Never Conjure Where You Sleep

 The screams of countless cicadas outside of Minako's window pulled her from her accidental afternoon nap. She tried to remember what she had been dreaming about but to no avail as usual. After wiping the sleep from her eyes she groaned, turning onto her stomach and reaching over to shut her window. The sounds of summer were muffled now but not enough that she could ignore them and go back to sleep. Minako rolled onto back once more and stared up at the ceiling above her bed.

Normally she'd be up on her feet by now and walking through her little apartment to get a beer or some leftover takeout from her fridge. However even the mere thought of putting any weight on her feet right now was pain inducing.

Work had been a lot as usual. Working in food service had been the last thing Minako had ever imagined herself doing. But out of the hundred and some-odd jobs that she'd applied to over the course of the last three months, the only one to give her more than a single interview -or a polite yet absolutely infuriating decline- had been a restaurant called Kaijuburger. It wasn't a terrible place to work really, compared to fast food or even a handful of other restaurants in the area. But she was constantly on her feet, hardly ever had the chance to sit down unless she found a spare minute or two to sneak off to the bathroom and even if she'd only been doing service and taking orders for the day, Minako would still return home smelling like stale grease and french fries.

After working there for two months at forty to sixty hours a week -depending on whether or not someone would call off sick or just not show up- Minako felt the ache of exhaustion even on her rare days off. It coiled like a snake beneath her skin and muscles and only tightened its grip on her whenever she actually chose to do anything more than doom scroll the hours away.

So that's the only thing she really ever did after work.

Even now, unwilling to move at all until she dragged herself to work the next morning, Minako unlocked her phone and tapped open instatube.

“May as well check my feed.”

The one good thing that had come out of being on instatube all the time lately was that she'd found the time to fight the apps’ ever changing algorithm and customize her feed. When she'd first made her account she'd be scrolling past nothing but clips from late night talk shows, ads for tv shows or movies and endless little pyramid schemes disguised as “easy self-starter-jobs.” After favoriting and sorting hundreds of videos into collections of several kinds, she was finally seeing the content she actually liked. Now her feed was perfectly peppered with a mix of art time lapses, book promotions and reviews and enough how-to videos from café baristas that she felt half confident she could have opened up a place of her own if she'd had enough cash to start.

That was a dream that had started to take root in her after her first week of Kaijuburger. She'd been so wiped out that she'd put in a coffee and breakfast order through the FlashFood app her first morning off. Thirty minutes and three sips of caramel Frappuccino later Minako was half sobbing into her sugar waffle sandwich and binge watching aesthetically cozy coffee shop tours. She watched a few even now, unable to stop herself.

“I could make that,” Minako said as she watched someone craft a cat out of latte foam. “Or that,” she murmured as the girl on her phone frosted cake pops.

When she felt tears start welling up in her eyes she tapped away from her feed and danced her fingers over to the trending tab on her screen. She didn't want to spend another night crying over a future that she not only dreamed up on a whim but one she couldn't even imagine herself obtaining. Maybe something new would shake this gloomy mood off of her.

The trending tab greeted her with several different collections of the most popular videos available under several different hashtags. Normally comedy, news, cooking and pet videos would hover around the top of the page but it looked like there was something else trending higher tonight.

In three separate collections above all the other tabs read the hashtags, “witchcraft,” “familiar” and “summoning.”

“What the-”

Minako opened up each of the collections one after another and scrolled over the thumbnails of hundreds of videos, trying to tell what was going on. Normally anything tied to the occult never made it this far in the trending feed. Deeper into fall or around Halloween sure but it was still late summer, the leaves haven't even changed color yet. Even so, Minako was reading video titles about a “ritual,” and a “spell to find a familiar,” that, “really worked” from more people than she could count.

All her life Minako had had a passing interest in witchcraft. She was never able to find the time to study or practice it beyond casting a short spell or playing around with fortune telling with a pendulum or tarot cards, but she knew enough about it to know what a familiar was. In the simplest terms they were a witch’s companion. Most of the time they were a pet, like a cat, crow or something of the like that you could connect with enough to give small tasks. At least that’s how it was in movies and books. In reality they were really just pets. Very well beloved pets, sometimes very well trained ones, but still just animals.

…still.

Unable to fight her curiosity, Minako clicked open a video titled, “why every witch should summon their familiar right now!”

It wasn't unlike most of the other videos in each of the three tabs. This one just had its poster-username witchcroft-pointing at three different reasons for doing the ritual popped up on the screen.

Familiars make perfect companions that will help you do anything.

You can make your familiar take any shape you want, human, animal or more.

Your familiar will never leave you, they'll be your companion for life!

Happy Summoning!

The girl on screen gave a big thumbs up before smiling at whoever was beyond her phone camera. Out of curiosity Minako opened up a handful of other videos. Each one was pretty similar, a witch giving more reasons to perform the ritual, giving info on what a familiar was or explaining why this was the best time to get into witchcraft at all. Minako tried to take in all the information everyone was sharing but she was too fried from work to commit anything to memory. There was something about planetary alignments and astrological anomalies and a handful of guides to the full ritual.

It all looked and sounded very involved and Minako wouldn't have the energy to attempt it even if she wanted to. Even now her eyes were slipping shut. She meant to turn off her screen and just go to bed, but she kept telling herself, “just one more video.”

The last her feed landed on was left to repeat over and over as she slipped into a dream. The visual on screen was the light of a candle burning far away from the camera and deep in the darkness of an unseen room. There was a spell being chanted again and again in a voice so soft it was hardly a whisper. Still, even half asleep the words slipped into Minako's head and into her lulling, dreamy thoughts.

Without realizing and bit by bit Minako repeated the chant. At first her chanting was incomplete, every other word missed in favor of a quiet snore. After an hour however, Minako was chanting in complete sync with the voice in the video.

Even as the late afternoon sun slipped low beneath the horizon and the light of the moon slipped into the room to illuminate someone new standing beside Minako's bed.

It wasn't until that looming figure leaned down over Minako, finger pressed to their lips to hush her that she finally stopped.