Magic Touch

Chapter 27 - Evening at Mari's

It was evening, and Kate was getting ready to leave for Mari's. She cast a glance at the sparsely decorated living room corner of her apartment. One photo of her parents - the adoptive ones - hung on the wall along with a handful of landscape photos. She wondered if other people hung photos of their friends in place of landscapes. When had she last gone to visit someone else than her parents? Save for her recent date with Rose, if a date counted as visiting someone. She couldn't exactly remember, but thought it must have been back in middle school, before her magic broke through.

It was a good thing Mari was not the one visiting her.

Kate waved her hand and a brown jacket gently slipped its left arm over hers, lined up against her back, and then slipped its right arm into place. She beckoned for her phone and tapped a quick message to let Mari know she was on her way.

It barely even took a second for a response to arrive. "Got movies and popcorn. Looking forward to it!"

That almost sounded like a stereotypical friend meet-up from the movies. Kate drew a sharp breath, reminding herself that this didn't mean she was going to privately involve herself with Mari in the future. They were colleagues. At arm's length. She was only helping Mari with her problem so she could help Kate with her own conundrum.

Mari's neighborhood was a short drive away. Pinpointing the specific house was easy because one half of was painted pink and the other yellow. Mari hadn't specified whether that was because the house was still being painted or it was supposed to be two-tone. Considering the owner's personality Kate deemed both options equally likely.

She walked up to the door and raised the arm to ring the doorbell when the door suddenly opened in front of her. Kate instinctively jumped back.

"Mari! Don't scare me like that. Do you have me on satellite camera or something?" Kate found the fact that she had so precisely known of her arrival to be slightly unsettling.

"Of course not." Mari huffed and crossed her arms. Then she raised one arm and pointed to the side of her head. "All that's necessary are a pair of well-trained ears. Being great at telling alarms apart and picking up on small changes in sounds has the added bonus of always knowing when visitors are arriving." She grinned and ushered Kate inside.

"Sounds like you have an enviable sense of hearing," Kate responded, though she wasn't entirely sure whether Mari was telling the truth or just messing with her.

"It's enviable until you're sitting in your office trying to do paperwork and some beeping from the other end of the hallway keeps throwing you off. Not that I'm complaining. Well, mostly."

Mari turned around and led Kate down a hallway, before they took a turn to the left and entered what Kate supposed was the living room. The centerpiece of the room was an emerald green couch covered in cushions in a wide assortment of colors, reminding Kate of the post-its in Mari's office. Accompanying the couch was a low oak table. She sat down and looked around the room. Scattered across it were crocheted animals, though at a second glance it turned out to be parts of crocheted animals. A head here, an arm there. Sitting between two cushion on the couch was a tiny body with just one leg attached.

"What's going on with all the," she trailed off trying to find the right words.

"Oh, the animals? They're works in progress. I figured I might as well put them on display to motivate myself to finish them faster. Cute, huh?" Mari's chest puffed out slightly as she spoke.

Kate rubbed the side of her neck. "Not exactly what I was thinking. Doesn't it strike you as rather morbid to have body parts scattered all across your living room?"