Free A Broom With a View by Rebecca Patrick-Howard

around her waist, revealing red underwear and a soft belly that protruded over the loose elastic. The woman cried out for someone, Liza couldn’t make out the name, and then slumped back down to the ground.
    “What does it mean Nana Bud?” Liza asked, frustration growing inside of her. “What do you want me to do?”
    But the vision was already melting away. Liza knew the exact moment when her grandmother’s spirit left because she was suddenly standing alone again, a chill in the air, and a sadness in her heart.
     

***
     
    Since she was stuck in the house for the night with nothing to do, Liza Jane decided to make use of her time and organize her altar. Maybe try a little ritual. She’d already moved everything to her new room, after all; she just needed to organize.
    She’d made sure her altar box rode up front with her on the drive down, and had gone so far as to take it in the Charleston, West Virginia hotel room with her. It contained some of her most precious items and she wasn’t about to let something happen to them.
    Now, as the sun sank down over the mountains, turning them a chalky blue in the twilight, she sat cross-legged on the old shag carpet in her “office” and carefully unpacked the items she’d spent years collecting.
    The altar cloth was one she’d made herself. It wasn’t going to win any contests (not that there were contests for such things) but she liked it. It had a Celtic triple moon on one side and a triquetra on the other and the cloth was a beautiful shade of hunter green on smooth silk. She’d done her best with the embroidery–something she’d done during the monotonous hours on a particularly boring trip she’d made with the pop opera group when they’d visited Kanas City. Back when she was still “allowed” to travel with them.
    She had three tall, thick white altar candles. She didn’t particularly need three of them, that’s just the way Kohl’s sold them in their January sale. She removed one from the box and placed it on the television stand and packed the other two in a shoebox. This, she placed on the shelf below.
    Next, she opened a different shoebox that held an assortment of tea candles and skinny little taper candles. Liza had them in all colors, from black to silver. There were several different candle holders to hold the tiny taper candles, too. They ranged from beautiful silver antique pieces she’d unearthed in flea markets and estate auctions to funky Art Deco style candle holders she’d picked up at Target.
    Liza Jane wasn’t a snob when it came to shopping; she was just as likely to buy something from K-Mart or the Dollar General as she was from Marshall Fields.
    Altar provisions were kind of a personal thing for witches. She’d never used a chalice or bowl or ritual bell, for instance. She did, however, have a little brass cauldron she used for mixing herbs and oils and cherished a handmade wand a friend had created for her. It was made of a beautiful piece of Dogwood.
    She’d always been drawn to the Goddess and tried to buy things with the feminine energy since they called to her. For that reason, she kept two statues of the Goddess on her altar and one in her living room. They helped keep her calm.
    “Well,” she admitted to an athame she unwrapped from purple tissue paper, “the Valium is also helping these days.”
    But the Goddess statues couldn’t hurt.
    She had one white ritual robe and two heavy cloaks (a winter-white one with rabbit fur and a deep burgundy for summer) and these she folded up and placed on a stool next to her altar. She’d never really been into the “costume” aspect of ritual work, although she knew some people who were.
    Liza was more of a “sky clad” person herself, although Mode had been slightly uncomfortable about having a wife who thought nothing of standing naked in the middle of the room, chanting and playing with fire.
    “For God’s sake Lizey,” he’d whispered on more than one occasion,