Free The Mentor by Sebastian Stuart Page B

love swirl and there are pink puffs of cotton candy and whirligig music and farm folks strolling and show animals lazy in the night air. Emma hates the county fair.
    As she walks into the botanica the fat proprietress—in a thin red dress stretched so tight across her front that her bosom ismashed down and indistinguishable from the other rolls of flesh narrows her eyes.
    “You have trouble,” the woman states, certain as a judge. She lights an unfiltered cigarette.
    “What kind of trouble?” Emma asks.
    “Bad trouble,” the woman says. She taps her temple and exhales by opening her mouth and letting the smoke billow out.
    The store is heavy with smells, a thousand perfumes and incense sticks, the fresh layered over the stale in a dense mix that suddenly makes Emma dizzy. More plaster figures, their deadpan faces betraying no religious ecstasy, fill the shelves. And candles, hundreds of candles in glasses covered with saints and Jesus again. Jesus is everywhere in the botanica.
    “I have magic for trouble,” the woman says, holding out a small glass vial.
    Emma takes the vial and stares at the light brown liquid it holds. “What will it do?”
    “Make you safe.”
    “How much?”
    “Twenty dollars.”
    Emma starts to unscrew the cap.
    “No!” the woman warns. “On your door make a cross with it and sprinkle it all around your bed.”
    Emma hands the woman twenty dollars. Suddenly she wants to get out of the suffocating store. The plaster figures look evil—passive spectators to the world’s unspeakable acts. What do they care? They’re saints; they’ve cashed in their chips. As she closes the door on her way out of the store, Emma hears the woman mutter something unintelligible, in Spanish, something that sounds to her like a curse.
    Before she unlocks her door Emma opens the vial—the liquid has a sharp fusty odor—wets her fingertip and makes a cross on the door. Inside, she unloads the food. She loves the bare cabinets, their corners home to crumbly spots of rust, and the noisy refrigeratorwith the cracked handle. She wants her apartment to be a refuge replete with books and teas and at least two different kinds of cookies. A safe place.
    She moves the chair close to the window and eats the apple and then four Fig Newtons, savoring every grainy bite, as she watches the street life below. Across the street an old man sits in a lawn chair in front of his building; couples out for dinner stroll by; clutches of hip young people in black, long-limbed and laughing, ramble down the block. Emma finds the passing parade hypnotic, and a sweet fatigue comes over her. She sprinkles the rest of the magic water around her bed, crawls in, and reads
Heart of Darkness
until her eyes begin to hurt. She turns off the bedside lamp. Red light filters in from the neon sign and plays against the far wall. She can hear the distant muttering of a thousand voices, a thousand beautiful anonymous voices. Emma lies still for a long time, looking at the light and listening to the voices. She has always imagined her father living in a room like this.
    It was a winter-weary day in March, filled with dirty snow and bare trees, and nine-year-old Emma was in no hurry to get home from school. Home to the creaky apartment over the hardware store. She was chilly in her too big parka and slightly soggy boots, but that didn’t keep her from walking slowly, kicking her way down the small-town streets. The first thing she noticed as she climbed the stairs was that it was quiet; there was no music—no Janis, no Billie, no Piaf. Her mother always played music in the afternoon, singing along as she drifted from room to room getting higher and higher, changing her outfits, touching up her makeup, staring at the long-untouched painting on her easel.
    The front door to the apartment was ajar. Emma pushed it open. Her mother was on the living-room floor wearing a hot pink top and her souvenir-of-Hawaii skirt, a panorama of paradise, her eye shadow