The letter she holds is just a shade or two lighter than the rubber gloves that cover her hands. Tottering up the driveway, she finds a family cooking out on their back deck.

“Excuse me, but could you tell me where the post office is?” She calls.

A father, a mother, a son just shy of his teenage years look up, the father answers “six long blocks and then a right.”

“Thank you,” the woman answers, the letter held over her head and her voice strident. “But could you tell me where the post office is?”

“Ah Christ, it’s one of the local fruitcakes.” His father turns his back on her. Watching her wait and wait, the boy sees her slump and give up, her white orthopedic shoes vanishing around the corner. The boy wishes that he could tell her, but he doesn’t know where post office is either.

The following morning, he feels another lazy day stretching to be filled. There was always the island in the shallow river across the street with its nightly collection of empty liquor bottles to break and used condoms to poke with sticks.

Instead he goes to the shattered boardwalk. Some of its splinters still hold riveted benches and empty arcade rooms, their windows long broken. The distant gray ocean slopes and crashes, like him it played alone.

Past railroad tracks and abandoned buildings with black and staring windows, he watches the underbrush for monsters and picks up a piece of rebar that he pretends is a spear. In the distance, he sees the wandering woman with the rubber gloves holds her letter high like a tiny sail. He follows at a careful distance. If she sees him she’ll put a curse on him, or worse, ask him directions to the post office.

Her home is white stucco clad in runaway ivy and the press of years, and the boy decides to investigate. He knows in his boy’s heart that sorcerers hide in plain sight. Pulling his t-shirt off and knotting it around his face, the now masked and shirtless warrior hefts his spear and creeps across the street, drifting like shadow from shrub to shrub, ever closer to the ivy tower.

Stepping into the shadow of her lands, where even the sun is afraid to push its rays through the canopy of willow and oak, his feet rustle in the choked underbrush.

Smelling the rot of tree bark and of the tower, he creeps low to the ground. The acrid spray of her army of guardian cats is thick in the air. Tightening his grip on the spear, he prepares to fight to the death.

Against the outer wall of the Ivy Tower, he peers into the black windows by his feet, dusted over with cobwebs. Her dungeon holds no prisoners now, at least none alive, and he says a silent prayer for the deceased.

Stopped under a window, he looks up and ducks lower when he sees green eyes and black fur blending with the shadows and dirty glass: one of her cats. Freezing, terror and readiness soak his muscles as he shifts his rusty iron spear for the pounce of the beast.

“Sally? What is it?” A quavering voice asks and the sorcerer’s face is at the window with the cat, pressing her yellow-gloved hands against the glass and staring out onto her overgrown lawn with vacant confusion and lost terror.

“Is somebody out there? I will call the police. Please don’t hurt me I don’t have anything of value.”

She waits, mouth anguished, eyes on nothing.

“Please?”

Like a hammer through a wineglass, her fear shatters his fantasy and he remembers that he is only a boy with his t-shirt wrapped around his head and a piece of scrap iron.

Dropping the rebar to be swallowed up by the ivy at his feet, the boy runs and prays that she cannot see him. Shame rises inside him, pushing him home like a bit of driftwood caught in the surf.

Gasping in his driveway, the smell of cat urine and her rotting home lingers in his nostrils like a rebuke, twisting his guts.