Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher

people—literally—intuiting your thoughts even before you were fully aware of them.
    Her house was Gothic on the outside—mansard roof, baroque balustrades—and modern within. Sparsely furnished. Mirrored hallways. A greenhouse off the kitchen in which she grew strange flowers and herbs. Her bedroom was painted sea blue. The bathroom had an onyx sink and tub. She was crazy about onyx. Her jewelry box was filled with it: triangular earrings speckled with diamonds, a panther brooch with diamond eyes, a skull ring.
    Ruby never ate so well in her life. She was amazed at Theodora’s cooking. She could prepare shrimp ten ways, stewed okra, dandelion soup, crawfish gumbo. Three times a day, she brewed Marielle a pot of hibiscus tea. When Marielle served it, she added a teaspoon of sugar and a squeeze of lime to each cup. Occasionally she and Ruby rode the ferry to Algiers for dinner. Marielle liked the outdoor restaurants on the harbor. People came over to pay respects. She seemed to know everyone: artists and socialites, but also tough guys and cops. One night, she introduced Ruby to a famous tap dancer. As he walked away, she said matter-of-factly, “One night he and I figured out that we’d known each other long ago, in India, in another life. Except he was an old woman and I was a young man.”
    When Ruby asked her how that could be, she told her some people live many lives. To find out if you’re one of them, youplace an object important to you, like a ring or a watch, under your pillow and see if you have a dream in which that object appears. If so, it’s actually a glimpse into a previous life.
    Of course Ruby tried it. She put an ivory comb, a gift from Marielle, under her pillow. She dreamed she was in a house by a river, combing her hair. There was a baby crying in another room and a man chopping wood outside. She never saw their faces. Later, she tried it with other objects, but it never happened again.
    Ruby learned that Marielle could operate in several worlds at once. Marielle would round a corner beside her and seem to disappear, only to reappear an instant later some distance away. Sometimes Ruby thought she saw sunlight pass right through her, as if she were made of glass. One day when Ruby was to meet Marielle at a restaurant, she smelled her freesia perfume ten minutes before she arrived. Another time, Ruby was in the greenhouse on a rainy afternoon when for an instant her name, letter by letter, appeared briefly on the glass pane before her,
Ruby
, as if it were being traced on the vapor with a fingertip.
    When Marielle arrived home, Ruby said, “How do you do these things?”
    “Optics. The power of suggestion.” Marielle smiled. “And magic.”
    Ruby began to see that there was a lot more to life than stumbling around with her mother. She met other witches, and people a lot stranger than witches: a Cuban sorcerer who claimed to be two hundred years old, and three Malaysian sisters who said they were mermaids from the Delta, and a self-styled Doctor of Telekinesis from Macao named Qi, whohad a watch tattooed on his left wrist that kept the time, he said, as accurately as any three-dimensional watch.
    Ruby also got to know the city. She worked alongside Marielle in the greenhouse and stargazed beside her on the widow’s walk. Ruby was roughly educated, having changed public schools annually, but Marielle gave her books to read, on alchemy, numerology, Egyptian amulets, Caribbean mythology. Ruby wished she could stay in New Orleans with her forever, and she sensed that Marielle wouldn’t object if she did.
    Ruby hadn’t needed to be reminded by Camille that she was in the city of her birth, where her parents had spent what her mother called “their week” together during Mardi Gras. Marielle was one of several cousins Camille Broussard had in the city. The two of them were nearly the same age, but they moved in different worlds. Camille’s father was a construction foreman. Having left home at