Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 12 Read Online Free Page A

Consequently, before hanging up her lightly-singed black dress and taking early retirement, she was able to teach Agatha nearly everything—strictly old school, of course—that she knew about the family enterprise.
    In Agatha's profession, image was everything. That's why she stayed away from the general public, whenever possible, and avoided traditional doctors like the plague. She had good reason to be standoffish. Ordinary people were turned off by her trademark wart, and physicians with itchy scalpel fingers had trouble keeping their hands off of her crooked nose and pointy chin.
    Even though from her early teens on she had ostensibly belonged to an elite sisterhood, Agatha was mostly on her own. A loner. She followed her mother's independent ways and paid little heed to either tradition or precedence. As a grownup, she wouldn't have known which way to point her broomstick to find the nearest coven.
    While still a relatively young woman, Agatha became the sole proprietor of an apothecary shop which specialized in hard-to-find botanicals, various and sundry animal parts—from eye of newt to powdered unicorn horn—along with rare minerals and alchemical concoctions of all kinds. Right from the start, her shop attracted an unusual clientele, including some customers with exceedingly odd sleep patterns, so that keeping regular nine-to-five business hours was totally out of the question. Her clients ran the gamut from people with a morbid fear of darkness, at one end of the spectrum, to creatures of the night at the other. Some days Agatha ran herself ragged while trying to run down their special requests. She needed help in the worst possible way and that's what she got. Her familiar was a cat. Nine lives, but not a good shopper in any one of them. What she really needed was a reliable human assistant. Sorcerers have apprentices, so why shouldn't she? Agatha put on a hat with a veil and went to a temp agency.
    The first young woman Agatha interviewed literally laughed in her face. Needless to say, she didn't get the position.
    The second jobseeker was much more subtle and likewise more pernicious. She waited until she'd actually arrived at Agatha's place of business before showing her true colors. From the newly-hired shop girl's perspective, Agatha could do nothing right. Heating a cauldron with a wood-burning fire was both old-fashioned and inefficient; the noxious fumes given off by the contents of the kettle added to air pollution; dumping the dregs behind the shop was bad for the environment; and so on. Her harping was relentless.
    Agatha finally had enough. She confronted her querulous employee. "You'd like for me to go green, is that right?" she asked.
    "Yes."
    "You first," Agatha said, and with a wave of her hand turned the temp into a garter snake.
    "The freshness date on this spell will expire in about six months," Agatha explained to her squirmy protégée. "Maybe by crawling around on your belly eating bugs for that length of time you can develop a true closeness with Mother Earth."
    A wary Agatha returned to the temp agency and tried again. She asked pointed questions and was pleased when her latest applicant gave sharp answers.
    "I can offer you room and board and decent wages. The job's yours if you want it," Agatha said, after the interview.
    "I do, but I should warn you, I come with a lot of baggage."
    "That shouldn't be a problem. I have a big storage room."
    "That's not what I meant. I have a stalker."
    "Oh? Well, don't worry, I'll make short work of your stalker if he ever dares to show his face anywhere near my shop."
    Those words would soon come back to haunt her.
    In the meantime, her new assistant, Marigold, was worth her weight in moon dust. She turned a blind eye to Agatha's appearance and a deaf ear to all of her spells and incantations. Without that latter virtue, Mari would have shape-shifted more often than the pantyhose of a yo-yo dieter who also suffered from gas.
    Although otherwise highly