russian church and, after we'd magically bound him, I nailed him (by the throat, no less) to the Witch Tree.

(That's how you do it around here; the offense to the tree magnifies the bale.)

There he hung, just outside the front door, for a year, scaring the squirrels and (probably) the mail carrier. Every time I went past, I'd ill-wish him afresh.

A month later, his face peeled off.

So mote it be, I thought.

Summer went by, and Autumn; then Winter.

Three days ago, I noticed that he was gone.

The nail's still there, but the P-boy himself is gone, simply gone: not on the tree, not on the ground, not anywhere. It's as if he'd never been at all.

Our topic at Old Craft discussion group that night was hexes.

It's a meaty topic, with ethics in the foreground.

One guy felt that he'd found the perfect solution to the problem. He was big into Santa Muerte, the Mexican folk-saint who happened to be (as a friend of mine rather uncharitably puts it) Deity-of-the-Month at the time.

When something dark needs to be done, he explained, you make an offering to St. Death—I suppose witches would say the Hag here—and offer it to her. Then she takes care of it.

That way, no matter what happens, you're clean of it.

Although I didn't say anything at the time, his comment triggered a moment of insight for me. It taught me one big difference between real, bred-in-the-bone witches, and the Deity-of-the-Month crowd.

Having stacks and stacks of boxes of books that Tom had had in his box storage room, I have decided to read some older books for the first time. My professional book reviews are of brand new books, and I won't be going into the same kind of detail on these older books here on my blog that I do when I review a new book for a magazine. These reviews will be shorter and more casual.

First up is Silver Ravenwolf's Hex Magic. It's full of spells I do not recommend anyone actually try, because she has taken traditional Penn. Deitsch spells and Wiccanized them in odd ways, and if one wants to learn that type of magic I would recommend learning from Urglaawe magical folk of whatever kind, hexmeisters or whatever. However, Urglaawe wasn't on the net ready to teach people at the time her book was written, and a lot of the personal stories are fascinating snapshots in time.

An empire of the imagination, Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore, the US's oldest (and only surviving) independent science fiction/fantasy bookstore was not only a well-loved local landmark, but a site of pilgrimage for readers all over the Midwest as well.

Now it's gone.

(It also had the grungiest men's room in the Midwest, which—on the evidence of it—had never once been cleaned since the store was founded in 1974. Ah, fandom.)

An unknown arsonist or arsonists burned it to rubble and ash on the night of Friday, May 29, in the arson that has stalked the first George Floyd protests here in the Twin Cities like a withering shadow.

I stand on the sidewalk before the hollow cave of the ruins. Strata of burned books carpet what was once the basement floor.

Touchingly, some people have left flowers. I, however, am here for another purpose.

Nowadays it's called Midtown Exchange and Global Market: a lively and successful gathering of lofts, restaurants, and ethnic specialty shops.

But more than 30 years ago, when I moved into the neighborhood, everyone in the area knew it as the Sears of Death.

A kind of shadow hung over the place. Inside, the light was always dim, the air always felt cold and kind of clammy, and everything, even new things, looked somehow tired, gray, and colorless.

Here's why.

Year: 1928. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sears is proudly opening its newest landmark outlet: an Art Deco skyscraper, clad in shining golden limestone, carved in Celtic Revival style.

On opening day, a shabby old woman shambles up to the doughnut counter in the front lobby.

“Give me a dozen doughnuts,” she mumbles, carefully laying out twelve pennies on the counter.

The clerk looks at her a little askance: the woman is dressed in tattered layers of mismatched clothing and smells pretty rank. Nowadays we would assume that she's homeless.

Still, a sale is a sale. The clerk dutifully puts twelve doughnuts into the bag, closes the top, and holds it out to the old woman.

“That's only twelve,” says the old woman, “I want a dozen.”

She's missing a number of teeth, and it's hard to understand what she says.

“Twelve is a dozen,” says the clerk, with opening day primness.

“A dozen is thirteen,” the old woman tells her. “That's what they give at the bakery.”

“Well, this isn't the bakery,” says the clerk. “Here, a dozen is twelve.”

The old woman takes her bag and goes off, muttering.

A Reminder to the Wise:

Spells are best used in conjunction with, not instead of, more direct action (such as voting).

Speaking of noxious opportunistic infections like the covid virus, how's about a charm to "disappear"

the Virus-in-Chief?

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