Mine Magic, Mundane

Everyone has their own magic words.

You write your first in crayon, in the pages of a rainy-day coloring book, or on the back of the kid’s menu, or if your parents are particularly unlucky, the living room wall. You grin in wonder and delight as this made-up word inexplicably shutters the blinds, or changes the television channel, or spins a tornado in your chocolate milk, or turns your teeth green.

“Never speak your magic.”

It’s one of the first things you are told, rule Number One. Magic is silent. It is written, not spoken. The moment you vocalize it, even in whisper, the power is gone. The word is just a word once more.

“Never waste your magic.”

In gradeschool you get your first notebook, your very own spellbook. It probably has a unicorn on the cover, or maybe a spaceship, or a kitten in a basket of yarn, or a poorly rendered superhero. Inside, each page becomes dedicated to a single word, the same meaningless (to everyone else) word scrawled over and over, each time it is used. But no word lasts forever. Each time you write it, the magic dulls, fading like the ink in your sparkly purple gel pen as you scribble it again and again and again and again.

“Never share your magic.”

If someone else writes your word, it belongs to them. It will never again work for you. At night you keep your notebook hidden away in the bottom of your sock drawer, or beneath the unslept side of the mattress, or in a plastic bag, floating in the toilet tank. It’s there right now isn’t it? Isn’t it?

By college, your notebook doesn’t have a unicorn on it anymore, probably. It is now full of a quarter-lifetime of magic words, the best ones transferred from one to another. Many of the words have remained the same, but you have not. You have long since shed the once inviolable wonder of the grinning child who first turned their teeth green. You have, by now, learned the terrible and inescapable truth:

Magic won’t allow you to fly higher than you can jump. Magic isn’t capable of saving the world. Magic won’t make you invisible, or invulnerable, or immortal. Magic can only ever accomplish that which could just as easily be accomplished without it.

Everyone has their own magic words. I did too, until I sold mine.

It’s Tuesday, so I’m on the B-Train home from midtown. Sitting beside me this evening is Jessica (Jess to the folks back home in Ipswych), who I notice is wearing (whether in irony or oversight) two different holiday socks: Christmas on the left, and Halloween on the right. Jessica is not the woman’s name. I don’t know her name, but calling her Jessica makes it more difficult to loathe her and her mildly hideous baby, who has been screaming, sans breath, since Gifford St. Station.

I press my forehead against the cold, rain-fogged window. The rattling of wheels on tracks, and brain in skull, seems to help stifle the sound, but only just.

Jessica, for her part…in desperation, takes out a small, notebook and pen from her patchy, sequined purse. With one hand, she flips the pages of the notebook, pinned to her knee (the other bouncing baby still), and desperately scribbles a word, unseen between the pages.

Silence.

Baby’s mouth is still open in a primal, aching scream, but no sound escapes. Jessica’s pale, freckled cheeks flush as she returns the notebook to roost. I can feel it in the air. The very same passengers who scorned her for allowing her child to scream like that now silently hold her in judgement for ending it. Good mothers don’t magic their children. Jessica doesn’t meet a single eye as she and baby get off alone at Knightsford Ave.

I am just about to rest by own bag on Jessica’s empty seat, when it is taken, quite suddenly by the man who had been standing previously beside it.

“Afternoon.” He says.

I ignore him, meeting his eyes only briefly in reflection.

There isn’t anything remarkable about the man, except for the smell…like scorched air, just before a lightning strike. The telltale reek of too much magic.

“Excuse me ma’am…miss.” He tries again.

Again, I don’t answer. Instead, almost by impulse, I slip my hand inside the broken zippered mouth of my bag. Within, my fingers find the familiar, little black notebook, unadorned, but worn at all edges. It’s the same one I’ve had since Freshman year, a gift from Nan before she died that November.

I haven’t had need of the particular word I’m thinking of in years, the one on page 89…or was it 98? But if this man touches me, he will regret it terribly for days, if not weeks. The bruise won’t fade for a year. Part of me almost hopes he gives me cause…

But then he pulls out the business card.

It isn’t uncommon, not in a recession. Spellbrokers buy, sell, and trade notebooks full of magic words on the grey market, often in hopes of finding that elusive spell of consequence that some young, broke, or desperate nobody has inadvertently created. “Real magic,” some call it.

The man gives his pitch. I have nowhere to go, so I listen, or half-listen.

The other half is thinking of rent, due on the 28th because it’s February…of the looming debt of my student loans, deferred no longer…of the wireless headphones that have been languishing in my online shopping cart for months…of Mom’s credit card statement.

“So, are you interested?” He asks.

It isn’t the first time I’ve been approached. If you ride the Blue Line enough, you certainly will too, but my response this time surprises even me.

“How much?” I ask.

It’s a seven-minute walk home from the station, ten if it’s raining, and it’s raining. For the first while, I duck and dodge beneath awnings and ledges, but by Rawlings Street, my heart isn’t in it. Once you’re wet, you’re wet. Still, I walk with purpose, eyes ever scanning the corners and alleyways. You don’t just skip around with $20,000 cash in your backpack…not in this neighborhood.

No lights on in the apartment when I arrive, and the door is locked. My roommate must have picked up that extra shift after all. My hand lightly brushes the envelope of cash as I grab for my pen (I don’t carry a key). The cash is roughly the same weight that my little black notebook was, but my bag still feels lighter…emptier. I tell myself yet again that the appraisal couldn’t have been better, that I made exactly the right choice, that $20,000 is more than fair for a book full of useless tricks, half of which haven’t worked in years.

I pull my pen out and click it.

Today is Tuesday. I don’t need the notebook to remember the word I use to unlock my door on Tuesdays.

Growing up, Tuesdays were the days Nan would watch us after school when my mom had to work her other job at the candle shop, before she was fired for too many approved refunds. Unlike perhaps every other grandmother on earth, Nan was a terrible cook…godawful even. But there was one thing that Nan could make decent, and it’s the one thing she baked every single Tuesday, just for me.

Snickerdoodle

I write the word, in connective, cursive letters on the palm of my hand…but I don’t hear the usual click at the door. I turn the knob. Still locked.

“Shit.”

Has the spellbroker already tried it out? Scribbled all my words down in his own little notebook, making them his? It doesn’t matter. The word isn’t mine anymore. I feel the emptiness of the word, the hollowness. I try to remember Nan’s face, not from photographs, from life…from memory. It shifts away from me in shadow, grainy and undefined.

Instead I find the business card, bent and folded at the bottom of my bag. I wasn’t sure why I kept it at the time, and didn’t read it then, but I do now.

Andersen, Anderson and Associates

29462 E. Harringbone Rd.

By Appointment Only

I knock on what I assume to be the front door, just beneath the hand-written sign: NO REFUNDS. No one answers, but unlike my apartment, it’s unlocked.

The smell is overpowering. The air is so thick with magical burn off, that it chokes all the moisture from the air, salting the breath in my throat as follow the only light down the back stairs. I lick my rough, crystalizing lips and taste static. I reach the last step and open the only door waiting for me there.

There are dozens of them, men and women, suits and pantsuits, sitting in rows at rows and rows of tables. Each is flipping through the notebook in front of them, reading the nonsense words aloud in monotone staccatos, like monks of the absurd. The magic expels into the air with each syllable, the words now worthless as each is spoken in turn, like bullets fired straight up in the air…

Raphenackch

Glemthume

Fubjibbit

Kavooku

Abstholom

Blissium

When they’re done, they toss the notebook into a bin full of notebooks. No, not a bin, a trash can. There is in incinerator in the back. The air is smoke, and noise, and magic.

I’m home again. The rain stopped a while ago, but my face isn’t dry, and my eyes are red and raw. I stare at the lock and sigh in steam, my breath curling upwards until it dissipates near the second-floor window, my own. There are still no lights on in the apartment, which means my roommate is working overtime again. The steps are still wet and cold from the rain, but I sit down anyways, tearing open the shrink wrap of the brand-new notebook as I do.

I think of something Nan said to me once, back before she forgot my name, about magic. I think I asked her why I never saw her doing any magic herself. She didn’t really answer the question, but I’ll never forget what she said, give or take a word or two:

“It might have been, in God’s great wisdom, the great equalizer…magic I mean. But the rich and powerful always find new ways to tip the scales back in their favor. They don’t want what’s ours Eleanor…just us without it.”

The fading black ink of my pen feeds the fibers of the white cover page as I spell out the letters of my name. I blow it dry. On the lines provided, I add my address, phone number, and for the hell of it, the promised reward if returned to me, unread and unspoiled:

$20,000

As the ink of the last zero dries, I turn to the second blank page of the notebook (the first never lays down flat the way you want it to) and crease it down. For a moment, my pen tip hovers above the first line, but I don’t touch it down, not yet.

I look up.

The rain-wrung night clouds have parted now to the far corners of the sky. The city is too near and too bright, which means I can’t see the stars more than pinpricks in the vast black. Maybe I am imagining them more than seeing them, but I know they’re there, deep and bright and safe and infinite, so far away that no matter what mankind might magic or conceive of, no one will ever reach them, not even close, not ever…

Always equally out of reach to all.