Breaking The Day

Today started out bad. Most days do. The pain crept from waking aches like fingertips brushing skin to screaming orgies of hot pokers in my bones before eight. I acted as I had to, and the target this time was young. It almost never is, but he had this smile like the world contained no pain at all and I lashed out without thinking en route to work. The world has many tricks in it, most of them sour and ugly: mine is like that. I’ve a friend who believes in magic, but I don’t think magic can fix anything. Not properly. It’s never there when you need it for real pain, for cancer, for what happens when a heart sours and rots or when age creeps into your body like an unwanted guest that will not go.

On the really bad days, I think Death is a rapist that takes us a little at a time for daring to grow old, for all the medicines and marvels of our technology are an affront and Death gets revenge in the slow decay of entropy. The body? The Mind? Both? Death does not care how it happens, only that his revenge is wreaked on the world. Today I ached with too many pains.

And so there was the boy. I have no idea how he got in front of me. I don’t move fast, because of pain and age, but I could have sworn I never saw him on the sidewalk. He was just there like a mirage. His face was full of baffled hurt and he was eleven – I didn’t even question how I knew that, not even why – as he stared up into my face.

“Excuse me? You threw your pain into me without even asking,” he snapped, as if asking made all the difference in the world. As if someone would accept arthritic agony if you asked them to. He didn’t look hurt, but I figured it was because he was young. Or I’d missed and thrown the pain into someone else. Not that I cared. I used to think the worst part about pain was that it took away the capacity to care, but that’s the kind of stupid thought poets have.

I stepped back, even so. There was something solid about the boy. As if he was somehow more real than I was, which made no sense at all. I turned, and a woman was standing behind me. I hadn’t heard her, and the boy greeted her as, “Charlie,” with a grin you could hear in his voice. Her eyes reminded me of childhood nights I’d rather never know again.

“You’re dealing with anyone over this, you deal with Jay,” she said softly. “He’ll be far nicer than I,” and she sipped coffee, the action so ordinary that on other days it would have made all this seem normal.

I turned back slowly to the boy. I could have shouted, Screamed. Got help and forced them away. Maybe. But there was something determined in the boy’s gaze, some hurt that demanded an answer. “It is what I do. I have rent. Bills. I cannot be unable to function, so I have learned to throw my pain onto others,” I said, and it sounded utterly silly even as it remained true.

“Ooooh. I didn’t know a pain kinetic existed at all,” and the kid sounded happy about that. “But I also don’t think it’s a good thing and hurting strangers is all kinds of wrong-face you know.”

“What?” I asked.

“He means not being jaysome,” the woman named Charlie said behind me.

“I have no idea what that is.”

The boy blinked. For a second he looked so shocked I thought he’d finally registered the pain I’d put into him. “That’s really wrong too you know,” he said, and there was nothing save certainty in his voice that somehow I did know that. “Being jaysome is pretty importantable and forgetting it and doing mean things isn’t good at all,” and then he grinned.

The grin earlier had been at a distance. This was close, directed and I swear to God it felt like a weapon. I almost staggered under everything it was, and everything it told me about the boy. “But I hurt you,” I croaked out.

“Uh-huh. but I am tough like a Jay and even if I wasn’t you didn’t want to hurt me,” he said with the same appalling certainty that no one would ever really want to hurt him at all.

“This is what I am. What I have to be. What I learned to be in order to survive. I can’t afford to be broken by pain, so I learned how to – move it. Push it into others. A kinetics of pain.”

“And you never tried to take pain out of people?” the kid asks, as though that should have been my first – my only – concern.

“No.”

“Oh.” And this word is said in a different tone. “Charlie?” he asks.

“Your call,” the woman behind me says. “I’ll vouch for the exception.”

“Okay. I’ve decided to be jaysome about this,” the kid says, as though I should have any clue what that means just because he says it again. “Because I’m Jay, and I think Honcho would be nice if he could so –.” And I feel it, feel the pain leap out of me and into him. Movement. Kinetics. Force. The kid takes it into him without looking the least bit hurt at all and my fear is turning into other things. “There. But for the pain to stay out of you, you have to take on the pain of other people.”

“What?” I manage.

“It doesn’t have to be physical of course, but there is balance. Payment,” he adds firmly.

I stare at him. “And if I don’t?”

“Then the pain comes back and all the painkinesis in the world won’t get it out of you,” he says simply, as certain of that as he is of everything else.

I shudder slightly. I nod. He grins, and wraps his arms about me in a hug and then bounces behind me to the woman and heads off down the sidewalk, boasting about how he did a helping and her replying that she knows because she was there as well. It only pauses him for a moment. Whatever he is, I don’t think much slows him down. I keep walking. After a good five minutes my phone rings, and my daughter is sobbing about the new horrible thing her husband has done.

I almost point out she knew what she was getting into when she married him, but there is a twinge of pain in a finger. I ask questions, I listen, and the pain goes away. Both mine and hers. And it feels far better than I want to admit. 

Finding the Shadow

Being a shadow isn’t as easy as people think, not if you hide in other shadows. Most people don’t even know that shadows can cast shadows of their own, but there are many things people don’t know and are often far safer for it. Part of being a magician is that one does not get the luxury of hiding, and another part is being aware in ways that other people never are. Once, a psychic informed me she could See the true shape of the cosmos if she dared. But psychics place too much on sight, and there are so many other senses that give information as well.

The world is full of secret and strange things. Sometimes terrible, sometimes wonderful. The instincts people have keep them alive far more often than they know. Which, again, is something denied to magicians. We go where people have the sense to never tread. It’s one reason there are few magicians, among all the others. It is why I am sitting up in bed in a cheap motel room with a piece of wood in one hand, string hanging from it, and fishing in my own shadow.

Because there is something in it that doesn’t belong there. And even knowing what and who it is, it takes almost three hours to get a yank and pull Jay out and back into the world. He thumps onto the bed, bounces a few times. Bounces a couple more because Jay is eleven and loves to bounce on beds. Never mind that until he hit the bed, the springs were shot and now aren’t. Jay is very good at bindings, and from far and far Outside the universe.

“Honcho!” He moves in a blur, wrapping arms about me in a huge hug.

I grin despite myself and return it, gently pushing them away. Jay grins in turn, and the power of his grin melts some of my annoyance away despite my every effort to retain it. “Jay. You mind explaining what you were doing in my shadow?”

“Oh! I was hiding from Charlie,” he explains.

Given that Charlie is is a god-eater, in her late teens and more importantly is Charlie, that much makes sense. I’m better at dealing with the weird of Jay than she is; Charlie is far better at helping him with normal human questions and concerns. I still have no idea what a feverfewm is even after Jay explains he grabbed some pancakes from them and left behind tea and then got really lost but in a good way because it was an adventure.

I find a gap between words, cough. Even Jay grinds to a halt at the meaning a magician can put into a cough. “And why were you hiding?” I press.

“Uhm!” Jay looks away. Looks back. “I maybe kind of tried to train Charlie,” he explains, “Because in movies you can train dragons and people train pets all the time,” he says, “and Charlie isn’t a pet at all but but but I figured she would be easier to train than a dragon.”

“Training her to do what?”

“Well, I have pokemon on my phone and I am a good pokemon traininer so I was going to train her to be a pokemon,” he says as if that made all the sense in the world. “But she got out of the pokeball and said some really rudey words Honcho, so I hid. And I hit really good,” he adds proudly.

“You got lost inside my shadow and couldn’t find a way out.” I point out dryly.

“It had to be a really good hiding or Charlie would find me,” he says. “And the god inside Charlie could find me if I hid in Charlie’s shadow but yours is really big and –.” Jay pauses. He doesn’t add another word, but slams into me with another hug as tight as he can give it.

“I know what’s in my shadow, Jay,” I say softly as he lets go.

He sniffs and just nods. There are shadow-creatures I once trapped in my shadow and, I realize now, forgot to let out. And given the things I have done, and the kind of person I have had to be over the years, there is far more as well. But none of it even dents Jay’s trust in me because he grins again a moment later. “I managed to train some of them though, but I stopped it because it wasn’t my shadow and it would be pretty rude-face to do.”

I blink. I never sensed that use of energy at all. I hope my face is as empty as I wish it is. “Ah. Well, thank you for realizing that at least. Charlie is in the small restaurant and I think you owe her an apology. Probably even two.”

“Oh!” Jay nods to that and gets off the bed, slouches to the door. “Wait, can I give just one is Charlie is mean to me?”

“No.”

He nods, and walks out the door at a normal pace. I don’t follow. I just listen, the door open, and am just relieved there are no screams or sounds of breaking plates a few minutes later. I eye my own shadow thoughtfully, but I don’t dare leave Jay on his own trying to apologize. Charlie often forgets Jay doesn’t get sarcasm and can be so very literal at times. I find clothing and throw it on since she hasn’t tried to kill him yet, the door of the room closing behind me without my needing to touch it.

Normally my magic does things like that; this time it was my shadow acting on its own. I sigh, knowing I have to set time aside later to deal with that but for now I just head to the dining room and hope Jay’s apology hasn’t broken too many laws of physics so far. Or other ones as well.

Potato Journeys

The garden contains a vast beanstalk that reaches up into the sky. It is every colour you have seen only in dreams, and some you have never seen at all. There are shades of green that jealously would wish it could turn when it is envious of itself. The beanstalk is not what is special about the garden. Indeed, it can only be seen sometimes if one stands in the right angle, or looks at it at precisely the right time. It does not hide, but you know it is not for you. It has stairs, unlike the one in stories, and perhaps they would even be an escalator if one was to ask.

The beanstalk is alive. It listens. It waits. There are giants at the top of it. They are human. They are also giants, the human magnified to some perfect ideal of friendship. The giants are not real, not even like the beanstalk is, but anyone seeing them would wish that they were. Even those whose images they wear balk at these versions of themselves. It is a hard thing to be a god; it is harder to be something far more than any god could ever be.

But the true wonder if the garden lies is how ordinary it is, given who found t, and how it was made. It is, aside from a beanstalk, a very ordinary garden until one digs deep into the roots of the stalk. There is a cornucopia of worms and insects around the large potato that exists as the base and root of the beanstalk. It has slightly more muted colours, because it has been in the dark. The potato does not snore, but it wishes so hard that it could.

Opened, there is a boy inside it. Not every potato contains a boy inside them, as not every cabbage patch contains a kid. The boy is eleven, and this is known as if it was simply a universal constant. And he smiles the way another might grin, and the smile is kin to the giants at the top of the beanstalk, and it is made of joy and innocence and a friendship deeper than the sea between the stars.

There is a woman. She has dug the boy free from the earth with the same shovel she used to plant him. “I am sorry,” she says, and there are a thousand meanings behind her words.

The boy hears the ones that matter, and looks baffled. “But Charlie,” he says, and he is earnest and brave and true in the ways a jaysome boy can be, “I have a really nify rest and some really great adventures!”

“I buried you because I needed a break,” she says, trying to make her own truth known. It is a hard speaking, even if she knows the boy must know what she means.

“Breaks are always good,” he says with a huge grin. “I take breaks from adventures when I’m sleeping and we had different adventures plus! I made lots of new friends,” and there are worms flowing happily over his feet.

“Ah.” The woman says the word in a far different tone. “They are not coming inside, Jay.”

“But they’re really tickly and comfy,” the boy says with a huge sigh after. All children feel that they are misunderstood. Jay knows that he is understood far too well.

“I imagine so,” the woman says, laughing. “But the owners of the house might not approve?”

“Oh! Okay, then,” the boy says, and crouches down and says farewell in the way only children can say it and it not mean forever. The beanstalk fades too. It does not vanish, but it moves itself somewhere else, perhaps seeking a story all its own, or if only in sheer embarrassment as having been grown up from a potato when that shouldn’t be possible at all.

The woman ruffles the boy’s hair and Jay grins at Charlie and says they will have to have even more adventures to make up for him being in the earth because! they probably had a famine of adventures without them, flinging the words in happy certainty.

The woman agrees, and the boy almost trips over his own feet as he follows her inside.

The first adventure is when she tickles him mercilessly for over five minutes.

The next one involves tea.

And there are so many more others that this tale cannot fit their telling.

The Hunted Hunter

There were laws. Accords. Pacts and promises, but the old Accords were nothing in small towns in the middle of nowhere where there were none to enforce them. Places barely on maps where no one could be missed. Source of food. Half the town is gone, in hunger I have denied myself for centuries. Their fear is the nectar that sweetens all things. I was feared once, long before I fell into the smallness called a universe. In places far Outside my name is still spoken in terms of fear and dread.

We fall so far when we do not notice we are falling.

There is interference, of course. One human has a Talent, enough to sense me. Not near enough to be a threat. That one dies first, and others they know as well. One meal, another. I eat slowly, savouring questions and terrors in equal measure. Every message they try and send out, I intercept. Every person who tries to leave, I devour. They learn not to leave, though it takes them time. Humans are such small things.

The magician that comes into the town is an unpleasant shock. I have made baffles and barriers and he wanders in as though they did not exist at all. There is a god-eater with him and a human boy. I decide they will feed me with energy enough to break even a magician. Magicians are, in the end, only human.

But the boy unmakes the hunger when I reach for the woman. Turns and sees me, through the disguise I’ve used for centuries. “Excuse me, but we’re drinking tea,” he says, as though that somehow was of deep importance. “And you’re trying to hurt us and Honcho and that’s really rude you know!”

“You have killed almost a hundred people.” I have no idea how the magician comes up behind me without my noticing, how he escaped my senses at all. He carries the dead in ways magicians do not – no magician deals with ghosts, with desires they can never answer. But this one – he studies me, and smiles, and all at once I understand the stories that have reached me even in the centre of my Power.

“You are the wandering magician.”

“And friends,” the boy adds firmly.

“I am,” he says. “You have rooted yourself deeply into this place,” and he says my true name, which I had almost half-forgot. “I can force you out, but it would damage the skin of the world in this area for a long time. I could destroy you with the dead I have gathered, but it would be revenge and cause the same wounds in the Grey Lands. Flee back Outside and never return.”

I would laugh, but there is nothing in his voice save certainty.

I open a Gateway, step far Outside and weave a way back with all the energies I have stolen. I can slip to a different point in time, or even another place entirely, and feast without being noticed at all. That is within my power as Opener of the Ways.

The Gateway crumples. The Way I am is unmade, with such power that I can no longer be certain where I aimed it, or even where the Universe is. I shudder a little. I have been away a long time. Reputation will only carry me so far. I remember why I entered the universe, and what is seeking me.

In time, It finds me. An Unravelling, ancient and mighty. But it asks about the boy I barely recall. His name, abilities, the truth of his strength. I know nothing of such things, and it is almost a relief when the Unravelling turns its power upon me and says it can send me back. At a price. And for a cost.

Energies flow, within and without, and I... reach, fall short of something, feel everything I was dissolving. There are barriers I cannot breach, and that is almost a relief even after all the Unravelling has turned me into.

“He resists me?” the Unravelling screams. I did not know they had speech. I never knew they had hate. All I am is relieved to feel myself being umade and freed of powers far beyond my ken.

Pokemon Phones

“Uhm.”

There are a few sounds that scare me more than an ‘Uhm.’ I turn and look at Jay.

He holds up his cell phone. Smoke is billowing out of it. “I think something went wrong, Charlie?”

“Does it involve you putting alarms in my stomach so I’d never forget supper?”

Jay shakes his head, all of eleven and quite serious. “Not even the potatoes!”

I pause. “Potatoes?”

“Uh-huh. I promised to help someone make their grow really buy but found a Pokemon only I think it’s too many on my phone cuz it’s over 800 now and getting weirdy.”

Jay hands me his phone. He is eleven. He is also from far Outside the universe and can do things even magicians can barely understand. I text the wandering magician with, ‘Phone. Now.’

I set Jay’s phone on the ground, dial the wandering magician and he he somehow uses my phone and his as a bridge, stepping out of the air beside us. “I was on the other side of town, making wards to help hold some homes together.” He eyes Jay’s phone. “Ah.”

“Honcho?” Jay looks worried.

“Not your fault.” The wandering magician sighs, snaps his fingers and – the air ripples. Twitches. Punctures. For a moment there is something I can’t make sense of at all, and then everything is normal.

“My phone?!” Jay’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t move at all. “That was my phone you banished, Honcho!”

“I know. But you can learn a lot of new games –.” he begins, because Jay priorities aren’t human ones.

“You didn’t even ask and it might be scared and confusled and and and –.”

“Jay.” He turns to me. “Your phone was full of Outsiders you captured on it. Including that one, ah, sink that wasn’t a sink. Pokemon Go doesn’t have that many Pokemon in it. You were trying to play that game, but being jaysome you did other things instead and bound a lot of Outsiders until even whatever you made couldn’t take that strain, kiddo.”

“But – but –.”

“But you thought you were playing Pokemon, and we didn’t want to ruin it for you.”

“Oh!” And Jay is an inhuman blur and then hugging both of us in thanks. Because as far as he is concerned, we were doing ‘a helping’ and his trust in us is almost unshakable.

I hug back, and wait until he’s fine before saying: “Pototoes!?”

“Oh, I’m helping some of them get really big and move around so they’re not bored and I saw War of the Worlds and potatoes would be great in Tripods you know!” He beams.

I stare at him. The magician has been a magician for a very long time. He just blinks, once. “Did the other person ask for this?” he asks before I can even find my voice.

“Not yet,” Jay admits, “but lots of people don’t ask for jaysome!”

“Yes. I know. It might be best if you want until they do ask: sometimes people only want normal potatoes, you know.”

“Oh! Okay,” he says, and then asks about lunch happily.

I don’t point out that he didn’t get supper last night because he decided to do a binding that put an alarm inside me to remind me when supper should be – both suppers, since just one wouldn’t be jaysome. Some things you just have to let go of. I tell him we can have it early, and get him a new phone, and all is made right in the world.

Until the next ‘Uhm’ comes along, or more worryingly an ‘Oops.’