Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

agreed, ‘but I thought you had some kind of a heart.’
    ‘Oh, I’m all heart, where is not whiskers,’ she says, very dry. ‘But a woman must think to her own welfares. What do I get out of your proposition? A headache and half my bits and bobs used up—and you gone? But I have had you gone for most of my life, at no particular cost. You are going to have to plague me something dreadfully to make that a factor to decide me. Which, seeing you were never thatoffensive—to me at least, even if you made of yourself a pig and a pain to others—I am not thinking you’re capable of it. I reckon I could still best you if it came to an out-in-out battle. There’s other things I can resort to, even if these old strings should give out.’ Or wires, she might have called those scrawny muscles, standing out from her sticks of arms.
    She looked down at me. I tried to see in that saggy bag of face the little strumpet that bounced on me that day in the hay when I was in heaven, when it all was new and life turned to fey-tales for a moment. Certainly she did not look on me so superior then. We were eye to eye, snuck away together from the God-man’s toil and picnickery. That were years before she were sucked in by his power and purse.
    ‘Have you done such, then, for people as
do
have money?’
    ‘Of course I have,’ she said.
    ‘You dint look me in the eye to say that, Annie. I don’t believe you have.’
    Now she looked, though—all put out, too. I were going in the right direction.
    ‘Why can I not be in the nature of an experiment?’ I said.
    ‘And you would be, too, it has been so long since I done anything proper, and never have I gone so big as that.’
    ‘And you don’t reckon you could?’
    ‘I don’t—Well, I . . . You see, Collaby, experiments is not what is done, this field of endeavour. The misadventures might end up too serious.’
    ‘More serious than being sought by murderers that a man owes money to?’
    She looked at me sidelong. ‘To be sure,’ she says. ‘The worst could come of that is your murder, is it not? Which would all happen in this world, no? Whereas
twixting
worlds, sending someone
across
to his own heaven, well . . .’
    I waited on her. ‘Well, what?’
    ‘Well, it’s not as if you’re askin for a poultice made up, or a love potion. I don’t even have all the preparations I would need. We are talking about a visit to High Oaks Cross when the market is on.’
    ‘It needn’t be done today. Sooner is better, but I can wait if I know you are putting something together for me.’
    ‘That is big of you. Right gen’rous. How ’bout if I am still out of pocket, though? Some of the items I would need is quite expensive.’
    ‘Point me at them, Annie, and I will obtain them for you. Or the pocket to pay for them. Such lesser amounts is no bother to me.’
    ‘Oh, so your fingers is light
and
little, is it?’ All eyebrows, she peered around her cup at them.
    ‘And the next man, you can charge
him
a fine price, and get all your costs back and some over.’
    She mouthed out her lips awhile, like a girt catfish’s, right down to some of the moustachios.
    ‘I will leave it with ye, shall I?’ I said soberly. ‘I know you have the power; it is just the will you must summon.’
    ‘Oh, must I?’ She mumbled her mouth and moved her ragged dress on her knees. ‘Must I just.’
    ‘You worked it so close in your youth, Annie,’ I said. ‘Are you not itching to use the fullness of what you hold inside of you?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ She looks down into the forest. ‘I have itched, I suppose.’
    ‘You see?’
    ‘But there was no living in it. There is a living in the herbs, you see, and in reading hands.’
    ‘Is it in my hand?’ I laughed, holding it out. ‘Look there and see if you’re going to do it.’
    She eyed my palm, but did not touch it. She read it quick as a kestrel reads a hillside, and looked away. ‘Dought,’ she said, and her voice had lost all its