# Senior Living

## Carol

The basement of Shady Oaks Retirement Facility smelled of rust, furnace oil, and eighty-five years of human endings. Carol Godwin stood naked in the middle of it, bare feet on cold concrete, and let the magic rise through her like a tide.

She looked thirty. She had looked thirty for a very long time. Honey-blonde hair in a neat ponytail, high firm breasts with nipples already tight in the cold, a narrow waist, strong hips, the body of a physiotherapist who taught chair yoga on Tuesdays and smiled at everyone in the dining hall. The staff loved her. She had been loving them back, one slow-drained life at a time, for nine years at this facility alone.

Upstairs, three floors above her head, Martin Star was drinking the last of his bourbon. Eighty-five years old, terminal, and convinced he was about to get everything he deserved. Carol had shown him the two dossiers that afternoon. He had not read a single page of either one. He had only looked at the photographs.

He had pulled Amy Greene's picture out first, held it at arm's length, and sneered. "Her she’s got the punk looking hair. I bet she’s the man in their relationship. ”

Carol had nodded and smiled. "As you wish, Martin."

Amy Greene was not the man of that relationship. Amy Greene was five foot two of eager, aching submission who called her six-foot girlfriend Mistress and meant it with her whole wet soul. And Martin Star, the man who had spent forty years on the radio telling women exactly what they were for, had just demanded the wrong body.

What he did not know, what Carol had known the moment she pulled his file and traced the family line, was that Amy Greene was his own great-granddaughter. The bloodline he had thrown away like a used handkerchief had come back around, ripe and ready for the harvest. Carol kept that secret in her pocket like a candy she planned to suck slowly. Maybe she would tell them. Maybe she wouldn't. The uncertainty was part of the flavor.

The circle was chalked into the concrete in the exact lines she had re-chalked at every equinox for nine years: a summoning circle, a name circle, a door. The leyline ran east by southeast under the snowpack, straight as a surgeon's cut, all the way to …