Seeing Auras

The aura – I have no words. I’ve been inventing new colours for hours, but this – this is like the dark side of the sun. Like cold fire, like the ending of dreams. The shape is human. That terrifies me even more. Aura upon aura, repetition without end. Nothing should look like this. They walk down the street.

You don’t walk, with an aura like this. You don’t do – human things. But they are. The other auras fade, even my own, as though only this aura was real.

“Apologies,” The man standing before me is maybe thirty, and ordinary, and the aura is gone. Folded away. Moved somewhere where I cannot see it. “Most people who can See learn how to control it quickly. There are not many magicians, but we are – parts of places, as much as other things. It confuses.”

“What?” Mylie moves forward, fists balled. “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but -.”

“I am sorry, but I was not speaking to you.”

Mylie made nurses in the hospital back off; she pulls back instead. Seeing no auras, but the magician’s voice is a deep well of truth.

“Grandma isn’t -. She can’t -.” Mylie flatters. “There was a stroke.”

“Ah. That, a magician would not dare touch.” The magician smiles, slow and sad, at my expression. “You saw auras for a time, Emiline. There is a power to that, but not the kind some might envision. To be a magician is to understand the helplessness of power better than most.” he says, and I don’t think Mylie hears these words.

“A gift one cannot control is not a gift at all.” His sigh is low and tired. “I can bind you so that you no longer see auras. It would be safest, because there is a boy named Jay in this town as well and I do not think you would survive his aura. Not that he ever intends harm, but to see complete auras without control would break you perhaps even beyond what Jay can easily repair.”

There is nothing for me. I don’t speak. I can’t, not words anyone can understand.

The magician hears. I am not surprised, given that aura. “You will be missed. That is hardly nothing. Listen: Jay is eleven, and from far Outside this universe. If your seeing his aura destroyed you, he would try to make it right and never understand the harm he would cause in the process. That is something as well. You have choices still.”

I think about an aura bigger than the magician’s. I think about what it would do, how I would die. Here, in front of Mylie. Broken.

Help me.

The magician touches my forehead. One finger, and I can no longer seen the gentle aura about my granddaughter. It changes nothing between us.

She grabs the magician’s hand, yanking it away, about to make demands.

“I’ve never done a poking game, Honcho!” The boy who is beside the magician is eleven, and his grin – his grin defuses everything. It is pure and innocent and wonderful and the magician gently turns my chair away. I think it is him, though he does not touch it, and the force of the grin diminishes a little.

“Games do get interesting when you plan them, Jay. I was helping here, and am done. You might want to see is Charlie is ready for lunch?”

“Okay! Bye, new friends!” The boy waves to Mylie. She waves back, looking dazed. Every puzzlement she had, every question she was going to ask the magician: it has all been driven from her mind by the sheer exuberance of Jay.

The aura behind that smile that would have destroyed me. I have no doubt about it.

But I think it would have almost been worth it. Almost.

Fancy Fireworks

I enter the hotel suite and stretch slowly. The ending of one year is always a dangerous time to be a magician. I’ve spent the last twelve hours working small magics non-stop. A few whispers to the world here, nudging needs and desires there. Helping people make it through the night. Some years it is easier, others it is far harder. Magicians in cities tend to just barricade themselves at home and hide this time of year, the need around them too much for their magic to answer.

A wandering magician can’t do that as easily. So I do what I can, push my magic as wide and far as I dare in the town. I’m worn out and tired in a good way as I pour myself a drink Charlie put in the fridge that is full of vitamins, minerals and a host of other things. It tastes far better than the name implies, and I’m halfway done when Jay opens the door and comes bouncing inside.

He’s holding a bag in one hand and offers up a huge, beaming grin at seeing me. “Honcho, I got fireworks,” he says proudly.

I don’t choke on my drink. I consider the bag carefully. Small, paper, and what is inside feels like seeds to my magic. But this is Jay I am dealing with, and when an eleven year old boy from Outside the universe tells you he has fireworks... I pause, now wide-awake and not the last bit tired from the previous few hours.

“Fireworks?”

“Uh-huh! I bought then in a shop, with money!” Jay adds happily.

I know better than to ask what else he might have tried to buy some with. “May I see them?”

Jay hands me the bag and I dump seeds into the kitchen table. Study them. Then Jay. “Ah. Jay. These are just seeds.”

“Huh?”

“Someone sold you a bag a seeds.”

“But but who would lie to a Jay?” he demands.

I – ah. People tend to try and help you, when you ask them for things.”

“Of course! They’re being jaysome too.”

“Of course they are. But selling a kid fireworks on New Years Eve isn’t allowed in a lot of places. So rather than say no, you were tricked.”

Jay stares at the beans, then at me. I catch his arm before he can vanish.

“Sometimes it is safer to trick a Jay than say no to you, yes?”

He lets ou a huge sigh. “I don’t see why, since they were going to be fancy fireworks!”

“Charlie is having a nap in her room. You can ask her about them, and I’ll find some fireworks. Deal?”

Jay nods, and vanishes. I can hear him informing Charlie that a nap interferes with adventures, and Charlie throw something at his head. Which means Jay is distracted at least.

I slip out the door with the bag, asking where it came from and finding myself at one of those small corner shops that exist partially because some street corners rely on having shops. The shop has closed, but I can feel someone inside and head in.

An old woman is finishing sweeping up behind a counter and eyes me balefully. “The door was closed.”

“Doors aren’t closed to a wandering magician.” I hold up the bag. “You sold this to a boy earlier tonight.”

She sighs, setting the broom aside. “I wasn’t about to sell real fireworks. He was just – eager. They’re a kind of jumping bean I enspelled to glow a little when fire touches them. I figured it would be enough.”

“I am afraid not, at least not for Jay.” I don’t tell her that the enspelling didn’t work. I have that much kindness in me always.

Crimson flares in the depths of her eyes, and her shadow lengthens for a moment. “I have heard of that one.”

“Not enough, if you thought he’d be okay with being tricked.” I smile. “We could use fireworks in the sky tonight, if you are willing?”

“I am very old, magician.”

“I know. But Jay is very young, and disappointing him might be unwise.”

“Even for a magician, that was a masterpiece of understatement.” She lets out a deeper sigh. “I will do what I can.”

“Thank you.”

“Magician.” I stop, halfway to the door. “Did he tell you about me?”

“No. I am certain he knew you were a dragon, but it never occurred to Jay that a dragon running a corner store would be strange. I am not about to ask.”

“You think I am that dangerous?” Her voice deepens a little. I hear scraping against wood.

“I think it would be rude.”

The dragon’s laugh follows me outside, warm and delighted.

Charlie is awake and in the kitchen when I return to the motel suite. It is cutting it close to midnight, and I tell Jay to head to the roof and watch fireworks. Charlie looks at me wordless, her mouth a thin line.

“Sorry. I needed Jay kept busy. He’s getting fireworks.”

“He told me about the bag. I assume the seeds would lead to a giant bean stalk?”

“No. Just sparkles and a little light when they catch fire. And jumping. Nothing Jay would consider fireworks, and I thought it might be safer if he didn’t head back and lecture someone about lying to a Jay. Or demanding fireworks they might not have.”

Charlie looks at me. “But they have fireworks?”

I grin, gesturing, and she heads up to the roof as well. I bring a drink of my own, and hot chocolate for Jay. Distant fireworks are already starting, time counting down in a low rumble. Above us there is movement. A cloud that isn’t a cloud. Fire that turns into explosions of light and noise as the dragon roars over the entire town.

Almost no one will hear it. Almost no one will understand. But those who do will have a different story to tell come morning, and a new year with a hint of old mystery to join the happiness.

Jay whoops and cheers and the dragon fades away slowly from the sky in a dazzling display of pyrotechnics I doubt she had known she had in her any longer.

I suspect her new year will be happier than she had thought it would be, even if it is not the year of the dragon.

Tabop

“Hi! I sensed some broken bindings and –.”

He muffles a scream, a boy not older than a Jay, spins toward me. “Who – what – you can’t be here – is this a trick?” falls out, whisper-quiet in the bedroom. His eyes are wide with terrors.

“Jaysome isn’t a trick and I am pretty good at it!”

“But – my parents – if anyone is over –. I don’t know what you are, but you can’t be here,” and the words are almost magician-like, pleading like a command.

“Huh?”

“I don’t know how you got into my room, but they’ll –.” He stills, fear falling inward. “You have to go.”

A door opens, and it was locked from the other side. A man looms, shadows gathered about him. “Tyler? What is – what in the fuck is this?” and he is only human, but his voice –.

The boy stumbles. He is pale, and brave in terror. “It’s not what it looks like, dad, it’s not –.”

“You are not allowed guests. What if they find out? What if they learn?” is demanded.

Tyler is shaking, and bindings are breaking because of the ones forming.

“You are ten. That is far too old to wet your bed,” the father says, and –.

“Oopses happen you know,” I say, firm as a Jay.

He turns, and his hand is open and solid.

I’m quick like a Jay and tough like a Jay but there are bindings he can do in this room. To hit, to harm. I hit the wall, bounce, stand. He moves in for another blow.

Tyler is in front of me. “I don’t know who this is, or how they got in. I don’t, dad!”

I grab the next blow in bindings before it reaches Tyler, pushing the man back. There is a woman behind him, and Tyler lets out a small wounded sound.

“You’re hurting him, and that’s not jaysome at all!”

They move in. Certain. Sure of their power and control.

I reach into bindings. Touch Tyler’s. I’m not Charlie, to pull out energy. Not Honcho, to see deep into things. But bindings have history, and he’s scared and always scared and hurting and hurt all because he wets a bed. And other things, but I don’t understand them at all cuz there’s nothing jaysome about what they do to their son.

There are other children in the house. Hiding too. Scared.

“Honcho would do terrible things to you,” I say. “And Charlie might do worse. I’m not them. I don’t do human things.”

And I smile, and it’s not a smile a Jay does because there’s too many teeth and they’re sharp and some aren’t teeth at all. There is being a jaysaurus. And then there is being a jaysaurus. And then, too, there is being Jayseltosche. Which is even bigger in all the bad ways of the word.

I reach inside. No binding. Nothing like that, me to me. Hi? Time to wake up, I say. Need you.

And I smile again and it’s not a smile at all and there are bindings breaking and I remake them and twist them into new shapes and I’m breaking the rules Honcho told me about not doing bindings on people but I’m not Jay right now and I don’t care. They twist, and again, and I let go of the smile, and settle back down into Jay.

Even my fingernails hurt a bit.

Tyler is staring at me. Even Honcho has never seen me like that. He’s not afraid. He’s crying, but not afraid, and he knows what I did because I let him sense the bindings.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

The parents have left. To another room, shaken. Broken of their power, for now and ever.

“That was a really bad bindings,” I whisper, and: “There’s others like that, but I don’t know if I can –.” And I don’t because it hurt.

“I’ll be jaysome,” he says and means it and I’m crying and we’re crying and it’s okay.

It shouldn’t be, but it’s okay because he’s tough like a Tyler and a human and his jaysome is a really good one too!

I find Honcho outside. He just looks at me. Hugs me, gently. Offers ice cream, and I know he’s doing lots of helping and fixings too so I eat a lot and Honcho looks at me after.

“That was pretty brave of you, Jay.”

“Nope. I was doing what is right and that’s doing what is right, and –.”

“Jay.”

And he is Honcho and I just nod and follow him outside. I have another good cry at the hotel, and it is a good one and he just holds me and presses a finger to my lips when I try and talk.

“There are hard lessons you’ll have to learn, and one of them – this one – is that there are things that can’t be solved by being jaysome. And no, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But –.”

“You didn’t,” he repeats, and I’m crying again and held again and I don’t understand Tyler’s parents even if I saw every binding they had and Honcho says it’s okay not to, sometimes, that sometimes one can know so much that they can’t be wise and it’s dangerous to learn what you can’t unknown.

And he says lots else I think, but I fall asleep and almost dream.   

The Wind Talker

I make friends when walking down a street, because a Jay is pretty good at that and I talk with lots of things. And some of them are pretty surprised a Jay can talk to them – sometimes even that they can talk! – but my new friend isn’t at all.

“I have an uncle who is a tornado.”

“Oh?”

“Everyone talks about him. Not just other winds. The waves. Storms.” The zephyr let’s out a sigh smaller than it is. “Even the earth knows his name.”

“Oooh! So you’re all kinds of sad-face about being a gentle breeze?!”

“Yes. I’ve felt you change winds. Move storms. Make things – more. Bigger. Terrifying!” Each word a gust, and after the zephyr barely manages a whisper: “Change me. Help me.”

“Jaysome is jaysome; it doesn’t have to be like that you know!” I stop walking so it isn’t tired when following a Jay. No one else is about. “Honcho knows that change isn’t always a helping. Sometimes help is learning to be you, not wanting to be other things. It’s a happiness if no one knows your name like they know tornadoes and typhoons and lots of other things starting with t I bet!”

“But I’m so small.”

“Uh-huh. And they were too once. They grew, and you can too: but you don’t have to grow the way they did. You can be big and not be feared!”

The breeze quivers when I’m firm like a Jay, but keeps on going too!

“But you are big. You are Jay, of the bindings, and the wind that howls between the worlds knows your name.”

“Well, I am jaysome. But that’s me being me and making friends and doing loads of helpings. Being big is more this -.”

And I reach, for a moment. Down inside, but also sideways and upside-ahead as well. It’s not waking up. (it hurts.) It’s not – it –

rememory
stirring-undone

being-wholeness

input-GIGO-output

darkness-light

flight

I let go. Push it away, and back, and far to the edges of jaysome. I think I almost don’t manage it, but I’m not sure because it’s the biggest binding I’ve ever done! I’m sweating and I have a headache, which is pretty new and my head doesn’t want to stop aching.

“... that is very big,” the zephyr says in a voice so small I almost don’t hear it.

“Uh-huh! There are lots of kinds of big, and some bigs even a Jay doesn’t want to be. Being small is better since it’s hard to big like a storm and not hurt and have people scared of you!”

“Thank you,” the breeze says, and goes off to be a breeze and nothing like a storm at all!

I head back to the hotel and hope Honcho can help with my headache.

Playing, With Fire

Being a magician is about carrying responsibilities as though they were not burdens. A magician protects the universe against threats from the vast wild spaces Outside. One result of that is that few magicians have ever left the universe for one reason or another; even fewer have returned. But sometimes there are no choices that can be made easily. Perhaps part of being a magician is that no one makes your choices for you, but it has been a long time since I believed that.

I park the borrowed car beside a closed service station. The car could barely run, and gives up the last of its strength in a satisfied rattle. Better this than to sit and rust to nothing. I could have repaired it more, but had neither the time nor energy to spare. Sometimes being a magician is just about choices. But that is life as well, magician or not. All we can sometimes do is make choices for those who can’t make it for themselves; given them a nudge, a touch, a push. The magic helps others; being a magician helps the universe.

This does not. I almost expect resistance. The universe to bend itself against me, the fae to show and demand I do not do this thing. That nothing stirs is a relief as much as anything else. I have enough to bear without that, and the door opens to the service station as I push it and walk inside. Service stations tend to be frequented by any magician who lives near them, often to make sure barriers don’t break down between the universe and the Outside.

I walk to the centre of the room, the door closed. I draw up wards from the place. Of travel and aloneness, of decay and fear, and turn them into a barrier to keep others out. That much energy I spare. The rest has gone into clothing, pockets, items I carry and have woven into me. the magic in me is almost smothered under the weight of the wards and places we’re carrying. It is afraid, and so am I.

I draw symbols I learned in a bookstore a decade ago. Reggie let me read anything I wished to in the store. Anything included books that took me weeks to even begin to understand. But knowledge is important if one is the wandering magician of an era, and I learned all I could. I speak words human tongues aren’t meant to utter, draw symbols that are barely that at all. The world shudders, presses down against me, resists my invocation: I bring my will to bear against it, avoid the attention of Entities meant to guard against such journeys.

There is no door, no hole. A feeling like bungee jumping without a cord, and moments later I am Outside the universe.

No reference points. Nothing, none. I see/hear/feel only by an effort to translate the unknown into the known. What was once clothing gleams, wards burning in the air and nothing else holds me together. Not-winds buffet me, but I move with them. Everything out here survives the chaos by moving with it. I find balance, let it go. Bounce. Twist. Flow. Shift. I have put magic from cities and towns and places for over two weeks into the items about my person. I begin letting them go. Shaping the power.

My body isn’t a body here; it is the only reason I am surviving this.

I brought as much power here as I could carry. As much as I could dare without also being a doorway back into the universe. It won’t be enough. Can’t be enough. I turn the magic into a seeking, a finding, a knowing I send out across distances so vast the term has no meaning. I am formless in the living void, but still a magician, still the magic and I feel the seeking twist. Caught. Bound by power I did not seek.

There is ground under my feet. I have flesh again. Blood, and bones as the wild of Outside is shaped into a solid place for a moment. It is the most beautiful place I will ever see, because I know the Walker of the Far Reaches who has made it.

“Moshe.”

“Nathen.” I’m not certain he has ever spoken my name before. And never in this tone. “What the fuck do you think you are doing?” he demands, and his power drives me almost to my knees.

I have bound him before, once without even knowing what he was. The Far Reaches are the only solid places Outside the universe, the Walkers who serve them the closest thing the Outside has to magicians. In the universe, I am perhaps more than Moshe; here the roles are reversed but even so I stand. I have bound him before, and that gives me an edge even now.

“Finding Jay’s mother.”

“What?” And sounds so shocked it would be funny anywhere else. Perhaps.

“Jay doesn’t have dreams. I am pretty certain his progenitor is a key to why and I’d like him to be able to have them.”

“Dreams. You make a hole in the universe yourself, you risk –.”

“Nothing.”

Moshe pauses. Stares at me, through me. He smiles. It’s not Jay’s smile. Nothing else is that, but it’s warm, and grudgingly impressed. “You’ve left a way back for you that nothing else can use. I should have guessed, but I never thought you’d be this – this – foolish. Even you know better than to play with fire like this, magician.”

“Sometimes being burned is worth the cost.”

“Not in this.” And for the first time Moshe almost drops his perfect, impossible beauty before he recalls himself. “What made Jay is far beyond me. I could not face her; you more certainly would not survive even an approach to such a Power.”

I blink. I’d suspected for a long time that Jay’s progenitor was one of the Far Realms in some fashion; this seemed to mean she was something else entirely. “I’d like to give him this much, if I can.”

“I don’t see how.” Moshe returns the seeking I’d made back to me almost gently. “Return, magician. This place is not for your kind.”

“Can you do it?”

“I will not.”

“We could make a deal.”

“No. My destruction is not worth you nor anything you could offer,” Moshe says flatly, and pushes.

I could resist. I could even try and bind Moshe. Instead I fall back, using the last of the magics I had stored in tattoos upon my skin to bind the way back into the universe closed. I land on concrete, my ears ringing. I can taste blood in my mouth and every bone in my body aches. I sit up slowly, hiss and realized the middle of my chest were Moshe had pushed me contains a small burn. A statement, a reminder? I have no idea.

I stand, letting go of the wards I made here and walk outside to find a ride back into town.

The universe bends itself toward the needs of magicians. Most of the time. it takes almost five hours before anyone stops. I wonder if the universe is making a statement, but I have no idea and I’m too tired to ask. The man who lets me into the cab of his truck asks what the hell I was doing out here.

“Playing with fire,” I respond, and he says nothing after the truth in those words. I close my eyes and fall asleep moments later, and my dreams make no sense to me at all.

On Spirit Animals

I don’t pray. Not as a rule, it’s just something I don’t do.

Every prayer I ever had was beaten out of by my father’s hands, my mother’s indifference. I’ve been told that we have to save ourselves, when I bring it up, but it doesn’t work like that. We save each other: and not a single prayer to any god makes one bit of difference in that. No god is ever going to save you: they’re too busy passing around the popcorn and gloating in our tears. Want to know why there is suffering in the world? I figure it’s because it’s what give them their power.

Otherwise, if any god was real, they’d do things now, not just in dusty books that mean less than nothing. Sorry. I’m just trying to explain, so that it makes sense. There have been worse parents than mine. Ones who were never home, or ones kids prayed – having nothing else to hope for – that they’d never be home. I’ll just say my day was a mean son of a bitch even before he got a beer in him and mom was on so many drugs to deal with everything that she did nothing at all. She was about as empty as you could get and still walk around calling yourself human. I bet the pharmacist got a crap ton of pens for all the drugs he put her on.

I was on a few, because of school. ‘Problem child’ as if that didn’t mean problem parents. Mom took some of mine, or dad did to sell them. I never found out who, but I was shaking, strung out. Uncle Tony had killed himself. He wasn’t a good uncle, I think, but he wasn’t bad either. In my books then that made him almost a saint. He didn’t drink, but the doctors said there was something in his brain. Parasite that made him just walk out into traffic one day and not stop, something like that out of a bad horror film.

And I was seeing things. People talk about spirit animals, but it’s more spirit forms. What’s important to people, what resonates with them. For dad it was beer, for mom the pills. I had a cockroach. I knew that because cockroaches are afraid of people and I never saw it. Never saw anything that could help me. Sometimes, when I saw them, the spirit animals warned me just before dad would swing a fist. I learned to read them as well as him. Wasn’t even sure they were real.

Honestly, I’m still not. No one had a wolf I ever saw, or a crow. TV characters, family members: whatever someones drug is, that was their spirit animal. Could have been me just projecting, or whatever the term is. The bad day wasn’t bad, not worse than any other. Maybe that’s what it was. Words I didn’t escape, a bruise to hide at school. Sometimes all you try to do is escape when you know you can’t and it eats at you. Like animals gnawing off their feet in traps.

I felt like that. I didn’t pray. To this day, I’ll swear I didn’t, but there was a kid in my room. Between one moment and the next. He was eleven. I remember that. I think if I ever get Alzheimer’s like a blessing, I’ll still remember him being eleven.

“Hi. I’m Jay,” he said, and he grinned. No one ever grinned at me like that. Not my mom when I was born, not any lover I’ve ever had. No one has, before or since. It hurt like nothing else too.

I might have screamed, because he had one hand on my mouth, worried. For me. He was worried for him, not of anything else. I knew that too.

“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said. “But you were sad-face and I thought I could maybe help?”

“My spirit animal is a cockroach and it hurts.” Of everything I could have said, could have asked, could have wondered, somehow that fell out of my mouth. These days, even on bad days like nothing I imagined as a kid, I’ll remember that moment and have to laugh.

The boy took it in stride as if it made all the sense in the world. “That’s not very jaysome,” he said, and – I can’t tell you what that means. I mean, it’s a word, but it meant – it helped, is all I’m saying. Somehow the word helped.

He offered to be my totem, entirely serious, and boasted he would probably be the best spirit animal ever. I said yes, trying to cover for my stupid statement, still thinking it so stupid but dad heard things, came in.

Demanded to know what another kid was doing in my room, said he wasn’t going to be having – well, no need to repeat. I try to forget it. The kid turned, stared up my father. And dad fell back. Fell away, looking scared. Whatever jaysome was to me, it had other edges I never got to see.

He left. Dad left. I’d like to say he never hit me again, or that he changed, but I’d be lying. The kid looked back at me and let out a huge sigh. “I’d like to do a helping, but then you’d be changed and you wouldn’t be you and that would be really wrong.”

And he meant it, as he meant everything else I said. So I’ve tried to be me ever since that day, even if it hurts. I haven’t seen the kid again. I left home as soon as I could, two years later. I don’t talk to my parents anymore, though sometimes I don’t think I ever did. I don’t pray. Never do. But now, some days, I think I understand a little better the people who do.

Huh? No, I haven’t seen any kind of spirit animal in years. I figure it was just the withdrawal and some of the drugs making me loopy, that’s all. It happens. I got better. I think the kid maybe helped with that too, but I’ll never know. It’s probably better that way. Definitely safer. Because whatever Jay was, safe wasn’t part of it at all.

Secret Lies

Everything magic buys is paid for. I know this, better than most other magicians. Some day the magic in a magician becomes prose rather than poetry, and soon after they die, and pay after that for a long, long time. Paying back the universe the gifts that were given to them one deed at a time. But some bills come due far too early, and I am considering food in the kitchen of a house that let Charlie, Jay and I stay in it when I feel a shift in energies. The house is scared, and it was empty and let us stay in it, but no longer.

I sigh. Charlie has a god inside her, and they both have a temper. One Jay sometimes presses without knowing, for all that he’s from far Outside the universe he is also a boy of eleven and his innocence is a terrifying armour against the reality of his own power. Most of the time.

The living room isn’t quiet. The TV is on, to C-SPAN, the screen blurring as facts move at speeds faster than they should, flickering to Fox, then to news channels in a stuttering blur. There are channels I block Jay from seeing in every place we visit, websites I bind with magic so he can’t visit them. But he is young, and curious in his wondering, and the bindings he can make and unmake go far beyond what magicians can do. It was only a matter of time before he decided to undo mine. And watch the news.

He turns his head toward me from the couch. His face is even paler than normal, and those so-ordinary eyes are dark and cold, his body rigid. He doesn’t move otherwise, doesn’t get off the couch. Jay is eleven. He was never eleven at all. “Honcho,” he says, his name for me from back when he first came into the universe and had a lisp, “I am watching the newth.”

And the lisp hasn’t been in his voice in a long time. Not unless he’s pressed beyond bearing, scared or terrified both.

“I noticed.”

He gestures, impossibly fast for anything human, the remote punching through the TV screen and out the back to impact with the wall. Jay is tough and quick, and he can make and break and shift bindings on levels so deep I’m not sure even the universe is aware of most of them. “There have been four mass shootings this week,” he begins in a calm, serene tone, and begins listing political issues, sociological issues, economic ones, one after another like bullets fired from a gun.

“I know,” I say.

He jerks his head up at my gentleness, eyes bright and fierce, fists clenching tight. “You know and you let it happen?” he demands.

“You know magic is only a small part of being a magican. There are balances –.”

“Shut up.” I do; Jay looks as shocked as I am for a moment, and then he is standing. Pacing, fury radiating from every line in his body. “I know you have limits, Honcho. I know Charlie does too. I don’t,” he says, with a terrible certainty that contains nothing human at all. “I could fix this, and you hid it from me.” His voice isn’t a magicians, to bind and force truth, but there is a terrible emptiness, a crushing purpose behind the words.

If I was anyone else, the words would have forced me back out the door. Sometimes, so rarely I half-forget he can, Jay stops hiding from himself, has some awareness of what he is capable of.

“I did.”

“Why?” His voice is very soft, something breaking in the word.

“Because there are things you can’t do.”

“I can do anything,” he screams, and the world about us shudders under his will.

“Jay.” He just glares, panting heavily. “I know what you can do.”

“You don’t –,” he begins.

“Jayseltosche.” Jay jerks at his full name, eyes wide and shocked almost back to himself. “I am the wandering magician. I have cost you dearly, restored what was lost at a deeper cost. I have broken the skin of the universe and knit it, slept with a Walker of the Far Reaches and survived, become fae and let that power go. You do not get to tell me what I do and do not know.”

He opens his mouth, closes it. Stares.

“People are mean, and cruel, and ugly. This is a fact that no amount of huggings or jaysome or friendship will change. Not if they are to remain people.”

“Then maybe they shouldn’t!”

“Charlie gets angry often, yes?” He nods warily. “The anger is what drives her, in part. She wouldn’t be Charlie without it, Jay. People wouldn’t be people without their darkness. We aren’t whole unless we have our shadows, and sometimes they aren’t dark at all. People are angry, and foolish, and often cause for despair, but one must love them anyway.” I’m trying to recall words I read once, paradoxical commandments for a time such as this, but they fall apart under the furious hurt in his face.

“I do, only people are mean and I can fix that, Honcho.”

“I know. But they wouldn’t be people.”

“And maybe that would be better!”

The word hang in the air, half-threat and almost promise. He can do that. Change everyone in the world in a moment. Make humanity something – not more, not less, but wholly different.

“I can’t argue against that,” I say softly. “We live in a fucked up world, Jay. But the only way to make it better is small, slow steps. We are getting better. Some days it doesn’t feel like that, and there is a lot of hurt and pain in the world – but birth is hard, and change is even harder. No one wants enlightenment, Jay. It is neither sought not welcomed, but it comes. In shifting beliefs, in altered systems, spasms toward the future that end up with at least one step forward in the end.”

Jay doesn’t move. I can’t eat his expression for the first time since I’ve known him. I don’t think even Jay knew he could hide what he was feeling from showing on his face. Maybe even he doesn’t know, not in this.

“People are jaysome, kiddo,” I say, and he flinches visibly as if struck. “Maybe not as jaysome as you, or for as long a time as you’d like. I help the world, the world pays me back for it. You help people, Jay. And they pay you back in kindness, and it takes courage to be kind, a type many people might never find in themselves if they don’t make friends with you, if they never meet you. It can’t be forever, but nothing is that.

“Everything I do will be forgotten, Jay, no matter that I am Honcho, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. That the sun will burn out some day is what keeps it shining. Thay jaysome exists is enough to shift the world in small, small steps toward something better. People have to change themselves or the binding isn’t as real.”

“But ... but – it hurts,” he cries out, and slams into me, trembling violently into the hug I offer.

“I know. Charlie and I didn’t want you to hurt like this, not if we could avoid it.” I hug him as tightly as I can. “And you can’t be Jay, not the Jay you have to be, and truly remember this.”

He sniffs. Looks up. The knowledge in his eyes hurts so, so much. “Honcho? Has this happened before?”

“No.” I am very good at this lie, so good he doesn’t question it.

He reaches inside, binding his own memories from himself. Forgetting, because the fact that we can forget is sometimes all we know of bliss. It’s not perfect. It’s as far from perfect as anything I know, but Jay can’t – he can’t be Jay, not as he is now, and not be compelled to fix things, no matter how much he would break in the process.

“Sleep,” I say, and he does so without a word. I put him into a bed, call Charlie and tell her to pick up a TV. I don’t say why. She knows by the tone in my voice.

Everything is paid for, but sometimes – sometimes some prices are so high that all you can do is pay and pay again and know nothing will balance the books in the end. I go outside. I am a power in the world. There is so much I hold back from doing, and some days it is so, so hard to do so. I don’t have Jay’s innocent arrogance as armour. I have nothing at all beyond a bitter understanding of how hard change is and how much the world fights against the future to cling to ugly pasts.

Such a messed up world. But setting that to right would only cause a bigger mess. I believe that. I have to, or everything I am has been for nothing at all.

Charlie brings me a latte, and we just drink, and say nothing, the pain Jay buried from himself in our eyes. Neither of us say a word, but we each hide it in our own way before we go back inside. There is a TV to fix, and Jay to wake up, and new adventures to have. And a world to help in steps so small that only the ripples will ever be felt, like faint breath on the back of the neck. I have to hope it helps. That what we do is enough of a push toward a better world. But deep inside I wish I had the courage to let Jay loose the depths of his power upon the entire world.

But I am not that brave. And I am not jaysome at all.

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.

Smothering

There are things magicians don’t involve themselves in, for all sorts of very good reasons. Magic is a poem responding to the world, wishes and desires calling, answers being answered – and the dead have needs that magicians know to leave well enough alone. You learn not to see ghosts quickly, or at the least to ward yourself against their desires – and a ghost is nothing but desire, a selfish scream against the ending of their own life. And often their desires are ugly things twisted by death.

Dying concentrates the mind wonderfully. Someone famous said that: they never said in what directions, or to what ends.

But there are exceptions, bendings to every rule I have. I wouldn’t be a magician if I didn’t get around rules even I impose on myself. I’m ambling down a street while Dana is doing fae things – mostly the fae version of a census of monsters they put glamours on, though it’s generally more violent – and I’m letting the magic out in soft whispers. Fixing tires, easing strain between family members in buildings I pass. Helping in small ways to make suburbia become what it always tries to be.

The house in question doesn’t have a white picket fence. It does have siding that was spray-painted black and a disused hearse in the driveway whose hood is covered in a red and silver glitter sign announcing it is the home of Mama Fortune, Soothsayer and Truthspeaker. There aren’t many psychics in the world: almost all of them learn, very quickly, to hide themselves. I have made some able to actually speak with the dead in moments of pique before; this time I’m just walking by when the needs of the building reach out, whispering and begging.

Everything has a voice, if you know how to listen for it. I slow, then stop and turn to face the house, staring into the present and the past in the same moment, letting the feel of its future wash over me. Séances. At least one a day to call up the dead; almost none work, since ‘Mama Fortune’ is only good at cold reading people, but sometimes her need to make money off a mark and their desire to speak to the dead is strong enough to half-open ways into the Grey Lands, to pull ghosts through for a moment. Ghosts who speak words none of them hear.

Ghost after ghost, at least one a weak, slowly drowning the voice of the house under their weight like rivers flowing over a bank back into the ocean. There are ways to kill the voice of a place, sometimes for very good reasons, but to smother it under madness, to drown it slowly entirely unknowing: that is something else altogether. I reach out, making a ward from power lines and children’s playsets, things grounded in the normal world, and walk across the lawn to the wall, running a hand over the siding.

Mama Fortune is inside with a customer; an old man who is too deep in grief to want a way out of it. I ignore them, pressing my fingers to the side of the house, drawing its voice up, pulling echoes of ghost voices out, undoing their smothering with an act of will that leaves me trembling a little – magic works best on things of the universe, and the Grey Lands are harder to reach than the normal world I grew up in – but I am not without resources. I whisper the name of a ghost I know, and the ghost who is a ghost-eater reaches out from the Grey Lands and pulls the voices away between one moment and the next.

I whisper a mental thanks to Dyer for his aid, consider the house and what Mama Fortune is doing. And then I smile softly, and weave magic into the house. Giving it strength to exert its own will, power enough to haunt Mama Fortune and drive her from it if the house so desires. To smother her in the lies she lives, if she pushes the house that far. I weave wards and protections into the making and then walk away, whistling softly to myself.

masking

He wore a mask. Jay didn’t see it that way as he wandered the aisles of the WalMart, hunting down some new accessory for his tablet. He hides his true nature as a creature from Outside the universe easier than I hide being a magician, but it is not always enough to avoid attention. He is small and pale and tugs on the hand of one of the staff, asking about a micro sync cable.

It comes out as ‘micro thync,” thanks to his lisp, but he’s sucking on his right thumb as he asks and people explain his lisp away as that, not thinking further about it. Not defining him by it. The staff member crouches down, smiling and asking what model Jay wants. He recites it, and they file it away as precious kid, perhaps eight. Maybe seven. Lead him to the aisle he wants and help him get the item. He gives them a huge hug in reply and bounds down the aisles to me, informing me that he found it firmly and dragging me toward the check-out lanes.

The staff member grins over Jay’s head and I return it and ruffle his hair as we walk. He’s far less ashamed than he used to be about thumb-sucking in stress; I caused the habit to emerge by drawing on his future potential to save a town, damaging him inside and out like the lisp is another echo of. He’s turning it into a weapon, using it to make people forget about him. Because a ten year old who lisps travelling with a magician is someone who can be noticed and Jay hates that so much he’s made masks to hide behind.

And he doesn’t even notice it at all, as innocents seldom do. I wonder how much of even that is a mask now, but keep the thoughts to myself as I pay for the cable and wonder idly what other masks he might someday use and how much of Jay is entirely a mask to cover how scared he is of his own potential.

He ceases sucking his thumb the moment we leave the shop with a huge sigh of relief and opens up the package, plugging the cord into the spare battery for his phone. “I can use it with my tablet now,” he says proudly.

“And that is worth that entire performance?” I say dryly.

He blinks, thinks about it, nods. “Yup!”

“There is a creature from Outside the universe hiding in the mens washrooms at the food court; how is this cable supposed to help us deal with it again?”

Jay grins. “I can put it up on youtube and make lotth of money!”

I cuff him alongside the head and he just sticks his tongue out and hurries ahead of me, tablet in his hands. I count to ten in my head and follow in silence.

Waitings and Mornings

The first story was done as a writing prompt, the rest of it finished this morning.

Waitings

Around midnight, I creep to the window and peek through the blinds. He’s still outside, sitting in the park on the swingset. I go downstairs, where Dad is still passed out in the living room in front of the TV, sneak around beer cans into the kitchen, make two peanut butter sandwiches. Because everyone likes those. Dad doesn’t stir. I cross the street and head into the park, feeling both scared and silly at the same time.

I saw a ghost once, after Grandma died. I asked Dad about the weird person at the funeral, and he’d said it looked like Grandpa who had been dead for years and years. So I’m expecting a ghost but not a kid. Maybe ten, pale with pale eyes, just sitting on the swing and sucking his right thumb as he rocks back and forth.

“Hello?” I say, because he doesn’t look like any little kid I know, and I’m almost thirteen. He doesn’t have a single grass stain on his jeans or dirt under his fingernails.

His eyes widen. “You can thee me?” he says around his thumb.

“You’re sitting right there, so yes.” It feels like a very grown-up thing to say. “I’m Iola.”

“Jay,” he says, and pops his thumb out of his mouth. “You’re human, yeth?”

“Yes,” I say, though it seems a little silly. “You’re not?”

“Nope,” he says proudly.

“That’s why you lisp?”

“Yeth.” He glares, as if daring me to comment further.

I sit on the other swing, not sure what else to do. “Are you going to eat me?”

He just stares. I hand him one of the sandwiches and he wolfs it down in two bites, then the second without a hint of shame.

“Are you waiting for someone?”

“My mathter went thomewhere thidewayth from here, where I can’t follow. And people can thee me now,” he says, soft and furious.

“People will come asking questions if you just sit here.”

“Oh.” He shoves his thumb back into his mouth and sucks on it again. “I don’t care!”

“My little brother went to stay with mom. When she left,” I say, and somehow it hurts less because there is no judgement in his face. “You can sleep in his room, if you want? Dad won’t notice.”

“Oh. You’d make a binding even if I don’t know you at all?”

“Maybe?”

He pops his thumb back out of his mouth and offers up a huge, goofy grin. “Thankth!”

“Your welcome?” He follows me home, giving, giving Dad a wary look and relaxing when nothing happens. No questions, no comments on the beer cans or Dad’s stained shirt. He comes up the stairs into Connor’s room and then hugs me.

I’m not eaten. He pulls back, says thanks again and curls up on the bed, dead asleep in moments. I think about my friends, and the neighbours, what they say and what they think as I go into my room.

I’m crying and I don’t know why.

Mornings

Dad is still in the couch – his couch, now – when I wake up. My alarm didn’t wake him, or the birds. Jay was awake in Connor’s room, poking at a cell phone and followed me into the kitchen in silence. I know what floorboards in our house don’t creek: he doesn’t, but they still don’t creak under his feet and the kid accepts peanut butter and jam sandwiches with a grin of thanks. He eats three by the time I’m half-done one and cleans up the dishes after without being asked, like no little brother in all the world.

I’m starting to think he really is not human. I’m almost done my sandwich when he’s in the living room and on the couch so fast I’d swear he vanished through the wall. He has his right thumb shoved into his mouth and is sucking on it, making him look so much younger than ten as he flicks cartoons on. I stand frozen in the doorway as Dad wakes, turns his head.

Dad’s fist moves. That’s the worst part: everything slows down, except me: I can’t move any faster as Dad’s fist impacts with the side of Jay’s head and sends the kid out of the couch and across the room into the wall, hard enough to crack it.

“Dad?” I almost don’t realize it’s my voice as he stands.

“Who is that?” he says, and his voice is deep-drink deep and ugly. I try to speak; words don’t come. I’ve never seen Dad like this, like the father’s in every movie ever made, all twisted up and dark like wicked step-mothers in stories. Like that. I’m thinking that because it’s easier than thinking about this, and Dad is in front of me. His hand is raised, open, calloused.

I can’t move. I don’t believe he’d hit me enough to move.

“No.” Jay’s voice is calm, and his hand is holding Dad’s arm. No pressure, just fingers pressed against it. There is no bruise on the boy’s face at all but no smile either. “Her Dad would never hurt her,” he says firmly.

Dad turns, and raises his left knee – his bad one, from the accident – and drives it right into Jay’s nose. Jay stumbles back but doesn’t fall at all, just offers a grin of small teeth and a nose that isn’t even scratched.

“I’m tough,” Jay says, “and that body ithn’t and I’m ten and he knowth that so you can’t hit me again.”

Dad goes still. “I can do anything I want to,” he says, and it’s not Dad’s voice at all. It’s too deep, and ugly, and his eyes are like dead mud from edge to edge like bad movie CGI. I make distance, but it doesn’t stop me from letting out a gasp.

“It’th okay, Iola,” Jay says. He’s beside me, so fast I didn’t see him move, his hands wrapped about my right hand and squeezing gently. “It will be okay,” he says, staring up at me, and I just nod because – because it’s look at him or what Dad is, and I can’t do it yet.

Jay turns and stares up at Dad for me. “What are you, inthide him?”

“I do not know the word ‘inthide’,” the Dad-thing says.

“I’m athking,” Jay snaps. “I could make you tell me and you don’t want that.”

“You think to scare me, little thing from Outside who sucks his thumb like a baby?”

Jay snickers at that. “I thcare me, tho I thould thcare you as well. And anyway, it meant you didn’t actually look at me, and I did it last night tho Iola wouldn’t think it was odd for me to do. My mathter took my hiding with him, when he went away. You can thee me, if you want to.”

And Dad stumbles back toward the couch as if struck, face the colour of off-milk with eyes wide and dark. I’ve never heard Dad whimper in fear, not once. Not ever. He wasn’t even scared when Mom left, just – stood, got a drink. Said nothing, let me read her note. All of it.

“Humans get sad,” the Dad-thing says, and Dad’s body trembles like jello. “And sadness is a way inside, to drown them in themselves. To give us a host to play games in, to do things they would never dare to do. Because it is safer to be sad, because they don’t know what they would do if they were angry, because they don’t know how to voice the longings in their hearts and haven’t for long and long.”

Jay snorts, the sound weirdly adult. “No one knowth how to do that, except maybe a magithan. But he doethn’t want to be you, tho you can get out and go away. Or I can make you go, and I don’t think you’d want me to become what I’d have to in order to do that?”

The Dad-thing smiles a strange smile, and then sits down on the couch and Dad’s eyes are just his, confused and small.

“Nap,” Jay says, and Dad just – closes his eyes and goes to sleep as Jay rubs his throat. “You have water? That really hurt and I can’t make thleep work at all.”

I go into the kitchen, get water. He follows, drinks, says nothing.

“Adults shouldn’t have eyes like that.” It slips out.

“All adults do, I think?” Jay gulps back water. “They just hide it.”

“You knew what happened to Dad.” He looks over, nods. No grin. “He would have....”

“He would have done thingth he didn’t know about,” the boy says firmly. “You can take all the canth to a recycle plathe while he hath a nap?”

“So the lisp wasn’t part of you tricking me at all?”

He rolls his eyes at that. “No.”

“And you’re stuck waiting for this master of yours?”

Jay nods, says nothing else. I don’t think his being scared last night was an act. I’m not sure all the thumb stuff was either, but I just thank him, hug him, and he takes a sandwich and a few bags of cans I give him to recycle. I wait until the door closes, and a few minutes after that before I shake Dad awake.

He looks at me with normal eyes. I say, “Dad?”

He says, “Iola?”

He doesn’t ask about the beer cans. We don’t talk about what happened. I don’t think we ever will.

I’m happy I met Jay, and I’ll be happier if I never have to meet him again and I can’t begin to imagine what that kind of life must be like. So I go into the kitchen, make coffee, and Dad goes upstairs, showers, changes. Drinks coffee and goes outside to mow the lawn.

I watch him from the window and I’m crying again but this time I know why.

Breakfasting

A sequel the past post, done as a prompt from the Monkey, though this version does have more lines to it.

I knew it would be an ugly morning when the smell of scotch was stronger than the smell of coffee. I stagger out into the kitchen, last night a jumble of drinks and pain. My nose is broken, my head hurts and the coffee is Starbucks, appearing on the table between moments. It's never good to find I paid for a free coffee somehow and don't know why.

Jay is sitting at the table, all small and pale, his eyes filled with waiting. There is no sign of Charlie, but the motel room door rings like a broken bell when I pause to listen with more than ears.

"What happened?"

"Charlie thlammed the door and left," he says, fighting the lisp in his voice and failing. It's hard for things from Outside to enter the universe, harder to remain and form bodies for themselves. He was too newly formed to do it, the damage to his Self reflected in his voice. Anyone who knows what he is would just have to hear him speak and know how weak he is.

He is quiet a few seconds after, thinking words over. "The old woman came and talked to Charlie, who growled, and I arrived and the magic-lady went away."

"Went away?"

"Vanithed," he mumbles.

"I knew Mary-Lee was following me. She is old, and I thought to confront her in the bar with witnesses to prevent her from doing things. She did something to my drink instead and you and Charlie were left to face the oldest magician in the world."

He shrugs; he bound himself to my service. I could tell him to do anything and he would at least try, which is a terrible power to have over anything.

I reach, and there is a plate of scrambled eggs and a fork in front of him a moment later. He stares at it, then back at me questioningly.

"She could have destroyed you, Jay. That's payment for the food." He begins eating without further prompting and a huge grin.

"Is Mary Lee human?" He shakes his head; his sense of Other is stronger than mine could ever be. I don't point out she was human, or that magic seems to have altered her more than even I expected. I just summon more food and wait to see if Charlie returns.

I leave my nose broken. It won't last and Jay doesn't understand guilt at all, so I head to the bathroom to use the shower and force the rest of the scotch from my system. Sobered, I am left to wonder if I am different than any other magician. Today says no.

Jay finishes off a last plate of scrambled eggs when I come back out of the bathroom, clean and shaved, six plates stacked up neatly beside him. "Charlie wanted me to tell you a thing after you had a bath?" I nod and he frowns, then recites: "'I thought you were better than that."

So did I, I don't say, because he wouldn't understand. The smell of scotch is gone and my nose is no longer broken but there is a sour taste in the back of my mouth that no coffee is going to wash away any time soon.

Tracks

Note: This piece is (as of now) the earliest chronological piece in the magician series, the writing of it inspired by Eric Boyd's prompt. There are very good reasons the magician doesn't bring up his past often.


Sometimes people do things you can never pay them back for. I knew Ryan hated me. He told me often enough, his fists found my face often enough as well. That's what hate felt like: being beaten down to the ground, hearing him scream insults at me that I didn't yet know. I was twelve. Google searches told me what he meant, and why. The worst part was knowing he was right. That's how it felt then. The worst part by far was knowing his words had hit as surely as his fists.

It was months before I finally I talked to my mother. She just smiled a strange sadness and said she'd always known. It had taken all I had not to scream at her. If you knew, why didn't you tell me? rang through my head. I grit my teeth so hard my jaw ached for days.

When I turned thirteen I became a magician. Not all at once, not sudden-like. I think there had been small things before then, little echoes no one noticed. The echoes became sounds: things happened for me, luck twisted in directions I bent it. It was an ugly summer, driven half mad by a mirror-borne spirit I later bound with pure desperation. And school came after that.

He was waiting, but I was no longer the kid he'd beaten up. He stepped forward and swung. I let the first blow hit, and drew him inside. Memories, loathing. All of it. I knew we were the same, then, in some ways, and I was somehow a mirror-spirit to him. Less hidden, more visible. Others had been making jokes about me as well. He knew all the jokes, was terrified of them turning on him as well. And he knew I knew; I was not magician enough to hide what I'd done.

He swung again, and again, wild and terrified, and I let each blow slide past me in cold judgement. There was a circle around us when he finally came to a stop, a teacher shoving students aside behind me. I turned, and said in a voice that could not be ignored: "We were just talking."

And we were, in ways that did not need words. The teacher fell back before the truth. People scattered from my gaze, for reasons wholly new. I turned to Ryan and smiled then, and I'm sure it looked as ugly as it felt when I whispered: "Was that good for you too?"

The colour drained from him in that moment. I didn't ask about a date. Nothing that cruel. Nothing that kind. I just turned and walked away, leaving him knowing I could speak the truth about him,  and they would all believe me.

I was almost sixteen when he killed himself. I had said nothing, no one had known. And he was free of his prison. I never saw his ghost: I'd learned quickly to not see ghosts, and I made a point of not looking at all for his. He died, and his prison fell away. They said his suicide note mentioned me, but they said a lot of things I didn't pay attention to.

He taught me about prisons, and that being a magician was not what changed me, nor who I was before. I left town a week later before it became a prison all its own and I will never be able to pay him back for teaching me that lesson.