Eileen said, “Mine is going to be a shapeshifter,” and Krissie said, “Mine is going to be an alchemist,” and I said, “I have no idea what mine is going to be.” And I tried to find another power that changed things, but basically you can change yourself or you can change other things but after that . . . change the weather? Change your mind? Change your clothes? The oil in your car? I settled for telekinesis. I have no idea why. Then I forgot about it. I’m just not used to writing paranormals. I was having a great time writing Mare running the video store and then I thought, “Damn, she’s magic.” And I had to go back and think how she’d use her power.

Which is when I realized that she had an odd power. Dee and Lizzie have amazing powers, transformational powers. Mare is really, as she says in the story, a human remote control. She’s a parlor trick unless she learns to do things at a macro or micro level; that is, unless she learns to move mountains or molecules, she’s pretty much rearranging the furniture. And that plays into her character, that as the youngest she already feels the most powerless, and on top of that she has, as she puts it, the suckiest power in the family.

Plus her power has real drawbacks, especially for sex, which she loves but has to be careful with because when she loses control she moves things with her mind, so she can’t be any place where she might fling things that would hurt somebody. So all her life she’s made love on the top of the nearby mountain where there are only trees and a circle of standing stones known to the locals as the Big Rocks that are too heavy for her to lift, especially the one in the center known as the Great Big Rock (it takes a lot to move the people of Salem’s Fork to poetry). Also any time she moves anything she gets blue sparks from the friction, which are pretty but tend to call attention to what she’s doing, so she can’t use her power when there are people around unless she does it very carefully. Which doesn’t mean she can’t play with it in private:

She took off her blue Corpse Bride veil and tossed it toward the bed. It floated through the air—she gave it a little help—and landed on the bedpost opposite the witch’s hat, the ends curling down to fold themselves like arms over the post.

“That’s amazing,” he said.

“I can do better,” she said and pulled her dress off over her head and tossed it into the middle of the room where it pirouetted, its skirt spinning out around it, and then curtsied to him. “How about that?” she said and turned to look at him, but he was looking at her. “Hey, you missed it.”

“I didn’t miss anything,” he said, looking at her blue lace bra.

The need for secrecy is the curse all the sisters face: because they’re in hiding, they can’t practice their magic where anybody might see, can’t ask anyone from the magic community for guidance, so they can never really stretch themselves, never really grow their powers. So Mare mostly ignores hers, using it to pick up muffins at breakfast and catch pencils before they fall, figuring that since she got the wimpy magic, there’s no point in working with it, but feeling vaguely itchy about it, as if there’s something important she’s missing in the world.

Which, of course, she is.