Making Safe Havens

You never find salvation where you want it, and certainly not when. We live in a mutable world; we change, we are changed. Salvation is a river we dip into from time to time, if it is anything at all. Nothing stays saved, nothing remained damned. Crude terms for complex interactions. That’s often ow it is. These aren’t safe thoughts, but sometimes safety is as far from safe as one can be. I get myself a beer, sitting at the bar. I don’t come into bars often. I don’t find anything of salvation in them, but places can be a kind of salvation too. The rush of voices is a ward, laughter an easy magic for a magician to draw upon.

And Jay is not here. I gulp back beer, letting it settle into me. Using it to ease into a kind of relaxation. If we have chakras, the point is never to wake them up. They are always awake. The point is to deaden them. To make a river. To let things flow. The anger is tight between my shoulder blades. I drink, let some go. Drink some more.

There had been a creature. Winged, made of shadow more than substance, something so old human magic could barely touch it at all. And I am human, for all else I might be, for every story about the wandering magician that verges into fancy. I am also a little buzzed to be using the word verges even in the silence of my own head. The entity had woke, was hurling across the face of the moon, mad with alien hungers, woken in a world too alien for it to know.

I yelled for Jay to bind it. Because Jay is from far Outside the universe, for all that he is eleven. Because his power dwarfs anything I can do, though he refuses to believe that. Instead he watched it move past, and happily told me he’d just had a misadventure, because missing an adventure is an adventure too. I told him he’d miss two suppers as an adventure instead, and to bind that creature.

And it was bound, in a snow globe in my hand, between moments. Handed over, and then Jay vanished in a sulk. I haven’t seen him for hours, which even for Jay is an impressive sulk. There are bindings between us so deep that even Jay might not understand all of them. He knows how angry I was, for all my calm command. How close I came to saying words I know better than to say at all.

I finish the beer slowly, considering another drink when there is a coaster on the bar in front of me that wasn’t there a moment ago. Knitted, I think.

I look up from my drink even more slowly. Jay is behind the bar, radiating pride. He’s wearing a white shirt, tie, formal pants.

“Do you want another drink?” he asks excitedly. “I have drinks!”

“Jay. Eleven year olds don’t tend bars.”

“But I asked really jaysomely, and the bartender said it was okay!”

At the other end of the bar, the bartender is pouring drinks, looking taken aback at the results and trying to understand why he said yes at all.

Saying no to Jay is dangerous; people understand that instinctively.

“And the drinks?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s all really nummy water. With flavours. And and and I have hot chocolate,” he says proudly, pouring me one and handing it over.

“Water and hot chocolate aren’t normal bar drinks.” I pause. “Please tell me you didn’t make snacks.”

“Nope! I had a whole list of things to do, and I did them but forgot that only I’m giving out hugs, which is like a snack but it’s also a hug!”

“A list of things.”

“I got black shoes and everything. Oooh! And a towel!”

The towel he holds up has teeth, and is trying to eat his hand. Jay doesn’t even notice.

The hot chocolate is excellent. Jay moves in a blur down the bar, chatting to people who are more than a little confused about the state of their beverages. They’re left dazed and confused at the onslaught of his irrepressible joy. One person at the back of the room demands a proper drink, and is quiet as a coaster zips through the air and impacts into the wall beside him.

“Drink coasters don’t normally double as throwing stars,” I remark.

“He was getting all rude-face and about to do meany bindings,” Jay says firmly.

“Ah.” I finish my drink quickly. “You’ll have to throw a lot more soon as people are going to get cross.”

“Really?” Jay bounces from foot to foot. “I’d be like a Jayninja!”

“Yes, but the point of ninja was to be unseen. And unnoticed,” I add as Jay vanishes from sight. “I doubt jaysome can avoid being noticed.”

“Oh.” Jay reappears. “Wow! I doubt jaysome could do that at all.”

“I doubt it could either.” I head toward the door. “Perhaps you can end your shift early?”

The bartender looks so grateful when Jay asks that some patrons almost start laughing. The wise ones stop the others from doing so. Jay thanks everyone for being jaysome and then follows me out of the bar. No one breaks the silence we leave behind us.

I glance over at Jay. “Is there a reason you decided to tend a bar?”

“Cuz I’m not allowed in them since I’m eleven, but I am if I’m working and! I sulked for over two hours and thought you might be worried!”

“I am often worried where you are concerned,” I say dryly.

Jay beams proudly; the sarcasm, as ever, misses him entirely, but sometimes I can’t stop it from emerging.

“I assume you’ve learned a lesson from all this?”

Jay thinks that over. “Uhm! I’m not sure, because lessons are kinda hard to learn? But I’m definitely not missing an adventure again!”

I nod and ruffle his hair gently. As long as he doesn’t decide to become a ninja, this has turned out better than I’d have hoped it would.

The Advertising Desk

“Hi!”

I almost jump out of my desk as I spin around. The boy standing in the middle of the office is eleven. Everyone else has gone home, and I know the janitors would never bring their kids to with work.

“Uh –.”

A stranger walks through the main doors. For a moment I think the hallway behind him shows a street instead. The man looks ordinary. “Jay,” he says.

“This is important, Honcho,” the boy says firmly.

The man lets out a resigned sigh.

“Can I help you?” I say weakly.

“You totally do the advertisements for AshleyHomeStore, right?”

“Ah – yes?”

“You have a hugey typo in your ad for jaysom bunk beds!”

“Pardon?”

“It should say jaysome!” And the boy grins. There is a terrible pride in his tone, but his grin – no one has ever smiled like that. Not me, not anyone I know. It hits with a force of innocent joy that takes my breath away.

Somehow, that doesn’t trigger my asthma.

“Jaysome,” I repeat. I can hear the e in his voice, and my own. The word is a possibility, a promise, a trust without end. It is too pure to be sacred, too – too jaysome to be terrifying.

“If I put that in ads, I could sell –.” I flatter. We could sell anything. I would get any promotion I wanted.

“You’d fix the typo really good,” the boy says firmly. I think his smile widens. I lose a few minutes.

The boy has left. The man remains.

“It’s all right,” he says.

I burst into tears. I don’t know the last time I cried.

He waits until I’m done. “Jay wouldn’t understand your tears. Nor what could be done with jaysome.”

He says the word differently. I hear the promise. And the power.

“You could bring down nations with that.”

The man nods. “Jay only has by accident.” His smile is gently rueful.

“What do I do?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

There are footsteps behind us. One of the janitors. Klaus, I think. Only he walks with a coldness in his eyes I’ve never seen. There is something feline about him, something wild and primal and severely pissed off.

“Wandering magician.” His accent is no longer one I know. There is a fury in his tone.

“I thought a fae might provide information.” The man turns. Whatever his smile holds, Klaus blanches at it. “This place sells jaysom bunk beds. Jay noticed the typo, and wishes them to fix it.”

Klaus goes still. Somehow, he pales even further. I can see through him.

“This,” the man called Honcho says, “might be a problem?”

“I can’t – we can’t be certain a glamour would stop everyone from seeing the word. Jay – jaysome – is too big, too real –.” Klaus falls silent. All the threat is gone. He looks small and miserable.

“A glamour so that Jay sees jaysom as jaysome could work. I will try and explain the details to him.”

“Try.”

“This is Jay. Even I can but try.”

Klaus nods. And steps – sideways, somehow, vanishing.

The wandering magician turns and looks at me. His gaze is steady. “Jay. A fae. Myself. This is a large step into a wider world than you knew.”

I nod. “It’s too big.”

“Sometimes. I can help you forget, though you’ll never quite forget Jay.” The man chuckles softly. “I don’t think even Jay could make himself forgotten like that.”

I take a deep breath. I nod.

“Forget,” he says, with a kindness that unmakes so much.

I almost speak, but it is too late to change my mind.

Until I wake, with the memory of even the forget in my head. And nothing forgotten. The magician knew. I don’t know how he knew I’d change my mind, but he knew.

I could return to work. Klaus might not be there. Or look like someone else. I check my bank account, finding over fifty thousand in savings. And an email, sender unknown.

‘For adventures,’ it says, and nothing else.

I resolve to share as much of those adventures as I can with everyone I meet. I am not Jay. But I think anyone can learn jaysome. I am to try.

One Evening, Not Jaysome

“What have you done?”

Power drives me to my knees. I’ve seen the wandering magician pissed off before. But I’ve never had the whole weight of his power against me. Not like this. There is a killing look in his eyes, his will a mountain without end. Magicians are human. I know this. But right now he feels like nothing so much as a force of nature, implacable and ferociously controlled.

“Nathen –,” I try.

His name does not pause him at all. I swear reality itself quakes about us. Afraid. I remember the time he was kin to fae for a second. Somehow this feels beyond that. As though he were real, and everything about us nothing but illusion.

I stand, holding his gaze. The god inside me is the fear in shadows, the darkness in closets, the monster under the bed. Claws and teeth and anger that barely match my own. I don’t try and eat his magic; right now I doubt I’d survive. But I eat my own fear, fan my own anger. Find strength and keep on my feet.

“Magician.” I don’t recognize my own voice for a moment. “Do you have any idea what Jay did?”

“Explain.” My anger doesn’t flow around him so much as crash back into me. There is no give to his expression.

“Jay took it upon himself to make sure I never lost a single calorie despite every diet I have attempted in four fucking years!”

“Because the calories would be sad if they left you,” the magician says, and almost there is a hint of humour, of humanity in the reply.

“I. Don’t. Care. Why.”

“You don’t have a choice, Charlie. You left Jay scared of you. So he ran away.” The magician smiles. I thought I’d seen his coldest smile a few times, the one he tried to hide from Jay and me. This smile is a dark fury I’ve never seen before, remote and alien like a flicker of light in a bottomless hole.

“Nath –.Magician –.”

“Where can Jay run that he believes you cannot follow?” he demands, and the truth of those words forces itself upon me.

“Oh. Oh shit,” I whisper. “He ran back Outside the universe.”

“Almost. I pulled him back in,” and his tone is so bleak I stumble back from it more than the terrible power that hasn’t let up.

“How?”

He blinks, and the pressure is gone. All that power, all the rage, and he pulls it back inside without even a hint it cost him anything to do. “I may tell you. Some day. Jay is hiding in a couch. You will find him, and you will apologize.”

He doesn’t make demands, not like this. Magicians don’t. He turns and walks away.

I open my mouth. He is Honcho. He is Nathen. he is the wandering magician. But none of those names seem to fit him right now. It will be gone. He’ll be the person I know soon. His name will the name I know. But I can’t shake the certainty that he is no longer the person I know, and paid a price to save Jay that neither Jay nor I will ever understand.

I try to say I’m sorry, but the words aren’t enough. Not for anything that matters at all.

Status Updates May 2018

“There is something terrible inside you,” the witch whispered to Boy.

“I think, Boy said after he thought it over, "you mean my conscience? Bess says that not everyone has one and Mr. Fox would probably call it a burden. Do you mean that?”

“Oh, child. If only it was that simple. The world holds many evil people who would be quite less evil were they entirely devoid of goodness.”

Once upon a time there was a king who wasn’t assassinated solely because no one else wanted the thankless task of trying to run the poorest kingdom in the world. The generational plan to make the royal family immune to assassins and coups had succeeded, but even the king sometimes privately wondered if it had been worth the cost.

He says every scar is a battle he lost, with a laugh that breaks to hear. He says burn marks aren’t victory laps, showing the places on his thigh where his uncle stopped smoking. Hre knows enough to know that to survive is not the same as to live, but he knows the lesson too well. There is something almost cruel in how he turns away from love as though it were another form of pain.

The head of the agricultural division of the company did not take kindly to learning their position had them listed as the CIEIEIO in the executive hierarchy

Partial contents of a cover letter:

“But you don’t [redacted]. Or swear.”

“It might be a failing. Point is that I can’t just get a job. Every place wants resumes, interviews, sometimes even cover letters that don’t feel as dull as ditch water. Which isn’t dull at all.”

“You could have said as dull as tap water, but we all know about fluoride.”

“...this was a really bad idea, wasn’t it?”

“I have no idea. YOU are Josh. I don’t even know who I am meant to be in this narrative. You’d think an English major would know that. Instead I’m just a voice in the ether. I can’t even be a muse since those don’t exist. Where were you? Right: applying for a job. You have been using Word and its variants for about twenty five years, and typing far too much fiction in that time. Use that. For once.”

“And reading. Being an English major means reading a lot. Sometimes too much.”

“The apartment is full of books, yes. I have no idea what you expect me to segue into from this. Especially when you don’t own a Segway.”

If gravity were real we would still be together.

“If we continue down this path, one of us will die,” Protagonist said.

“We could not kill each other.” Antagonist paused. “Or have you not considered that option?”

“I am the protagonist. You are the antagonist. We know how this story ends.”

“I’d argue that we don’t. I am an antagonist, yes. There could be others you can kill instead of me?”

“That’s not how this works!”

“What kind of protagonist are you if you can’t change the story?”

“You don’t understand. I’m the protagonist because I can’t.”

“You are dying. It’s not blood: you need some Vitamin D.”

“D? I do not know that one.”

“Pardon me?”

“When I was a child, vitamins only went up to B,” the vampire explained.

“No.” Protagonist pulled his hand free from his sword as the city guard moved toward him. “If I fight them, they are only going to lose.”

The city guard captain stared. “Who are you talking to?” she demanded.

“This isn’t important to you. Consider the Narrator a kind of god.” Protagonist looked about, snapped his blade out and sliced a pattern through the air before sheathing it. “I don’t have many skills, but I am very good with a blade. Better than four guards, and my ignorance of the law about keeping my blade peace-bound in the evening is not reason enough to attack me. You might not have heard of me, but you recognize that skill.”

“Are you talking to us now?” the captain asked.

“Yes. Fine. Call it a misunderstanding. I go my way, you go yours.”

“And if we say no?”

“Then I humiliate all of you and you’re forced to declare some foolish revenge I don’t want to deal with.”

That doesn’t have to happen, the Narrator protested, but the guard sheathed their blades, offered a warning and let Protagonist depart. Grudgingly.

Once upon a time there was a hero who never noticed their call to adventure because they were busy beating a game on their phone.

I ran away. They say there are things no one can run from. But you never know until you try.

I said I was drowning under the weight of your expectations. You just laughed and said I had no idea what drowning was.

And you were right.

The stories about the seariders focus on the fact that the builders are a small subset of them who made mines for reasons that were logical and involved making use of their short stature. The weavers in the woods never used bows and arrows at all.

Protagonist paused mid-stride. “I am on my way to the market for some fruit. Is there any particular reason I thought that?”

“This is dramatic emphasis. Making sure you know they are not dwarves and elves,” the Narrator snapped.

“...but I have no idea what a dwarf or elf is?”

“Good. Keep it that way. Also, Westrin is not set in Europe in the middle ages! That trope is done to death!”

Protagonist stopped. “I don’t even know what any of that means.” And surprised himself by adding: “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine,” the Narrator said in a tone normally used to declare war.

Protagonist wisely continued to the market in the small hope that these were varieties of foreign food he would avoid eating.

I asked if you loved me.

But you said if I had to ask, then I already knew the answer was no.

“I haven’t followed politics in weeks. I just... I can’t keep doing this.”

“That’s how they win.”

“How is it that we burn out, but they never do?”

“I’m scared.”

“No, you’re not.”

“… what?”

“Everyone does a typo about that, autocorrects in their own head.”

“I don’t understand?”

“It’s sacred. Not scared.”

This isn’t the time for jokes!”

“I’m sorry, Commissioner. But as long as the Joker escapes from Arkham it’s always time for jokes.”

“Open up! This is the police!”

“I haven’t opened up to anyone in years.”

I have never written a poem about you, not even the ones that mention you by name.

For Sale: Conscience. Free to a bad home.

By age 35, you too should be a meme.

“There are two paths before you. Down one lies riches, down the other -.”

“I walk between them.”

I am updating my Privacy Policy because so many other places are. Please check your emails accordingly.

I wonder about jobs where you help animals act better in movies.

Imagine the fun of being able to say you'd given acting lessons to a goldfish.

“How do you stop being afraid, when it feels like that is all there is room for you to be?”

“There are other things, even if the fear waits under them. Even our shadows cast shadows. There can be a slim hope in that.”

The most important thing about writing a short story is deciding the name of a smog inside a bathtub is Sidney.

I think there must be a sherlock Holmes pastiche somewhere that goes like this:

"Good day, ma'am. Are you well?"

"I am afraid."

"Nonsense! There is nothing be afraid of. You got up around six because you always got up that early at the farm you lived on as a child for a brief formative time, had a small breakfast with only two eggs, put on your second-best dress, took two trains to get here, stopped at the Piccadilly line, read only the Times on the train and got lost at Clement Street on your way here and you're paranoid everyone is watching you. Oh dear."

“You’re not like other boys I’ve dated,” she said.

“I know – I –. You can’t trust me,” he said.

“You think that’s why?” she asked almost gently.