“Joan,” Mama whimpers from underneath his body, “please. Just GO.”
And her fear, her careful, cautioning pleading, that’s what does me in.
I get a running start before Jed knows what’s coming. I throw myself into him, tackle him, wrestle him to the ground. I’m small but I’m fast. I get a few licks into his side, at his ears, before he tosses me off him and rolls over to recover.
“Mama, run!”
But she starts pulling me toward her. “Jed, don’t you touch her, leave her be, she’s got nothing to do with this, you hear, she’s just scared. Joan—” She lunges to grab both my arms—
“You want this?” I wrestle away from her as Jed curses and starts clambering to his knees. I won’t believe it. Mama is my hero. Mama is my salvation. Mama is my sun.
“Get back inside. He’ll kill us both.”
I don’t move. “How long has he been using you like this?”
She doesn’t answer. But her face says everything. “Better me than you,” she whispers to herself, her voice breaking. “Thank God for my protection spells.”
All words are silenced, stay dammed in my throat. Images flood my mind from the past, of Mama in our washroom, of her slicing a pocketknife into her thumb for a spell she wouldn’t explain, rubbing her blood over my lips and eyelids, her whispers I could barely hear: Not to be seen by him, not to be touched, when he looks at her, he sees me, and all at once the memories crystallize, take on new meaning. I’m so livid I can’t move—it’s like the anger has me hostage, or under a spell—
But then I realize I can end this abuse and her pain with one desperate, powerful trick.
Slow, fearful realization settles over Mama’s features, and I can tell she knows, that all the times she’s told me that magic is dangerous, poisonous, that it takes as much as it gives—her words have fallen on deaf ears. ’Cause as Jed is shaking off pieces of high grass behind us, coming over to give me hell’s reckoning, she reaches for me—
“NO, JOAN, DON’T!”
But I wrangle away from Mama, conjure this new, untamed magic force inside me, picture the dark, awing, invincible something running through my veins turning into pure lightning, command the lightning to burst out of my frame like a storm of hell, and I mutter, “Destroy—”
I see it too late, of course, in that split second where I throw a pitch of pure magic force, that Jed already knows what’s coming too. He beats me to it, sends his own swath of wrath and sorcery toward me to swallow me and my amateur trick—
But not before Mama leaps in between us.
Long ago there was an arrogant sorcerer, a child of a sorcerer, a black hole of a sorcerer—
The wind stops, the sounds of the clearing are gone, the texture of the night is flattened into one never-ending moment, as Mama is suspended, perfect, floating in between us—
And then she turns brittle, like she’s made of glass. She bursts, shatters into pieces, falls to the ground like scattered dust. A magic wind swirls her away into nothing, and then she’s gone.
I hear a long, low, primal cry before I realize that I’m the one wailing. “Oh my God, no, oh my God, no I—wait, no no NO . . .”
Jed collapses on the ground beside me. But he doesn’t say a word.
“No . . . no, we need to undo it,” I sputter. “Jed, bring her back. Jed, you need to undo it.” He doesn’t answer, stares straight into the grass. “Take it back, you hear me?” The world is a melting blur of sounds and colors, my tears drowning all time and space. “We need to take it back.”
Jed sighs into his hands. I don’t know if he’s crying. I don’t care. I hate him, I hate him so much I want to break him. I want him to break me. “PLEASE, Jed!”
He doesn’t move for a long time. Finally he looks at me with pink, watery eyes, more sober than I’ve seen him look in a long time. He whispers, a hollow sound of defeat and regret, “All the magic in the world can’t undo it.”
*
Jed’s whisper sends my eyes flying open, my hands instinctively reaching around my knapsack-turned-pillow, like I’m trying to claw my way back out of the past.
And then I’m curled on a coil-riddled cot in the warehouse, the bruised sky of early dawn sneaking into its windows, face-to-face with a lightly snoring Grace.
I sit up, stare at the sad sea of sleeping bodies around me, attempt to shake off the remnants of the dream—my sputtering pulse, the few tears that trail around my ears.
All the magic in the world can’t undo it.
If I keep thinking about what magic helped me to do, how it beat through my veins and told me I was strong enough, how it convinced me, enabled me, to go and destroy everything—
I’ll want to banish my magic again and cage it back inside a bottle.