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BLACK POPLAR: PROLOGUE.
Strawberry Pocky.
Mina rummaged through a cupboard until she found a box of the pink, finger-long biscuits.
"Yum!” she gushed. “Want one, Mom?"
At the table, her Mother attempted to spoon applesauce into Oliver’s mouth. Oliver hated applesauce, he clamped his jaws shut until it dribbled off his chin and onto the floor.
Her Mother grimaced and pretended to stick a finger down her throat. "Honey,” she said, “how can you eat that weird Japanese stuff? Why not a Hershey bar? Or some chips. Like a normal teenager?"
Mina rolled her eyes and left the kitchen. She patted Oliver's head on the way out and tromped upstairs, past the Bauhaus poster on the door of her bedroom, kicking it open with the toe of her combat boot.
The shades were pulled. Mina turned on a small bedside lamp, tossed her badtz-maru satchel on the floor and lit a candle. Red wax tricked down and across the plastic Hello Kitty figure that served as its base. For a moment, the room smelled like sulphur.
Sitting down, she wrenched off her boots and flopped backwards onto the bed. The CD player on the end-table was covered with paint marker and discs carpeted the floor. She lurched into a sitting position and punched it into action.
Mina picked up a manga edition of ‘The Bell Jar’ from where it lay next to her stuffed penguin. She thumbed through a few pages, reading a random passage aloud. ‘To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.’
She closed the book, got up and danced her way to the bookshelf, humming along with the music. The bookcase was draped with a black lace scarf and seemed to have exploded. Paperbacks spilled off the shelves - dog eared fantasy novels, manga and gothic romances. On top, over-sized anime collector’s guides leaned against a snow globe filled with ash.
Squeezing ‘The Bell Jar’ into a gap on the shelf, Mina went to the door and locked it. From her closet she produced another wobbling stack of books, drawn from the sheltering folds of a red silk sheet. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she fanned the books out before her.
Eliphas Levy, S.L. MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley.
Magic, she thought, real Magic. The kind that gets you kicked out of school, freaks out your parents and lands your ass in front of a shrink. She’d been studying this stuff for a year now and so far, it was a bust. She buried the sense of disappointment. She wouldn’t quit, not yet. A couple of times, it had felt so close! If she just kept at it, she knew she’d figure it out.
Mina reached up and turned off the table lamp so that her collection was lit by the light of the lone red candle. She touched each cover reverently and took a deep breath.
Life was more than strip malls, she thought. More than babysitting and high-school. It had to be.