Shabbat
"When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know"
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything."
- Sylvia Plath
Tom Riddle may have been magic, but Ixchel was beginning to suspect he was more trouble than he was worth.
It had been a near getaway. Rosalía Eztli had been waiting for her daughters by the floo, and the three returned home smoothly enough. The smell of fresh paint and canvas was as strong and comforting as it always had been in the cottage by the sea.
They had taken the floo from Rosalía’s studio, the wide windows lighting an airy room filled with half finished paintings, figure drawings, and sketch books. Dotted around the organised chaos were miniatures of Ixchel and Socorro aged over the years, smiling and playing in the painted grasses and wildflowers.
As her mother slipped back into her seat with an easy grace to resume the portrait commissioned by Endicott Ogletree, Ixchel breathed a sigh of relief, and stated rather unnecessarily that she was going straight upstairs to her room to change out of her muggle clothing.
"Mmhmm," Rosalía had hummed, eyes on a particularly difficult bit of shading under Endicott's quite bushy left eyebrow.
Ixchel's foot had barely connected with the first step when "What happened to your watch, mija?"
Socorro snorted ungracefully and muttered something about going out to practice her Porskoff Ploy.
Thus the late afternoon found her hunched over in her mother's greenhouse, grumbling under her breath. Sweat clung to her brow as she harvested and cleaned the dirt from madder roots the muggle way, preparing them to make the dye for madder lake paint. She had told her mother she had lost her watch. Rosalía had sighed and the mostly painted Endicott tut-tutted in such an infuriatingly condescending way Ixchel was half tempted to paint over his mouth sometime that night.
"I don't understand how you could lose it, mija." her mother mused, looking up from her palette, "You're normally so careful with your things."
She wasn't sure why she lied, why she had told her mother she must have lost the costly wrist watch in Hyde Park, but it felt like a secret. Hers and Tom's.
As she slipped under the duvet for bed hours later, window open to let in the perfumed breeze of summer, her hands were stained red. Their house elf Tully was deeply unimpressed when he saw her ochre fingers, moaning they would stay so marked for days.
A knock at her door stopped her from dousing the lights. Without waiting for an answer, Socorro, dressed for bed with her hair charmed into pin curls, opened the door and crawled under the lilac blankets with her sister.
"Scoot over." She groused.
Ixchel huffed, but made room in the bed for her sister.
"Why'd you lie to mum, Ixchel?"
She shrugged.
"Hmm. What were you talking about with that muggle boy today?" Socorro asked lightly, changing tactics.
Ixchel turned onto her side to face her sister, the bed squeaking lightly beneath her. "He wasn't a muggle. He's going to be in my year."
Socorro raised a brow. "How can you be so sure?"
"Couldn't you feel it, Coco?"
"Feel what?"
Ixchel had never felt disappointed with her sister before. She had felt a kaleidoscope of feelings related to Socorro; jealousy, annoyance, anger, pride, friendship, love, kinship, but she had never before felt disappointed in her older sibling.
She kept silent for a bit, listening to the hum of WWN from downstairs as her mother stayed awake, nursing a glass of Tully's specially made wine, and swaying to the music. If she strained her ears and held her breath, she could hear the waves from the sea below kiss the cliffs and the sand.
"I told him we were magic and I don't think he believed me."
Socorro laughed freely, "Of course not! Can you imagine how mental you'd have come across to the poor bloke? Telling him you're a witch whilst wearing that hat I told you muggles only wear at dinner parties."
"Hey!" she frowned, kicking her sister under the duvet.
Socorro snickered, and drew her legs away. "Well, if you know he's going to be going to Hogwarts this year, you can say your I told you so's soon. Mum does like to say you've a touch of vidente, but I think you're just potty."
Socorro's laugh rang out again as she rubbed her twice-kicked shin.
She didn't hear from Tom.
Early, sparkling summer bled into the lazy heat of late July, and Ixchel tried to think no more of the boy with magic behind his eyes. Her skin grew bronzed as she played amongst the cliffs and sand dunes, running fingers through tall grasses and braiding crowns of white tansy and fragrant rosemary.
She helped Socorro practice quidditch drills under her bossy lead, and clung to the old broom model that had been handed down to her as her sister barked orders. She was taught recipes under Tully's tutelage, both giggling in delight when her flan came out beautifully, and holding their bellies laughing when they discovered she had used salt rather than sugar in her Victoria Sponge. Some days Ixchel assisted her mother in bulking up her paint stores. She sat on that same old blanket from the park and faced the sea as she ground cochineal insects, bone charcoal, and azurite into a rainbow of powder and possibilities.
Rainy days and evenings found her ensconced in the house library that always held the scent of parchment and cinnamon, poring over family tomes and Wizarding staples alike. The oldest books were bound with vellum, had a heaviness to their presence, and were guarded closely by her mother's unyielding spell-work. When her mum was suitably distracted or in a particularly indulgent mood, Ixchel would use her mother’s wand 'pine, unicorn hair, 12 inches' to practice some especially interesting charms. The self-marking calendar that lay discreetly on her mother's desk counted down the days remaining until the school term started.
Friday evenings were an exceptional favourite. After being kissed goodnight by their mum and their hair charmed for bed by an ever patient Tully, she and Socorro sat on the steps in their slippers and dressing gowns, listening in on the salons their mum hosted for immigrant witches and wizards in the British Isles.
Socorro bragged to her little sister that mum had told her she'd be allowed to attend and drink elf wine next Yule, and Ixchel fantasised about elegant sorcerers communing to debate the theories of magic and life. And if more and more of the witches and wizards who attended her mother's salons hailed from Germany and Poland and the like, they didn't speak of it to her.
Whilst the summer days grew hotter and more languid, the news their owl brought with breakfast grew darker and more anxious. A wizard named Grindelwald was gaining a following, his ideology tantalising to the witches and wizards tired of secreting themselves away. His message and methods seemed to be growing more brutal, and their mother didn't hide it from them.
"Darlings," Rosalía said over pumpkin juice and eggs, eyes sliding from the blond man emphatically speaking on the front page of the Daily Prophet, "Think carefully on the man who uses fear as a rallying cry."
On a Friday night when cooling charms didn't seem to work, and the air coming through her open window was too heavy with anticipation to sleep, Ixchel padded her way down on bare feet to the kitchen in search of a glass of water or a spoonful of No-Melt ice cream. She tiptoed quietly past the closed door of the remaining party goers, and slipped by a sleeping Tully's room, reveling in the chill of the bare wood and stone under her toes.
A grandfatherly wizard wearing a pince-nez and burgundy robes lined with topaz had donned her mother's oven mitts and was pulling out an intricately braided loaf of bread.
"Oh, hello my bubaleh. Care to join me?" He asked in a warm German accent, motioning towards the garden.
"What's the occasion?"
His laugh was throaty, "It's Shabbat."
The word was foreign and she followed out of curiosity.
They sat on the back patio where the wisteria climbed the walls and the jeweled sky laid out before them in its infinite expanse.
"Would you care to take Challah?" he said, handing her a small piece of raw dough. "It's been so long I nearly forgot."
She held the dough between her fingers, unsure what to do. "Do I eat this?"
"No, dear." He withdrew his wand and muttered the gentlest incendio she had ever witnessed, "Throw it in."
Bemused, but enjoying the theatre of it all, Ixchel threw the dough into the flames and watched it char into ash.
"Very good, bubaleh."
She smiled up at the gentle man before her and reached for the golden bread between them, but he shook his head before reciting something in a language she did not know. It sounded like a spell or maybe a muggle prayer, and she watched him with full, dark eyes. Only then did he tear off a piece for her, sprinkle it with salt and placed it in her grasp, patting her hand softly as he did so.
The bread was rich and spongy on her tongue.
"It's a bit late for it, but sometimes traditions are more for the sake of nostalgia than the practise itself." He sighed, wistfulness colouring his words.
Ixchel chewed her bread thoughtfully. "You sound homesick, sir."
"I suppose that would be fair to say, Miss Eztli, but your mother has been very kind to us, working to create a community out of us outcasts." he was quiet for a moment longer, and lit a long pipe. "My own mutter always said during the pogroms, 'Ari, my boy, prejudice grows from the heart whose soil has never been nourished by education. It grows there, firm as weeds amongst the stones.'"
She straightened in her seat, mind whirring to dissect his melancholy clues. "I've read about him, you know, in the Daily Prophet. Gellert Grindelwald. He's getting quite popular on the Continent. Mum says the Wizarding World is at a crossroad."
Ari gave her both a look of appreciation and resignation. "It's not just our world on the precipice of something sinister. Muggle as well, my child. Just as important. Just as much to learn and just as much to lose."
"But they're not magic." Ixchel stated, perplexed. 'How could they have as much to lose as us?'
He seemed to quote something in a whisper not meant for her ears, "Hath not a Jew eyes?"
His voice grew louder, "Is not all life magic? Is not the fact we exist and feel, take pleasure and sorrow alike magic?"
They sat in silence, salt on her lips as she worried his words like a pebble between her fingers.
She thought about that conversation for quite some time. And in the future, when she lay in bed, awake and naked beside a man who answered the question presented to her in childhood with a resolute 'No!' she thought back to Ari Zimmermann and the bread in her hand at eleven years old.
She didn't hear from Tom. She didn't hear from Tom until she did.