The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

A mother-daughter eye-lock got witchy so fast.

People kept or left things in books—quotes, clippings, often about the author, letters that arrived while they were reading the book, bills they didn’t want to pay, foil gum wrappers, bookmarks from now-closed bookstores, funny drawings from their children, dry autumn leaves, grocery lists, complaints. She stored these scraps in a manila envelope marked Ephemera. From another time, another place, the bits had come into her hands. Some were personal. A bookmark made from dried yarrow flowers arranged between pieces of clear packing tape had kept the reader’s place in Rosemary’s Baby. Later, when she looked it up, she found that yarrow was a banishing herb against evil. In a copy of The Aspern Papers, she’d found a lock of dark brown hair. A torn envelope printed with the words Let me go, hundreds of times, in tiny letters. She’d left the found words I have never felt such bliss in yet another book, a very dry study on the properties of land snails. But