I coasted through the city on the backs of breezes: a gust hissed out of a bus’s hydraulic lift. The sigh of a woman fixing her bangs in the dirty glass of a convenience store fridge. An old man’s cracked cough, expelled through the gap below a newspaper-covered window.
The city opened its doors to me, tapped out its secrets like cigarettes. It was a street-corner flock of lean and hungry men, work shirts and hard hands. Girls with their elbows set on chrome countertops, eating sugar packets grain by grain. A sticky-buttoned jukebox at the back of a shotgun bar, full of songs about an America that never existed. Powdery paperbacks sold from blankets spread across the sidewalk and mildew-scented Legion halls clicking with the sounds of a bingo cage. Hot wet rooms full of dancers with helpless faces and music amplified until it was fuzzy as peaches, sharp as grapefruit spoons.
Craving silence, I whistled to the water’s edge. I sped like a skater over its rippling top, hissing around the heads of night sailors and diving down to witness a conquest of zebra mussels, their slow invading sway.
Back to dry land, where I slid between the mouths of a couple on a bench, gaunt and pierced but folded into each other with the perfect courtliness of a Victorian cameo. The bench was at the edge of a graveyard, overgrown. If my soul had hands I’d have reached them out to skim the waving tops of butterfly weed and bellflower, blazing star and mountain mint and the dainty fireworks of golden alexanders.
Rising up from among the sounds of the city—bad brakes and sharp laughter, the furious yowling of unspayed cats—came the rhythm of a slowing heartbeat. My own. The kite string that tethered me to the body on my bedroom floor was calling me home. I took hold of it like a zip line, shinning over El tracks and headlights and the minnow dart of bicyclists.
The candles we’d lit were flickering wax coins and my room was gray as a mourning dove. Before the sun could rise and my tether could break I slipped back inside myself, braced for the magnetized click of body and soul.
It didn’t come. Maybe, I thought, that was part of the transformation. Maybe it was within the slipstream drag of spirit moving within form that magic could play.
Fee was back from her own journey. I could feel her beside me, hand warm in mine. But on the other side of me, Marion lay still. Her hand was corn-husk light and her pulse too slow. I tried to sit up, to check on her.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t move at all, beyond a twitch of my fingers.
Just the realization made my throat tighten. The tightness slid sideways into panic. Not because the spell had gone wrong. It was working as it was meant to: we had entered this state together. We would come out that way, too. Until Marion returned, Fee and I would stay just like this.
I’d thought I’d felt fear before but it was nothing to what I felt then, still as waking death and listening to her pulse tick down, down, down. Caught in endless suspension, not breathing enough but not dying of it either. Waiting, in agony. Waiting.
Then, with a glittering rush and the scent of woodfire, she was back.
My relief was so great and instant it swallowed the fear. And I almost—almost—forgot how it felt to lie captive to magic’s rules, waiting on Marion to release us.
We opened our eyes. And with them our eyes, the ones we hadn’t known we had. In the moment before joy came in, I shuddered. Because we’d gained something, but we’d lost something, too. It would take a long time for me to work out what that was.
We sat up, looking at each other, and started helplessly to laugh—Fee and I did. Marion, though, she cried. Still crying, she put her arms out and pulled us into a rare hug. Her mouth was in my hair but I think what she said was, Thank you.
* * *
When I looked back on that night I wondered whether that stretch of frozen abandonment was our first true glimpse of what magic would make of Marion. Later, when my head was filled with the odor of witching and my left hand bloodied on broken glass, it was one of the things I thought about. Our first neon sign that her hunger had a double edge.
It took time for the effects of our awakening to fade. For a handful of disorienting days, everyone we looked at wore a halo of colored light. Soft, mystical, unmistakably there, unmistakably magic. Fee was limned in fresh green like an elf princess. Marion’s aura was the color of brick dust. A lonesome, hard-road color. Fee told me mine was blue, that I looked gift-wrapped in sky.
Twice I tried taking the train and had to step right off, the car such a riot of overlapping colors I could almost hear it. By the end the feeling was like a high that went on too long. Even after it was gone I received occasional flashes of useful sight: the good-looking man smiling at me from across the train, his aura the color of dried blood. The girl dancing at the show, crackling with the contagious, brushfire shade of damage.