The Body

I find her in the cemetery crying beside her gravestone: there are few things that can complicate a life more than resurrection does. She looks normal enough, even to a magician if they look too closely. Perhaps a little pale, but it’s not as if she’s going to be eating the living. Few things work like they do in stories: I sometimes think it would be kinder if it did.

“Nora Baker.”

She spins. Not a ghost, but dead enough to see deeper than humans do. “Are you an angel?”

But perhaps not as deep as she should. “I am the wandering magician of this era. Someone brought you back?”

Nora nods. She is young, perhaps fifteen all told, and I feel no hunger inside her.

That is bad, though I try to hide it. “Do you know who would want to bring you back?”

“No. No, it’s not – it’s not possible,” she says.

“I imagine you can see ghosts now: they tend to be imprints left behind, like your shadow taking on a life all its own. Someone like you is like a wrecking ball, imprinted so hard into the world that your body is restored. There is nothing in that grave anymore.”

“I’m haunting myself?”

“No. You were recalled to life. It is not a thing magicians do, for many reasons. The cost is far higher than even love is willing to pay, but madness is something else entirely. It is the main reason few magicians dare fall in love, for fear of the madness that might follow. Or at least will not give themselves up wholly to love even when they do,” I say, threading power into my voice, letting the words wash over her in a soothing. “You must know who cared for you enough to do this?”

“No. My parents love me, but this transgresses – they would not do this, not sell their souls for me.”

“Someone did, and I doubt it was you. May I?”

She nods, not sure what she is agreeing to, but I reach out with the magic and feel the edges of her, touching what lies within. A face appears. A boy her own age. Not warded, because he doesn’t know enough to do that. I pull light and air together until an image form the light of the moon and stars. The boy is taller than Nora, with long hair trying to cover up an acne-scarred face, shoulders hunched against the world. The image fades, as if his desire to not be seen even extends to this moment.

“That – that’s ac- Tony tee – Tony Brown,” Nora says, looking shocked. “I don’t think he’s ever talked to me once.”

“But you know him?”

She hesitates, then nods. “This is magic, making him appear?”

“An image only, but it will help to find him. I imagine you desire answers?”

“But you know what he did?” she says, and it is only just a question.

“I have suspicions. I imagine you wish to know the truth, and that he should as well.”

“I couldn’t go home. I wanted to, but everyone knows I died. The had the funeral three days ago, and this town is not that large in ways that matter. I have spent the last six hours hiding, wandering, not understanding. I can enter churches, I don’t have demonic urges. I haven’t eaten a single brain.”

“I know. The conversation would be far different if you had.”

Nora pulls back at something in my voice. “I should be?”

“Not brains, no, but there are many reasons the dead aren’t brought back. Tell me about you and Tony.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I knew him, everyone knows of him, but that’s not like being his friend. I wasn’t a cheerleader, nothing like that. I don’t even get good grades, I haven’t even had a proper boyfriend yet!”

I decline to point out that she’s only fifteen, if only because such things probably don’t apply to the undead.

“Tell me about Tony himself, then?” I ask when Nora adds nothing else about her. Almost no one sees themselves properly from the outside, even after they’d died.

“I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him. He’s Acne Anthony, Tony Teeth: those are what everyone calls him. You saw the acne. He has the kind of buck teeth everyone makes jokes about, that he’ll never see a beaver because he is one. People said things like that,” Nora says.

“Did you?” I ask; I don’t need to thread power into it. Lying comes less easily to the dead than it does to the living, at least for a time.

“I – no. I have an uncle who was a volunteer firefighter until he was badly burned. People made so many jokes, so I guess I learned not to say such things about people?”

“You were never mean to him.”

“But that – that’s not reason enough to bring me back from the dead!”

“How does your uncle react when people do him the kindness of treating him like he’s everyone else?”

Nora is silent at that. “I didn’t even think,” she says finally. “I didn’t even think that all. I was texting on my phone, crossing a road, not thinking then either. And now I am – what I am, magician?”

“Only Tony can answer that,” I say and she just nods and walks. Starting to see her life from the outside, learning that she is probably not the monster she always thought she was. I almost envy her that luxury, since it is one magicians almost never have.

I wrap wards about us to make us unseen as we walk. Nora moves quickly after some gasps as staring into people’s homes. Starting to see more about people she knew than the living ever wish to, and remains human enough to both want to know more and to fear what might come of that.

The home of Tony Brown is dark. No lights on, no TV, no cars in the driveway. No wards, no ghosts, no power. I walk up to the front door, which opens without my touching it. Nora makes a startled sound at that small magic, and I close my eyes a moment. It would be funny if the sadness underneath wasn’t rising up. There is no power here, the house almost devoid of furniture, and we find Tony Brown upstairs in a largely empty bedroom. There are tacks on the walls where posters used to be, a power bar where a computer once was and shelves empty of books.

“Nora?” he whispers, sensing her without knowing how.

“What have you done to me?” she asks, the words coming out close to a scream.

I step in beside after her as the boy’s face crumples, wrapping bindings about her so we won’t attack him. “Tony Brown. Tell her,” I say, and there is nothing in him to stand against the command of a magician.

He jerks his head up. For a moment, he tries to resist as if he can hide from the truth even now. “I love you,” he says to Nora. “I kept wanting to ask, but I knew you’d say no. That kindness only went so far, and then you died and I couldn’t help – I couldn’t help but wonder what if, what if, and what if? It burned in me like an obsession, like how much I wanted to see the new Star Wars movies, only bigger even than that.

“I looked online. In places where I shouldn’t, and I did what I had to,” he says, his voice raw.

Nora steps forward, gently pushing long hair out of Tony’s face. His acne is bad, even worse than the imagie suggested, bucktoothed yellowed teeth trying to hide behind thin lips. He gulps loudly, his face naked terror and yearning both.

“She needs to know what you did to bring her back,” I say, cutting through the moment before it can be more.

Emotions spasm across the boy’s face, but he does speak: “Sacrifice. Everything I owned, my friends – online only, but without a computer they are lost,” he says.

“You didn’t use magic on yourself?” she asks.

“I know that doesn’t end well in any story,” he says simply.

“Tell her the rest of the sacrifice,” I say softly.

“I had to sacrifice everything that meant anything, for it to work.”

Nora goes still, drawing back from him. “Where are your parents and sister, Tony?”

“They – they were – it costs, to bring the dead back,” he says. “I love you. Love is worth … isn’t it?”

She says nothing at all, then turns to me. Her anger is cold and ugly. “You knew? You brought me here and you knew!”

“To bring the dead back has a cost; I didn’t know what it was in his case, Nora. Nor what you would consider acceptable.”

“You thought –.”

“The dead are not the living,” I say flatly.

“What do you know,” she demands, and power begins to rise as a coldness from places the living aren’t meant to tread. Light burns about her in an unnatural calling.

Tony whimpers; I’m not sure Nora notices.

“I am a magician.” I smile, and her power shatters against me. No power, just the force of memory in the smile. “And I know more of death than you, and more of the sleep that does not end than you can grasp.”

“I –.” She draws back. “I don’t want that. Not this, and not that. Please?”

“I don’t know how to undo it,” Tony whispers.

“We do terrible things for love that we would do for no other cause,” I offer quietly. “And there is more that you can do.”

Tony closes his eyes, then straightens and looks at Nora. “I release you from love, from the bonds I made and the crime I did. My life holds you, my – my life releases you.”

And he closes his eyes again, and falls back onto his bed in silence.

Nora doesn’t move, even as power shimmers about her. He murdered his family for her, and that’s shaken her deeper than she can easily understand. The body dissolves, the spell unmade by Tony’s death and two ghosts face each other in what comes afterward.

“You may meet in the Grey Lands,” I say, “But not until after prices are paid.”

Tony nods to that, and vanishes as hands and fingers swirl around him.

“His family,” I say to Nora, who hovers in the air.

“What happens now?” she whispers.

“That is up to you,” and I turn and walk away.

“Magician? Why did you do this?” she demands, meaning so many things.

“Because sometimes the only way forward is through the fire and out the other side,” I say, and I’m not talking to the ghost at all as I leave the home. It begins to burn behind me, and I am almost certain that’s not my doing.

But I don’t think almost is enough.  

Jay Hooks

The window opens silently without being touched. Given that the fourth hotel windows aren’t even meant to open, this is mildly impressive. I’m on my fourth cup of coffee to keep away at ungodly’o’clock in the morning as Jay slips in the window. He’s dressed entirely in black like a ninja would be, only his black seems to blend into the darkness and light both, the effect mildly disconcerting as the window closes behind him and he seems to fade in and out of view. He is holding what looks to be a grappling hook and vanishes as the window closes.

I cough. Not loudly, but I do cough.

Jay spins, eyes wide, the clothing fading into view as a drab black. “Charlie?”

“Jay. It isn’t even four in the morning. What are you doing?”

“I was out flying,” he says. “Like a jayboss does!”

“Wearing black?”

“Uhm. Uhm. Yes?” he says hopefully.

“And with a grappling hook in your right hand?”

“I hid it somewhere else, so you can’t get me with that,” Jay says proudly.

I wait. It takes a few seconds before his eyes widen. I missed Jay being able to see, if only for the addition it has to the look of panic in the kid’s face.

“I mean that I might have hidden it if I had one, but I don’t.”

“Hidden what?” I ask, unable to help myself.

“The – uhm. Something that –.” Jay bites into his lower lip. “You know!”

“Kiddo?”

“That I’m secretly BatJay!” He glares accusingly up at me with all the force one can muster at eleven, even if he’s not really eleven or human at all.

“Jay. You told me and the wandering magician about it. And posted it on your tumblr, which I do read.”

“But –. But –.”

“You’re jaysome, so how could I not read it?”

“But superheroes have secret identities,” he wails.

I fight back a grin. “You could have thought about that before telling us.”

“I was really new to it, and – and you know I’m SuperJay too and could figure out I’m SuperJaysome as well,” he says with a pout, looking like he’s about to cry.

I reach over, and grab him into a hug. “It’s okay, Jay. It’s not like we’re going to tell anyone.”

“But it was one of my secrets,” he says as he bursts into tears against me.

I pause. ‘One of’ sets off alarm bells in my head, but now isn’t the time. “It can still be a secret even if it’s shared, Jay. I was trying to make a joke about it, not hurt you.”

“Honest?” he sniffs, looking up at me.

“Honest, with extra bindings on top,” I say, which wins a giggle. “What adventures did BatJay have?”

“Well, I –.”

“He. Or you might accidentally tell someone, remember?”

“Oh! Right, so BatJay was busy flying and helped save a bird from flying into a plane that wasn’t using lights and the plane landed in the water outside the town and there were people on boards who weren’t jaysome and they had boxes that were filled with really icky bindings. So BatJay took care of them just like a jayboss would only as a batboss and he used the grappling hook to bounce some of them off the plane,” he says with a huge grin.

“Grappling hooks do that?”

“They do in Just Cause, and it gave me lots of ideas!”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“BatJay took their money and did a sneak-giving to some homeless people and then came back here and met me and you kinda know the rest?”

“All right. You want to get some more sleep then?”

“Okay,” Jay says, and bounces off to the one motel bed.

I don’t even try to sleep after three cups of coffee. I poke the internet for information to find out what Just Cause even is and how grappling hooks factor in. I then spend over an hour in horrified silence. A video game where the goal is destroying structures and hurting people with grappling hooks and it had given Jay ‘ideas’. I wait up for the morning paper, and turn the tv on to local news as soon as I can.

The wandering magician wakes at the latter, asking if anything is wrong.

I say I have no idea yet, show him footage of the game and explain.

The lead story involved some probably drug dealers who were found unconscious on a beach with drugs on them and no sign of their craft anywhere.

I tell the wandering magician it’s up to him to find out what Jay did with an entire float plane. He pours himself coffee, asks for the crossword puzzle in the paper and we do our best not to think too hard about it as Jay sleeps.

prompt: the letter o

“Why?” Oh, they asked that as they died.

 "So you wonder about that now, do you? So long, with top billing, with all the fame. You die, and only I am brave enough to seek vengeance. I could not escape you, but now you cannot escape me…“

O leaned down, bending over the corpses of E and I.

 "E-I-E-I-O,” O growled. “Always the important letters, the ones everyone remembered. But it started with me, with the O in Old MacDonald. Old And oinks and moos and honks were mine! But everyone just remembered you."

"And all you could think,” O crowed as the letters burned, “was to ask me why I was doing this, when that contains not a real vowel at all!"

And so O left the scene of the crime, never wondering why U, with only two utterances in the song, had not joined in the seeking of vengeance.

But U and Y had plans of their own… and the less said of I the better.

war gnomes

I do a good shaking, because sometimes humans like to sleep way too much – probably cuz they have dreams. “Honcho?”

He wakes quickly, in the way of magicians, already dressed except for shoes even if it is three in the morning. “Jay?”

I feel him reach out, with magic and senses, the wards he put on the hotel room humming as he touches their bindings. He sits up, gets the shoes, grabs his coats. “What is it?”

I’m already dressed and hurry to the door, opening it and waiting as patient as a Jay. So I’m kinda bouncing from foot to foot.

“Jay,” he says once we’re in the hallway, closing the door behind him. “Is Charlie needed?”

“Nope! And I think it’s always safer to let Charlie sleep.”

“And that is why you woke her at 4 a.m. yesterday to help you invent verbs for Jayism as a language?” he asks because magicians are really good at not forgetting.

“Oh, that was different. I bet Charlie was totally bored of sleep after a whole six hours!”

Honcho says nothing to that, probably because he’s all impressed by my logic and we take the stairs down the three flights and leave the hotel.

“Okay, so I was practising flying a bit more because gravity is a binding I can have lots of fun with and I sensed some weird bindings on the ground in a garden – they weren’t broken, but they’re the kind of bindings that want to break other bindings? I landed, and listened a bit and came to get you because people listen to magicians more than a Jay and I’m all from Outside the universe so sometimes I don’t understand things?”

“Only sometimes?” he says, and I’m pretty impressed Honcho can do a joking when he’s only half-awake and without coffee.

“Uh-huh. Anyway, it’s some garden gnomes and they’re sounding really ... not mean, or meany, but – worse? Like trolls of garden gnomes were bigger, only trolls aren’t often mean because they don’t need to be?”

“What were they talking about?”

“War.”

“With who?” he asks, not even breaking strike as we walk.

“Lots of human teenagers have been destroying them, thinking they’re just like normal stone garden gnomes when really sunlight turns them into stone and they’re really angry and want revege and have stone weapons and can sneak into homes and stuff and it would be a lot of bad bindings.”

“I imagine so.”

But Honcho doesn’t pull up a single ward against stone, doesn’t draw on the world for protections against gnomes as we walk. Maybe trusting I’ll be really good with bindings, but I’m not sure at all. I lead him to the garden and we just walks in after opening the gate. It’s really large, all ornate pools and gardens and trees and filled with gnomes. They’re all small and stone and angry, like pebbles grinding together in the darkness. There are sharp weapons, and their anger is like sharp stones cutting into feet.

“Magician,” rumbles among them, sounding like something ugly in the dark.

“Yes.” Honcho doesn’t put power into his voice like he can with magic. “You do know most humans don’t even know your kind exist. Most don’t even know magicians are real or that their world is more than advertised.”

“We will make them know,” one says, stepping forward, and she is really tall, almost reaching my knee.

“And then what?” Honcho’s voice is soft, the gnomes straining in to hear. “You murder them in their beds with your sharp stone blades, and you think humans will let it go? Every stone gnome in the city will be destroyed within a week. And they it will spread, because you’re seeking revenge. They will be driven by hate. Hatred that you’ve shaken them from comfort. Hatred that you’re action is to strike first and speak later. Fear that you’re as human as they are, in all the wrong ways.”

“What would you suggest we do, magician?”

“Decide what you really want, and seek for that. If you don’t want to be harmed, hide so the humans cannot find you in the mornings. Seek specific ones one – those with talents, the few psychics. Reveal yourselves in small numbers, let stories spread Let them tell stories with no substance, to make people scared of hurting garden gnomes. They’ll make curses up you can give small substance to, tell stories that will change the way they think about you. It’s one solution; there are others, but that could be the easiest.”

“You want us to hide, with your magic and –.”

“I want you to survive,” Honcho says. “And the humans as well. The real magic in this is to make everyone win, and it doesn’t take a magician to do that.”

“We are not cowards, magician.”

Honcho blinks. Nothing more. He doesn’t use magic, not even that I sense and I’m very good with bindings, but the cold anger in his voice is something else entirely. “It takes true bravery to seek peace. It is a lesson everyone forgets, and the one that must always, always be learned. You have jails, for those who break your laws?”

The gnome nods, looking wary.

“Arrest every voice that cries out for war, and perhaps you could find a way to peace.” He lets out a breath, the anger gone elsewhere. “I can work some small wards to help you; Jay here can help with bindings, but magic is only a band-aid. The solution will need to be something else.”

“You have power, and you ask us to seek other means?”

“There are many kinds of power. Restraint is among the most impressive; if you don’t think I’m doing that now, you know nothing about a wandering magician.”

The gnomes go still. There are whispers. Stories. They begin to back away, the bindings fragmentting apart.

“Stories,” Honcho says. “You can use that to change how we think. It won’t be easy. I’d never say that, but in the long run it might work.”

“You will help us, then?” The gnome asks, then she pauses. “Never mind. I think you did.”

They share a smile then, and Honcho nods and heads back out the gate. I follow in silence.

“We’ll need to do a binding to stop humans from hurting them, lasting at least a month,” Honcho says, not looking over at me.

“But you said –.”

“They make need help if they are to hold the course. We’ll work something out that helps them as best we can, kiddo.”

“And they won’t ever know?”

“It will be for the best if they don’t.” He reaches over, ruffling my hair. “You were right to wake me for this. Now, I’m going back to bed and you’re going to pretend to sleep for at least two hours.”

“Oh.” I let out a hugey sigh but follow. Sometimes Honcho thanks me in really weird ways, but he doesn’t say a single word when we get back and I sneak my phone under my bed to play games in the darkness. And sometimes Honcho is sharp enough to pretend not to see me being a Jay at all!

Sweltering Stars: the cast

This is a sci-fi novel being written pretty much for the sheer fun of it. It’s sci-fi horror (the horror stuff showing it’s first glimpses about the 5K mark) exploring transhumanism, the far (very far) future and essentially what happens when the hubris of a humanity that has spread out among six galaxies realizes it means nothing when the stars turn right and the Great Old Ones come out to play.

Cast:

Kaden: An archaeologist, Kaden is an explorer of the past who finds ways to interface with ancient technologies using modified old tech, techtweaks (sometimes alien in nature) and modern technology designed to break, scan and hack ancient systems. Nominally the leader of the expedition to the space station Nanospark VI, he knows the least about what is going on and nothing about the true nature of the universe, though he carries one alien item on him he’s hiding from everyone else, and it may be both their salvation and destruction.
He was pretty much based on how difficult it would be to get technology in the future to interface with ‘modern’ technology now, so in the future you’d need people who specialized in such things.

Lillias: a very, very well-trained security officer who is actually a cyborg (this is only technical: nothing of her is human, her memories implanted into a mechanical body - it actually makes her the most transhuman of the characters in that sense), she has done everything from bounty hunting to bodyguarding and running entire planetary security systems. If she has a flaw, it’s thinking that she is actually better than she is and being a bit too reliant on her various offensive and defensive systems and scans.
She is terrified of true darkness, though no one remembers why.

Otli: a flowing liquid entity with a human mind Otli is basically a sentient puddle that explores places and is close to unkillable (since it can switch between states of matter at need), Otli has run into one of the Great Race of Yith and barely survived the experience, its memories of the event being very, very vague. Otli definitely appears to be the most transhuman of the characters and is quite happy to use that in order to be underestimated or ignored.
It is well aware that they’re meant to all die at the station - Otli is often sent into situations to explore by the Charter where only it survives to report back - but is quite up front about this and rather puzzled as to why the Charter organization would sent along assets as valuable as Lillias and Kaden if they were meant to not survive this exploration.

Other people will show up eventually. This far all the main case have secrets - from each other and themselves - and no idea what their real mission is, or if they’re intended to survive it or not.

Yup Still alive!

Hoy. Heading toward the third act (I think). Charlie just discovered that the reason secret Canadian government agents have been trying to kill her and Jay since they came into Canada was for budget reasons.

It turns out that keeping an eye on the wandering magician and friends was using up too much of their operational budget, and executing them is far cheaper. Hence the attempted murders.

Facebook status updates part XL (Oct. 2015)

(50 of these. Damn.)

I used to take pictures. Until they made experiences too real to bear.

“Sleight of hand is something anyone can do. There is no magic in being a conjurer - often the opposite, in fact. Most conjurers are just people without the talent to be performers. You want real magic, watch people work sleight of mind on themselves.”

We were afraid. Our fear gave birth to the gods that ruled us once they grew too powerful to be demons. They rule us far more kindly than we ever treated them. And we wait, in our terror, for them to become the monsters we were to them.

This is the post your mother warned you about.

We live in the cyborg age: when I wiped my harddrive, I lost every means I had to contact you.

“You keep asking me to tell you the truth. But the only truth I know is that all truths are partial at best.”

I wrote another story about you, changing every detail I could so that you might not know how much I’m trying to say.

It was called ‘The Last of the First Goombah Panty Raiders, book 1: The Torment of the Galactic Cheese Muffins volume 2 - Love’s Windswept Moor and the Kingdom of Mal'Kuth’s Eternal War Against the Armies of High Lord Chaos XIII Jr.. Subtitled: a novella.’

They finished making their costumes, the work of months to tan the skins, a year of watching videos on YouTube to prepare. This time, they felt they might pass as human.

I changed the difficulty setting on my life. Went from Medium down to Easy, and I think that’s why we can no longer be together.

VOTE HARPER … because the world needs more music

VOTE MAY … because it was a better month than October

VOTE TRUDEAU … because Canada needs political dynasties too

VOTE MUCLAIR … because if it sounds like nuclear it might just bomb

He used to hand strangers notes on which he’d written: ‘I love you’, 'Have a nice day :)’ and the like until he handed one to a bank teller who hit an alarm at seeing the piece of paper being handed over. He spent six nights in jail, and each took away a word he used to write down.

He tried to wake up in the dream, to shift location, to sleep or be elsewhere but not a single thing worked. The room remained, his family waiting on the other side of the table remained, seeking in dreams a truth they’d never tried to find in the waking world.

You discover all your crimes on twitter, each hidden within trending hashtags. And you know, deep inside, that you can’t be the only one to have made these connections.

They say we all see things that we cannot unsee, but it is far harder to learn what one cannot unlearn, to sit on knowledge that festers and one cannot share without making the world a poorer place for the knowing....

We live in the cyborg age: when I wiped my hard drive, I lost every means I had to contact you.

These are not the posts our mothers warned us about.

“The return exchange dance is NOT any kind of Native American dance. Even if you are starting to feel as though you’re cursed.”

The zombies tore off their own arms to give them to the homeless, unaware that they had been asked to bring alms instead.

The gifts were accepted.

You know a story went odd when a character explains white privilege via neutering dogs.

“I’m not scared of being a monster. I’m scared of what comes after, what happens if being a monster isn’t enough anymore.”

Sometimes, she said, silence can be an act of creation.

And I never understood, not until it was too late.

I voted according to my conscience, he explained, and staggered back to the toilet to throw up again.

One of the mysteries of the era is the weakness of Great Prophet of our times. For all his terrible prognosticative power, the towering Nixon - who strode the 20th century like the broken gods of old, spoke only one great truth amid his cunning sea of lies:

"Tonight we'll dispense with the formalities. I'd like to toast the future prime minister of Canada: to Justin Pierre Trudeau," Richard Nixon said at a gala buffet in April 1972 during a state visit to Ottawa when Trudeau was just four months old.

But his power seems to have crescendoed then and deserted him thereafter, for it did not foresee his own downfall. Those who study such moments of Grace wondered what it meant for lowly Canada, and what terrible things might come to pass under a future set in stone.

Every day is just like every other one.

Except when it isn’t.

I have been trying to write you a love letter

In full knowledge of the heat death of the universe

Every boy wants to be their father, at least until they see the sides of him which are more than that.

“I lied,” the Devil said in quiet fury. “Everyone knows that about me. Everyone knows I lie!”

“You said you loved me.”

“And you should have known I was lying. Only you didn’t, so all of this is your fault. All of it,” and the Devil walked away.

And I deleted every selfie I’d taken of the both of us from my phone, but it didn’t stop the pain at all.

I love you in the way the NRA protect their interests above sanity.

I don’t know if this should scare you.

Probably.

I was trying to mainline poetry as if it was caffeine but I was left wide awake at 2 a.m. sobbing over lives I had never lived, experiences as knife blades of torrid prose and I stayed up for the dawn with wide and shuddering eyes.

It was not like what the poets had written at all.

"I love you lagom," he said, and for years she wondered if she'd misheard until she learned otherwise.

It’s not a proper world if it’s one where heroes die.

It’s only been a year but I’m scared of meeting you again. You said, “we can still be friends” as if we could go back to being that small. As though we could just take back the soft secrets, as if we could pretend the private jokes that were just us didn’t exist anymore at all.

The note you handed me said I was layogenic and when I checked my phone to learn its meaning you sprinted to the window and climbed out the fire escape. You’d said you could love a hunchback, but the truth was something else. Then you fled.

I tried to explain, but my conjoined twin just giggled in savage glee.

They finished making their costumes, the work of months to tan the skins, a year of watching videos on YouTube to prepare. This time, they felt they might pass as human.

On Halloween eve, there is a 30% increase in vehicles that only look like taxis. And almost all of them are hungry.

(It will be left as an exercise to the discerning reader to determine how much of this increase is linked to uber.)

You keep asking me what being dead is like, as though I would have haunted you if I had a choice in the matter.

Hallowed Eve

There are rules, when you are a ghost. They are burned into our being with the same fire that lets us remain in the Grey Lands after we die. Obey the rules, and you can return to the land of the living rarely. Break them, and you can return more often – until the Wardens find you, or you run into an exorcist or something worse by far. But obey, and you can walk the world of the living as if you were flesh and blood for one night every year. And be far more than that as well.

The hallowed night. All Hallows Eve, when the shadows are holy and you can bring fear into the hearts of the living – or anything else you might desire to attempt. You can terrify, but you cannot kill. Kiss, but you cannot love. There are rules, after all, and some of them protect us as much as the living. We have power on this night that we do not have on other nights. I can do things I never could even at the heights of my mortal madness. I carry the cold of the grave about me, and the light that burns in my eyes is that of a hereafter.

Because I have no desire to fake being human. Because I am not in the mood for such things. I move, and humans think it a costume. I smile, and candy and drunkenness protect them against some of my power. I am remembered in death as I was not in life, and that is enough. I move through mirrors, flit through crowds. Create stories, give birth to new urban legends. The night is mine, and I am wild with it until I run into the boy.

He looks to be about eleven, all thin and pale with a white cane and dark glasses. I’d have taken him for human except his walk has no fear to it, and his smile – his smile is like nothing I’d ever seen, not even in a dream. I make a sound and he spins at the noise, and his grin strikes the air between us like the bells of a holy place that has found itself become sacred. Sacred places are terrifying, but there is nothing terrifying about his smile.

I know enough to know that should scare me, and draw about me the cold from places where the living cannot travel.

The boy moves, faster than human boys could, and collides with me to wrap his arms about me. For a moment, I think it an exorcism – that I have, somehow, breached the rules – and then I realize it is a hug as he let go, “Hello,” bursting out of him with exclamation marks behind it.

“Hello,” I manage.

“My name is Jay. What’s yours?”

“Alice. Red Alice of the Bloodied Hands,” I say.

“Oh. I’m just a Jay,” he says. “We hugged, right? It’s hard to tell because your bindings feel all kinds of weird you know.”

“We hugged, yes.”

“Good!” He flings out another grin like a careless offering. “This is the only night I can touch ghosts, since otherwise most of them poof and vanish except Dyer, but he was pretty tough even if he wasn’t tough like a Jay.”

I flinch, not meaning to. All ghosts know of Dyer. The ghost-eater who became a ghost on dying, was barred from the land of the dead – and eventually found a way back inside. Most powerful of all the Wardens who keep us in the Grey Lands, and this boy says his name with casual ease as though speaking of a friend.

“Can I help you?” I say, because such a power should not be shunned.

The boy blinks broken eyes. “Uhm! I think I’m okay, but we could play tag if you want?”

“Tag?”

“You’re pretty fast, I bet, and the exercise would be fun!”

“You have a phone on you?” He nods. “Can you use it?”

“Of course,” he says with innocent pride.

“Look up my name.”

He asks his phone to look me up, and it turns the text it finds into speech. Jay listens for a good minute, then turns it off and looks up. “You killed lots of people?”

“I murdered them, yes.”

“Did they deserve it?”

“I have been a ghost for over two years years. I ... no, I do not think they did. No matter what was done to me, what I sought revenge for.”

“It was a really meany post on twitter,” he says, and I have no idea if I’m being rebuked or not.

“There was also a facebook post of me. They – used me, and I had revenge.”

“You could have something else. Like a friend,” he says happily, and insists we find a park and play tag.

I don’t have it in me to say no, even if I should. It turns out he is very fast, and ticklish despite everything else. We play tag for half an hour, Jay and I, and when it ends my hands are no longer bloodied at all.

“What have you done?” I demand, in the voice I destroyed Mo with.

“I didn’t do anything,” Jay says, staring up at me unafraid. “I let you make a choice, and you make a good one.” He smiles, and this smile is soft and a little strange, this night touching whatever he is as well. “You tried to use me and I think that meant I used you as well.”

And I think about death, and hallows, and holy nights. I wonder why the rules exist, for the first time, and what this night is meant to do. “I can pass on. Beyond the Grey Lands.”

“I think so, if you want to?” he offers. “I don’t know much about that stuff at all. Honcho says it’s not safe to look too deeply into how the universe works in case I find a fnord. Which I haven’t yet!”

I just nod, and thank him in a daze, and he offers up a huge grin before checking his phone, says he’s late for a party and vanishes somewhere else in the world between moments.

I am cleansed, and I am Alice, I am me and I am free – and yet I think it is for the best that I am not invited to whatever party the boy has gone to.

I keep walking, but this time I am silent. I wait for the dawn.

And I am not afraid. 

The Promise

Charlie and Jay are mending fences – though I’m not sure Jay grasps that there are any to be mended – so I use the time to walk the town of Osterville. Less than three hundred people call it home, and the old paper mills were closed and shuttered decades ago. No one comes here to buy a home, no one can afford to just leave and start over. People say they can, but the past clings like regrets, the air whispers of promises waiting their fulfilment and music stations and TV shows blaze out of windows against the light as much as the dark.

A town too small for a magician. A town in need of one.

I walk, the magic sending out whispers of its own. Easing pains, shifting griefs, lessening the load of living. For a time, for a short while. Breathing space in which people can breathe again. I move, and the world changes with each movement. Small things, in small ways. I gather silence and shadows about me so no one sees me, walk the town twice with slow steps. I could do more.

I have done far more in my time. Shifted time and space, burned new patterns into the old skin of the world. But each time costs, and costs again, and I pay and I pay until some days – not today, but some – it feels that all I am is a payment. Cashing cheques until the bills come due. And if I were to stop, to bind myself to one place – I don’t know when another would wander. How far they’d go. How long they would last in their wandering. So I hold the burden, and I walk, and I touch the town in all the small ways I dare to.

Magicians help, but it never feels like enough. The world pushes against magic, reality resists the weight of dreams. We do what we can, tell ourselves it is what we must. We don’t dare to be more, for fear of the bill that would come to. For the price that others would pay. I fix two cars, continue to walk. Some days I want to stop. Just be still, taking root like a tree, a giving and a receiving. Finding balance in a world that offers none, that insists I be a balance for others.

It’s been so long since I’ve been just me, and not the magician as well. But I have promises to keep, and oaths to hold onto. I can’t get go of the magic, I can’t cling onto it too tight. So I walk a third time, easing more pains on my way back to the RV. Charlie and Jay are having a tickle-war, and part of me wants to join. To relax. But I can’t let my guard down.

Not around Jay.

Not knowing what I know.

Because I made a promise, and I intend to keep it.

Jay Privileges

“I’d strangle him if I thought he’d notice,” I mutter, but not so low that the wandering magician doesn’t hear me. “Where is Jay, anyway?”

“Finding a cold that lost its host. If left alone, it might mutate.”

I stare at the magician. “The word ‘might’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that, isn’t it?”

He smiles at that and sips his coffee across the table. The coffee shop isn’t crowded, but no one is paying us attention. Possibly my being a god-eater, or a ward on his part. Or pure chance, for all I know. “I thought you might need to talk. You’ve been pressing the kid a bit hard the last two days.”

“Right. You know what white privilege is?”

“I’m a magician. We know all about privilege,” he says mildly.

I count to ten. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, Charlie. But I’m not sure Jay can.”

“Pardon me?”

“Jay senses bindings, the ways in which things are connected together, how bindings flow between people and groups. And he does this through time as well as space. Tell him a parent is hurting a child, and he’ll sense the bindings backwards and forwards, sideways and across – how the parent was hurt, how their child might hurt others. Ways the bindings shift and flow, how other bindings touch and mutate each other. He had a kind of hindsight and foresight we simply can’t have.” He has another sip of his coffee. “Jay has enough trouble differentiating humans of different sexes, let alone genders or skin tones. To him, we’re all human. Different, yes, but far more similar than we are ever different.”

“I can tell different dog breeds apart,” I say flatly.

“And yet you can understand why it is necessary to neuter a dog. Could you explain that to a dog in a way that makes sense?” he asks, magician-soft. “In a way they could accept?”

I stare at him. “What?”

“Jay might see what we call privilege. And he might understand why it is necessary, though not in any way we’d understand, not in any way we’d accept or make sense of. And, I imagine, definitely not in any way he could articulate without using the word Jaysome a lot. Strength is an accident arising out of the weakness of others, Charlie. It’s something one has, and not always something one is clever enough to refuse. Jay has to wear his innocence like armour, or he would see far too much about the world. Including the parts we never want to admit.”

“Like when someone claims privilege is necessary because we neuter dogs?” I snap.

“I can say what I wish, but you choose what you want to hear. How you interpret my words, whether you hear what is behind them,” he says as he finishes his coffee. “I am saying that Jay simply can’t explain how he sees the world without hurting us, without failing language because language always fails. Why else would we have poets, if not to chart such regions? I chose the worse explanation and metaphors I could think up, and they explained and said nothing at all. Jay would be even worse at trying to articulate his own truths in any way we would be prepared to hear, let alone accept.” The magician stands. “You know the saying that there are three sides to any story?”

“Yours, mine, the truth. What of it?” I say as I stand.

“Jay’s side is probably as close to truth as one can get. And the truth is rarely pleasant and never kind. If he articulated how he truly sees human who aren’t us, you’d probably never see him the same way again. That you are his friend matters, Charlie, more than trying to understand issues of privilege and he would rather have you and I as friends than be forced toward truths he has no desire to ever know.”

“You make it sound like a burden.”

“All curses are, even if they look like gifts from the outside.” And he walks away without looking back.

I get more water for my tea, and I sit. And wait for Jay. And I have no idea what I am going to say at all.

It turns out that I just need to offer a hug.