Young Writers Society

Justin Fairchild does not hide his love of floral arrangements. From the second you step into Apt 108, you’re bombarded by the sights and smells of Flower Hell with an open floor plan. The living room and kitchen overflow with arrangements, some of them work-related, others for fun. Perfumed wreaths of preserved buds hang on each closed door.

The kitchen is so full of flowers, floral supplies, and flower food that it can hardly be used to make human food. Mostly it’s instant or frozen food that’s heated up in the microwave nestled under an overbearing bouquet of roses.

None of Justin’s flowers ever seem to die—he keeps them just watered enough, he says, or feeds them the right mix of ingredients—but Zelda has never seen these ingredients, except for the bone meal. Monday he collects the bones from the farmers and butchers around town and freezes them; Sunday he enlists Zelda’s help in crushing them into a fine dust for fertilizer.

The living room is more for arranging than living. The couch is full of flower pins and no one wise ever sits on it; Zelda and her friends prefer the coffee table or, more often than not, the safety of her room. (It doesn’t help that Justin tries to interact with her friends every time they come over—including many failed attempts to make cookies.) The recliner is white leather and well-maintained, with dark smudges where Justin usually sits and rests his elbows on the arms while he pins and ties arrangements.

The TV is always running on the same local news channel. No one really watches it; it’s more for background noise than anything.

There are four rooms on the back hall: the master suite on the first left, Zelda’s room on the second right, the guest bathroom on the first right, and the laundry nook by the water heater on the second left. From the laundry nook, with the door closed, you can almost hear a conversation going on in the living room.

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Zelda’s bedroom is its own beast. If Justin has his flowers, Zelda has her found things.

Her father builds shelves as quickly as she fills them. One shelf is dedicated to her cameras of hobby past; for her twelfth birthday, she’d asked for a cork board to pin her photos on. Justin one-upped himself and installed a board that takes up half the wall opposite her shelves, now full of pinned photographs -- mainly of leaves, but some of Zelda and her friends, and some of weather events around town. Mainly fog.

Most of the shelving is filled to the brim with stuff. Notebooks and three-ring binders from ninth grade; track and field awards; some gadgets she got as presents from distant family.

Her bed and desk are squeezed in together on her outward-facing wall. The window casts light into her room in the evenings, which means she spends most of the afternoon in the living room on her laptop. Especially in the summertime, when she has nothing better to do.

The bed is a mess all its own—dirty clothes, unmade sheets, a pile of comforters from wintertime in one corner, and about six pillows.

The desk is kept bare except for her laptop, the charger for said laptop, and a single framed picture of her parents, together, smiling.

The floor is clear enough to walk through, but the closer to the closet you go, the more found things there are—a box of marbles found in parking lots (marbles found indoors have their own); a smaller cork board, this one covered in glass, with a few butterflies found in the creek behind the apartment complex (all their scales and color washed away by the water); a small garden of cedar sprigs (it repels bugs, Zelda rationalizes when her dad asks why she’s bringing sticks into the house); boxes of other things that don’t have homes yet.

In the closet, she has thirteen left shoes, only nine of which are her size, and fourteen right, eight of which fit. All her clothes are her own—any found clothing is donated to the nearest charity center. She doesn’t want to be implicated in a murder or anything.

Maybe that’s why she leaves the knife she found in the forest on her desk, too. It’s a beautiful knife, with swirling decorations that seem almost otherworldly. Sitting next to the picture of her parents, it looks like it belongs.

Maybe that’s why she hides it whenever Justin comes into her room.

At the end of Old Salem Road stands Frankenstein’s dollhouse. A hundred feet down from the house is a sign, painted wood, reading:



(It is, indeed, meant to say ‘horology’ and not ‘horoscopes’—Julissa prefers to study time in a natural sense, rather than bludgeon her way through with clumsy human methods of interpreting it.)

A mishmash of different styles, time periods, and cultures, the Grey House looks like it’s been cobbled together over hundreds of years and tens of thousands of miles—a colonial facade greets the casual viewer, while a stone medieval tower roofed in Gothic turrets twists up the left; a Victorian greenhouse juts out to the right; a spacious, flat garden paved in sandstone walkways stretches out behind it, a circular reflecting pool at its center.

The garden gives way to a vast half-dead lawn that ends abruptly at Salem Creek. The other side of the water is dense with dark forest.

The interior is almost as chaotic as the exterior.

The sitting room is perfectly maintained—the only room in the house with more than two pieces of matching furniture. This is where Julissa does her business. Lots of curtains over the windows to cast different shades of sunlight onto the table; a crystal ball poised carefully on a three-footed wooden pedestal on the coffee table; furniture all in shades of wine and mahogany to give the impression of someone serious. Someone who knows what she’s doing.

Past the sitting room is the living room, which is very much lived-in. This coffee table is strewn with Wendrick’s papers to be graded, Jovian’s homework, Jupiter’s research projects from last year (or the year before; she’s lost track), and anything else that winds up there.

In the middle of it all float pages-long guidelines with long, title-case headers printed on an old-style press: On The Uses Of Common Foxglove; The Proper Maintenance Of A Scrying-Bowl; To Interpret Whispers From The Beyond; To Ignore Whispers From The Beyond; To Entertain A Faerie.

These are the textbooks of the Grey house. Grades in school are good, but not everything, so long as you know how to tell the difference between all the nineteen Western tricksters should they come knocking at your door, how to safely welcome a vampire into your home, or how to operate the Door Of Many Doors at the end of the hall, next to the guest bathroom.

Upstairs are the bedrooms—Jupiter’s closest to the stairs, next to the computer room; Jovian’s at the end of the hall, overlooking the family cemetery—the two-story library, and their father’s workroom. Their mother’s workroom is in the basement, where vibrations from the house can’t destroy her careful balancing act or her minuscule shave of clockwork parts. The children are not to enter either workroom without express permission or for emergencies.

Julissa often pulls her children out of school (often enough to have a truancy officer on their tail) to educate them in the arts of magic. Such things as can only be done once a year, at a solstice or equinox or other special night—or during a total solar eclipse—or in the middle of the day on a Wednesday, because she had a house-call to make and it was convenient to bring her children along. By the time they reach teenagerhood, the Grey children have been to more countries than most American adults know exist.

They have never been Beyond, or to what their mother calls the Other—the Inbetween. Not quite Beyond, but not Here, either.

Jovian gets quiet when their mother talks about ley lines, corpse roads, and the Low Road (and how they’re all the same thing). Jupiter pretends not to know that the reflection pool is over the strongest point of the ley line passing through the Smokies. She pretends not to notice him coming into the house soaking wet on a perfectly dry and sunny day.

Instead, she buries herself in books and devotes herself to studying the magic of this world: the magic of attraction and loss, here and now, far and gone. Nothing is linear so much as it is planar, and everything is tied to everything else; you need only look at it the right way.

The reflection pool is tied to lost things—Jovian, and others.

Jupiter’s room is a perfectly-contained catalog of things she’s found on the side of the pool. Dated and organized and everything in its place: A butterfly missing its right wing; five right shoes, six left, all of different brands and styles; a spray of juniper (“I almost named you Juniper,” her mother opined when she brought that in); and most recently, a small leather sheath embossed with natural swirls and decorations that seem to change whenever she looks at them. Something about touching it makes her feel anxious and apprehensive—it feels wrong.

Maybe that’s why she hides it away from everything else, where she doesn’t have to think about it.