Read Online That Magic Mischief by Susan Conley - Free Book Online Page B

only she didn’t have to pick up the odd sub-editing job, the occasional review, the random feature. She cared about history, not the dry, dull kind, but the kind that was about people who did interesting things in interesting times. If only her areas of expertise — artists, musicians, actors — weren’t so oversaturated. All she needed was the
one
break, the
one
subject, and she’d be minted. She cared about what people did, and how they did things, and the things they made, and she knew she was good at it, at translating their actions into words —
    Maybe I just suck
, she whined to herself. “Maybe I am, quite simply, a crappy writer and a crappy girlfriend and a crappy person.”
Which is why I have friends that
suck.
    Lorna and her magical snickerdoodles. Bitch. Just to show her, Annabelle had gone and planted the hazelnut, liberating a long-dead fern from one of her prettiest pots, a hand-thrown, hand-glazed terracotta she’d picked up at a Celtic Arts Fayre, a beautiful bronze and green thingie covered in spirals and whatnot.
    Ha. And Maria Grazia — “Now, sweetie, maybe you could let us know exactly what you mean by the phrase ‘out of thin air’. Do you mean that it is made, possibly, out of air, air that is thin, right?” Annabelle mocked MG’s thick Italian accent, and then felt terrible.
    “Okay, get up
now
, Annabelle,” she said, “Get up up up up up and out of this bed and send out a query, write a post, get some crappy freelance gig, think positive! Gogogogogogoooooo — Go!”
    She lay unmoving, staring at her one true friend, the ceiling: always willing to listen, always there. She closed her eyes, knowing that it wouldn’t be offended, and ran through her mental Rolodex, trying to come up with some names of people she’d worked for, trying to remember who might be busy enough to throw her a bone. She’d fallen out of touch with most of them. How’d that happened? Well … in the last year or so, if she was being honest, she
had
kind of blown off a few things, not returned calls, because, well … she and Wilson had always seemed to be away whenever a gig came up, or on their way out of town, or else, you know, they’d been busy with stuff … Then Wilson would talk her out of her self-chastisement and say it didn’t matter, and why should she take other people’s dregs. And what was the point of all this commercial stuff? She didn’t want to be a hired gun, he had insisted, there wasn’t much of a future in that, didn’t she want to be a serious writer anyway, it was certainly more legitimate cachet to be literary rather than commercial —
    “Wait. A. Minute.” Annabelle sat up suddenly. Wait just one minute. That had been her idea … right? Literary historical fiction as opposed to straight biography, so much sexier and trendier and … She fisted her fingers in the hair at her temples. “It was my idea, wasn’t it? It was — oh my God. But. No, I said — I thought I decided —
no way
.” Whose decision was it?
    Was she
that
far gone?
    Annabelle finally got out of bed for the day. Shuffling her feet into her plush bear foot slippers, she decided that she couldn’t possibly investigate that train of thought without a serious infusion of fennel tea to ensure clarity.
    Wow.
    Way too much excitement for one morning.
    She opened the door that led to her ‘living room’ — and gasped.

Chapter Nine
    Overnight, a plant had grown in the pot in which Annabelle had sown the hazelnut, if grown is the proper word. No, on second thought, it didn’t even come close. A growing plant implies quiet, peacefulness, a gradual unfolding of branch and flower.
    Overnight, a plant had
exploded
out of the pot in which Annabelle had planted the hazelnut.
    “Holy shit!” shouted Annabelle.
    She couldn’t take it in; an entire corner of her ‘dining room’ had been shanghaied by a twisting, gnarled, and enormous … tree, practically. If not for the large pink flowers that seemed to