The Paper Magician

Fennel sat on his haunches and whined.

Crouching, Ceony pet the back of the dog’s neck. Where was the doctor? Why was Mg. Thane here, delivering this baby? Folders had no expertise in childbirth! Ceony finally noticed the wetness of Thane’s shirt—not from sweat, but from rain. It dripped from his hair. The storm—Mg. Thane must have been the only one close by, save for the midwife. A doctor wouldn’t be able to travel in this weather, not with rain gushing over the roads. Mg. Thane must have been the closest aid . . . and the midwife seemed to trust him.

The birthing woman gasped, and Ceony gaped as Mg. Thane pulled a tiny infant from between her legs, purple skinned and bloody. A boy, bald and writhing with deep blue eyes. The babe cried a healthy cry and kicked weakly at the umbilical cord that still connected him to his mother.

Mg. Thane laughed, cradling the babe in his arms as the midwife hurried over with scissors and a wet sponge. “It’s a boy, Mrs. Tork. It’s a boy. Congratulations.”

The woman, face streaked with tears and sweat, laughed and held out her arms. The midwife cut and tied the babe’s umbilical cord, then carefully laid the infant onto its mother’s breast.

Mg. Thane’s shoulders slumped, and he pressed his soiled hands onto the floor to hold himself upright. He looked tired and weathered, but he laughed, his eyes gleaming with happiness. Ceony marveled at him.

“Are these your achievements?” Ceony asked the deaf magician, who was nothing more than a replaying memory. “Your happy moments? Your good deeds?”

Ceony backed away from him and shook herself to the present—her present, at least—and pressed her palm to her own heart, feeling its quickened rhythm. She wanted to know—wanted to connect the little pieces that created the mosaic of the man she knew—but she had to focus on getting out. But where did the visions end?

Lightning flashed, and Ceony spied Lira’s silhouette outside the window. Fear like a cold lance pierced through her middle. Had Lira followed her through the graduation ceremony after all?

Forcing her rigid muscles to move, she and Fennel ran to the closest door. Ceony grabbed the worn brass handle and turned it hard.

She stumbled through, a tornado of charcoal and navy swirling through her vision. Fennel barked. Ceony tottered with the dizzying effect of the whirling colors, which darkened and settled onto a new vision of Thane in an office that did not match the study in his cottage on the outskirts of London. He sat at a desk with a stack of papers in his hand. He looked similar to the Emery Thane who had delivered a baby just moments before. Evening sun and the light from a single kerosene lamp highlighted his features.

“It’s finished,” he said with a sigh. Not to Ceony, of course, but to himself. Ceony had heard the paper magician mumble to himself before, usually behind the closed door of his office.

She spied over his shoulder to see A Reverse Perception of Paper Animation scrawled across the front sheet of paper. A book. Mg. Thane had written a book! And an absurdly thick one as well . . . She wondered why he hadn’t assigned her to read it yet.

“All of these are the same,” she said to him, though she knew the image of her teacher wouldn’t turn at her voice. “They’re all good things, good memories, happy times. I’m in the warmest part of your heart, aren’t I?”

Ceony’s mind shot back to her secondary school’s biology class taught under Mr. Cooper, the same class where she had dissected that poor frog. The homework assignment she had turned in on the eleventh of February surfaced in her mind as fresh as if she had completed it yesterday.

“Four chambers,” she whispered. Hadn’t the anatomy book said something similar? “The heart has four chambers. Could it be that I’m in your first?”

Mg. Thane stretched in his chair with his arms over his head, his back popping twice and his neck popping thrice. Standing, he hefted his manuscript and phased through her on his way to the door.

“Is that it?” Ceony shouted after him, pulling out another piece of paper and Folding a yellow fish. A fish had fewer Folds than a bird, and she completed it in half the time. Fennel pressed his paws against the side of the desk and sniffed at it. “Is that the answer? If I get to the end of your heart, will I find the way out?”