Alonso told them what they wanted to hear, with a kick in the ass.
You have already met the man you are destined to be with and you know who he is and why you’re not together.
Your children will be at their happiest near a lake, but they will resist this knowledge.
Your work will be celebrated after your death.
And then Alonso told them he had fulfilled his purpose, and that he would finally be allowed to move on. After solemn and tearful goodbyes, Charlie let her whole body go limp. She fell to the floor and pretended unconsciousness for a full minute—until she worried they were going to call an ambulance.
Even her mother’s most skeptical friend plied her with cookies and herbal tea after that.
She never had another “visitation.”
Sometimes her mom looked at her strangely, but Charlie tried not to notice. And Posey, jealous of the attention Charlie had gotten, started reading tarot cards and cultivating a thousand-yard stare.
While Charlie felt as though she had been left with only the least interesting parts of herself and lost the rest.
4
MORE COFFEE
Bright morning light flooded the kitchen. Lucipurrr was in the sink, paws balanced on a dirty plate, licking the leaky faucet.
Charlie poured coffee, noting the shine of Posey’s bloodshot eyes and the restless way her leg moved under the table. She was still in the pajamas she’d been wearing the night before, adding unicorn-shaped slippers, their fur a stained gray.
“Did you stay up all night?” Charlie asked, although the answer was obvious.
“I found a new channel to follow.” Posey’s tone suggested she expected Charlie to argue with her. On the message boards Posey frequented and in the videos she sought out, dangerous advice was passed around on quickening one’s shadow, the first step to becoming a gloamist.
Most of the mainstream articles written about shadow magic were about alterations—clickbait like Is Magic the New 1%? Hollywood Actress Starts New Shadow Trend. Rip Out Cravings for Junk Food at the Root. Most Useful Shadow Alterations for New Moms. Is Removing Desire the New Lobotomy? In those stories, gloamists were the providers. The dealers. The grocery stores of magic. The Old Saint Nicks of magic.
Celebrities had their shadows altered more frequently now that the trend had caught on, changing them like other people might change their haircuts, dressing up for the Met Ball with shadows in the shapes of dragons or swans or large hunting cats. They had their emotions triggered to better prepare for roles, or to be able to write more evocative songs.
And if a few people starved to death, or threw themselves off bridges, or had so much of themselves removed that they seemed to float through their days, that was a small price to pay. When shadows withered or burned up or failed to graft, the wealthy could always buy new ones.
But dig a little deeper into the morass of links and articles, past the gloss of general interest, and you got to theories about how people became gloamists. Legitimate sources weighed in with a measured manner. A scientist from the Helmholtz Research Centres was quoted in a now-viral interview in The New Yorker as saying “Shadows are like the shades of the dead in Homer, needing blood to quicken them.” But it seemed as though every wellness influencer and would-be wizard had a hunch to sell. YouTube and TikTok became crammed with bogus tutorials. How I Woke My Shadow with Pain, Shadow Quickening After Fistfight, Magic Ability Discovered After Drowning, Safe Asphyxiation Techniques with Plastic Bag—Guaranteed Results. And in the depths of 8kun, the ideas were much weirder and much worse.
Charlie could remember before, when actual magic had seemed impossible. And then the confusion when no one seemed to be sure what was real and what wasn’t. But Posey had gone from a childhood belief in magic into an adulthood where magic was real—just denied to her.
Charlie vividly recalled coming home to a bathtub half filled with melted ice and her sister sitting on the floor, wrapped in a towel, her lips blue with cold. “I should have stayed in longer,” Posey had told her, teeth chattering. Charlie begged her not to try anything like that again.
Instead, Posey had gotten a piece of fishing line to tie to a tongue piercing and begin the slow and painful-looking process of splitting her tongue. Apparently once you got used to using the muscles on both sides simultaneously, it trained your brain to a “bifurcated consciousness.” The second thing every gloamist needed, after a quickened shadow.
As far as Charlie could tell, all Posey got out of it was a slight lisp.
Charlie yawned and checked the messages on both her phones. On her real phone, there was an invitation to a barbecue from Laura, her closest friend from high school, who these days had three kids and not a lot of time. A plea to bartend at another friend’s backyard wedding. Spam from a shop with a sale on onyx charms.