It had come as a bit of a surprise to Tamara that Miss Millie maintained a landing strip. Her bush was trimmed into neat, parallel borders at either side. Tamara browsed her way carefully down Miss Millie's strip, then she leaned in, heart racing, to rub her own short bristles against it. She so badly wanted to do this right, for Miss Millie's pleasure. Tamara's hands were trembling. Her movements became gradually more vigorous, rubbing firmly up and down as her excitement mounted.
Tamara wondered why was it so important to sweep clear this particular long patch of dirt beside the house? She wondered, too, why Miss Millie had called it her 'landing strip'. Perhaps it had been another of the woman's wry jokes. Or was she even aware of the obscure and somewhat tortuous double-entendre the phrase presented?
The first task of the morning had come as a slight disappointment. But Tamara was excited anyway. Miss Millie had said that today she would begin in earnest her apprenticeship, and learn something about Miss Millie's work.
Tamara still couldn't work out quite what her mysterious older employer was all about. Did Miss Millie like her? Was she even into girls? Tamara often caught herself grasping for clues, with the slightly shameful, adolescent obsessiveness that comes with having an intense crush. So many little things had seemed like sure signs. There was the note Miss Millie had left her the previous day. And the occasional casual remarks Miss Millie had made about Tamara's appearance. She had said 'delightful', hadn't she? And then they had sunbathed together in their underwear. Had that been a flirtatious thing? Or was the fact that Miss Millie felt comfortable with their both being naked instead a sign that she thought of Tamara in a completely non-sexual way?
And now Tamara was to become Miss Millie's apprentice. That was surely a good thing. At the very least, it probably meant that they would spend more time together, and that Miss Millie might talk more openly about herself. But would it also entail a more formal, less friendly teacher-student relationship?
I'm so sorry, mistress. *Sob*. Please, punish your errant apprentice. Spank some discipline into my delightful backside!
Inner-Tam, seriously?
Tamara shook her head and blinked herself out of her daydream. She leaned on the broomstick she was carrying, drew a deep breath, and set to sweeping. She was going to clear this little strip of land until it sparkled. And she was going to earn herself another 'marvelous', a 'sterling work', or maybe a 'dear girl'.
The strip was narrow, only about the breadth of a small car. But it was long. It led all the way from the front door to the iron fence at the edge of the garden, some fifty meters away. It was flanked on either side by the tangle and brambles of the overgrown garden.
When she had started, the path of the strip had been only just discernible, beneath an irregular clumping of long grass overlaid with stray vines. Tamara had spent most of the morning fighting back the bushes. At first she had used a pair of pruning clippers, but after seeing that she had barely cleared a tenth of the undergrowth in the first hour, she had switched to an old machete she found in the shed. And now she was sweeping away the vegetable debris bit by bit, and nearly done.
As usual, Tamara had had to seek out her own equipment. Miss Millie seemed to value initiative. The broom had been an unexpectedly good find. Tamara had found it leaned against the hat stand just inside the front door of the house. She had been a little skeptical at first. It looked rather old, one of those that was just a bunch of bristles tied onto the end of a long cylinder of wood. But when she had failed to find anything else suitable, she had given it a go, and it had done a surprisingly good job.
With each sweep, the broom glided across the breadth of the strip as if blown by a convenient gust of wind. Tamara found she had to apply only minimal force to drive away the hacked-off plant matter. It seemed as if the broom's shape, the angle of its bristles or something else about it, was designed to make sweeping as easy and as comfortable as possible. Perhaps it was just that Miss Millie, or her previous apprentices, had used it so often for precisely this task that the twist and warp of the wood had come to match the movements perfectly.
In one triumphant arc, Tamara swept away the last heap. She stood up straight, dabbed at her brow with the back of her hand, and looked out along a pristine expanse of bare dirt. Then something odd happened.
When she accidentally let go for a moment of the broom she was holding, it stayed standing up. It wasn't as if it just stayed that way for a moment, balanced, and then slowly teetered and fell. It just stood there. Then she looked down at the ground. On closer examination, perhaps it wasn't really standing so much as... hovering. Though the tips of the longest bristles were just touching the ground, there was clearly no way that they could be bearing its weight.
Curious. Tamara gave the broom a gentle prod with the tip of one finger. It gave, with a tiny wobble, but then swayed back into place, like one of those weighted child's toys that right themselves when tipped. She looked around, she wasn't sure why, perhaps to check whether someone was watching her, playing an elaborate prank. Maybe somehow it was even that mischievous cat, Malkin. But he was nowhere in sight. Nor was Miss Millie, presumably still out on whatever morning errand had drawn her away today.
That was odd. Odder, even, than discovering that Miss Millie kept a human being as a milking cow. That had been weird, but it had at least been explicable, and in keeping with what Tamara thought she knew about such basic concepts as inanimate objects, and up and down.
Tamara gave the broom a second prod, a fair bit firmer than the first. More of a slap, really. She wanted to test the limits of the broom's strange equilibrium. In part, she was hoping that the broom would finally fall to the floor and that she would be able to dismiss the slightly unsettling phenomenon as a one-in-a-million chance of balance, gloss some vague sciencey bullshit over it involving a disturbance in the Earth's magnetic field or something. But though the broom teetered again, it sprang back. And this time it sprang back at Tamara. The tip of the stick tapped her on the chest logo of today's superhero t-shirt, right in the boob.
Tamara laughed, a nervous giggle of disbelief. She rubbed her breast where the broom had struck her. It hadn't been a painful blow. More sort of playful, somehow.
"Are you...? What's this?" Tamara felt instantly very foolish for addressing the broom. She looked around again. Fortunately, she was still alone. The broom's last movement had seemed so deliberate, even like an attempt at communication, like gently bopping someone on the nose.
After a brief pause, the broom floated towards her, the tips of its bristles dragging a faint pattern of squiggly lines through the dirt. It stopped, right in front of her, just lightly pressed against the front of her body.
"You, er..." Tamara began, laughing at herself, "I should hold you?"
That seemed somehow to be what the broom's gesture indicated. As if in response, the broom tilted slightly forwards, straightened up, then tilted again, in another gesture that this time looked very much like a slow nod. It was surprisingly expressive, given the limited dimensions of movement available to the object.
Hesitantly, Tamara put her hands on the shaft of the broom and gripped it. "Like this?"
The broom wiggled from side to side, in what was pretty clearly a shake of the head. It nuzzled itself a little more intimately against Tamara's body.
Something occurred to Tamara, something whimsical. Conceding for a moment the utterly ridiculous premise, what might a broomstick want to do? What did people do with them sometimes, other than sweeping? She put one arm around the middle of the stick, sort of hugging it, and she put the other hand near the top. "You want to... dance?"
The broomstick 'nodded' vigorously. Then without waiting for a response, it jerked swiftly to one side, pulling Tamara along with it.
