Woman King by Evette Davis

to find a table outside and picked up a rumpled copy of the San Francisco Chronicle someone had left behind. For several
minutes I sipped my cappuccino, gazing at the sea, enjoying the
first moments of quiet I’d had in days.
    As I regarded the foamy waves rolling in and
out with the tide, I worried about what was coming next. I was
rapidly moving toward a moment when I would have to open myself up
again to feel my emotions and those of others, something I had
avoided for a long time. I felt like Pink at the moment when the
bricks of the Wall are set to come tumbling down. What would I
discover, I wondered, when the dust settled?
    I pushed aside my worries and settled in to
scan the day’s news. Within a few minutes I came upon a headline
that surprised me, “Internet CEO Seeks Return to Congress.” I read
with interest a story about my former boss, Levi Barnes, and his
decision to run for office again, this time as a congressman
representing Silicon Valley. My first job in Washington had been
with Levi when he was a congressman from Salt Lake City. After
losing a particularly tough re-election bid, he’d left politics and
moved to the Bay Area to become an entrepreneur. It seemed
unthinkable that, after losing so badly before, he would give up
his privacy and success to reenter national politics. What had
changed for him? It had been more than a year since the two of us
had spoken, and I made a mental note to call him to catch up. I was
also curious to see who he had hired to run his campaign.
    The high-pitched squeak of the N-Judah
streetcar jarred me out of my thoughts. It was time to head home.
Seeing that a train had reached the end of the line, and was
turning east again toward downtown, I decided to hop on and ride
back to my house.
    By mid-afternoon, a few hours later, Elsa had
returned. She walked straight into the kitchen and began brewing
some kind of concoction that gave off a quite unpleasant aroma. I
came into the kitchen just as she was placing small button-shaped
fruits into boiling water with what looked like cinnamon sticks and
a vanilla bean.
    “What are you making?” I asked, trying to
breath through my mouth.
    “It’s going to be a tea,” she said. “You’re
going to drink some tonight before we go out.”
    “Is it going to taste as bad as it
smells?”
    “Actually, it’s going to taste worse,” she
said, keeping her back to me as she hunched over the stove brewing
her potion. “The trick is to drink quickly and not think about
it.”
    “What does it do?” I asked, thinking that I
should know what I was getting myself into.
    “It should help you regain your senses,” Elsa
said. “It’s an old recipe that has been used by many women over the
years.”
    “Where did you go last night?”
    Elsa kept her back to me. “New Mexico,
mostly. I had a few other stops to make.”
    “You don’t seem to have flown on a commercial
jet to get there,” I said, hoping to provoke a discussion about
portals and time-walkers.
    For the record, it’s not that I find it
difficult to imagine that there is more to things than what we see
at first glance. And I don’t doubt that the world has more
complexity to it than we imagine. I’ve just never wanted to accept
it.
    What I want from life is something more
rational. If I’m going to pay attention and care, then I want to
know how the mysteries work. If I can understand the mechanics,
then I can manage my fear. After years of living in a very logical
fashion, now I’m expected to be Alice in the looking glass, throw
caution to the wind and drink my potion so all can be revealed.
    “You know I didn’t fly on an airplane,” Elsa
said. “I used a portal. It’s a door between places. They are
scattered across the city.”
    “Where do you go when you use them?”
    “With a little practice and focus, you can go
anywhere,” Elsa said.
    “Am I going to use one tonight?”
    “No. Tonight you’re going to work on finding
those instincts of yours so