Tiny Magic

When Jocelyn learned that magic was real, she was disappointed by the smallness of it. Her aunt was able to close cabinets without getting up or keep a mug of tea warm for hours, but there was no hidden stash of broomsticks or cauldrons. She had expected ancient, rotting books filled with potions that called for horse hearts and frog hairs. She had expected a secret room with a spiral staircase and a talking crow. But, according to her aunt, crows didn’t talk. That would be ridiculous. 
Her aunt’s magic had never been a secret, at least not an official one. The recommendation was to exercise common sense and to avoid scaring people. But this was just advice. There was no formal code of conduct. Jocelyn’s aunt found that as no one was looking for magic, no one ever saw it, and so she never had an issue unlocking doors by snapping her fingers or pulling a large umbrella out of a small handbag whenever convenient.
Along with the announcement of Aunt Ivy’s magic came the news that Jocelyn had the gift too. This, as was obvious from the look on Ivy’s face, was supposed to be ground-shaking, life-changing information, and so Jocelyn followed up her astonishment with feigned incredulity.
“That’s impossible!” she gasped.
But truthfully, she didn’t feel too surprised. She had spent years waiting for something to happen and had been expecting the winds of fate to blow her way eventually. If there was magic, and magic had its chosen few, it seemed perfectly reasonable that she would be among them.
Aunt Ivy showed Jocelyn one bit of magic after another. But more striking than the magic itself was Ivy’s enthusiasm for it. It was clear that she had been looking forward to this day for years - that she had spent hours imagining how the afternoon would unfold and how Jocelyn would react to her planned demonstration.
It was awful to be the less excited of a pair, and doubly so if the other’s excitement depended on your own. Of course, Jocelyn was excited, and the magic had come as a nice surprise. She hadn’t thought that the afternoon was going to unwind this way, and she was glad that it had, but Jocelyn had been holding her breath, waiting for the first reveal to give way to some greater revelation. Hours later, when Ivy was melting and refreezing ice, Jocelyn realized that this was the extent of it. There was no grand finale coming.
All of Ivy’s magic seemed to live in this domestic space. She could start a bath while still in the bedroom or turn on the radio from the bathtub. She could turn her ringlets into soft waves but had never managed to get her hair completely straight. She could clean her house in a fraction of the time but still often found herself putting off the chore.
When Jocelyn got home after this first day, she went to look for her mother. Her mother was a painter, although not in the same way her father was a lawyer. Other people agreed that her father was a lawyer, and they gave him money and an office to prove it. Iris was a painter because she said so and because it was what she did with nearly all of her time.
Jocelyn was in love with watching her mother paint. There was something meditative about seeing Iris mix colors and wash her brushes. She loved the music of the murky, swirling water, the brushes tapping against the side of the glass, and the knife scraping against the palette. Iris too seemed held in a trance, humming aimless melodies and rolling her neck, her shoulders, and her wrists periodically, for hours and hours as the sun slowly moved across the room and then disappeared altogether.
Iris was a beautiful painter. Jocelyn had been frustrated by her own attempts to paint because she could never paint the world as it was, let alone improve upon it the way her mother could. Iris’s work didn’t strive to show off her technical mastery. Her technical mastery was a given. Her work was emotional and compelling, even when it was mundane. Jocelyn preferred seeing the world through her mother’s eyes than through her own. She’d rather look at the painting of the view from the kitchen than look out the window.
That afternoon Iris’s easel was set up by a large pine tree in the corner of their yard crammed with holly and rhododendron that her mother had dubbed the winter garden.
“Aunt Ivy showed me her magic today.”
“Did she?” Iris asked without looking up. “Isn’t it incredible?”
“Yes.” Jocelyn waited for her mother to say something else, but she didn’t. “And she said I can do it too.”
“Of course, you can, sweetie. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I?”
“I don’t think so,” Jocelyn tried to remember, feeling confused. “I’m talking about real magic.”
“You’ve always done real magic.” Iris tilted her head and squinted, inspecting her canvas.  
“Have I?” Jocelyn asked, knowing that trying to have a conversation with her mother while she was painting was usually pointless. Iris was quiet for a moment.
“Sure. Whenever you lose something, it always turns up in your closet. Haven’t you noticed?”
She was right. While her brother might tear the house apart looking for a missing mitten or book, Jocelyn never had to look for anything for more than a minute or two, and it always showed up in the same place.
“Oh, I hadn’t realized that was magic. I just thought I was organized.”
Iris dipped her brush in a cloudy glass of water and took the second as an opportunity to give Jocelyn a quick smile before mixing a new shade of deep green.
The following week, Jocelyn spent every afternoon at Ivy’s house, listening to her aunt’s stories. She had discovered her magic very young, and it had delighted her whole family. As children, Iris and Ivy had spent hours playing with her magic and looking for its bounds. The magic, even when it wasn’t the activity itself, created an atmosphere that the girls loved. Anything they did, they did with a heightened sense of mischief and spontaneity. And after they aged out of the childhood pastimes of hiding in plain sight and rearranging found objects and debris into ramshackle playthings, the magic still kept them interested in each other. Ivy spent hours trying to grow new flowers or talk to ladybugs, and Iris spent hours sketching her. Jocelyn was impressed that the magic had brought them closer. She imagined that if she were in her mother’s place, Ivy’s specialness would have pushed her away.
But then again, after only a few days of practicing magic herself, Jocelyn had come to feel that it wasn’t that special after all. It was at its best when in service of something else, making things happen faster or easier.
“It’s a little pointless, isn’t it,” she had said, wilting onto the sofa after exhausting a list she had made of magic she wanted to try.
“Not at all,” said Ivy, “It’s useful, and it’s beautiful.” She rubbed her fingertips together and then stretched them out to reveal a rain cloud hovering above her palm. She held her hand up to the window, casting rainbows around the living room. 
“Can you teach me to control the real weather?”
“No,” Ivy said, closing her hand and wiping it dry on a blanket flung over the back of a chair. “I’ll teach you everything I know,” she said. “But it doesn’t get much bigger than this,” she pointed to her six-foot-tall lemon tree, which grew out of a teapot. The tree could be counted on year-round for perfectly ripe lemons and was probably the thing Ivy loved most. 
“Doesn’t anyone do big magic?” Jocelyn asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Jocelyn considered the questions. “Does anyone read minds or time travel?”
Ivy leaned her head back and closed her eyes as she skimmed through the catalog of her memory. Then, after a long minute, her eyes popped open and a smile broke across her lips.
“I remember hearing about a man who had figured out how to fly,” she said, leaving the room. 
“Really?” Jocelyn jumped off the couch to follow her.
“I can ask around,” Ivy said. She was kneeling in front of a bookshelf in her office, pulling notebooks off the shelves, cracking them open, and then tossing them aside. “Would that make you happy?”
“Yes! Thank you!”
Ivy opened a notebook filled with names and addresses.
“Okay, then. I’ll let you know when I find something.”
When Jocelyn got home, her mother was in her attic studio. Nine months a year, Iris painted outside, but in the cold months, she worked inside, painting from her memory or her imagination. The people and places she invented always felt real, the faces conjured so vividly that guests to their house would assume they belonged to a beloved cousin or a childhood friend.
To look at Iris's paintings was to wrap yourself up in her imagination. It was easy to assume the paintings were mirrors and could only stir up your own preexisting longings or heartaches. That the emotions you felt were yours and had merely been called to the surface by Iris's work. But Jocelyn had decided this wasn't true. The paintings weren't mirrors at all. Iris had painstakingly crafted the images, deliberately deciding on each shade and figure. The way you felt when you looked at them was by design.
Jocelyn loved to watch this construction happen, but it was impossible to find the exact moment a painting came to life. Every afternoon when she came home from Ivy's house, Jocelyn sat next to her mother and watched her work, hoping to clear her mind with the sights, smells, and sounds of the studio. Iris, however, insisted on asking about every aspect of Jocelyn's magic.
Iris had an endless imagination and suggested Jocelyn try things that she would never have thought to try herself. Iris asked her to turn a bouquet of red roses pink and then black. Iris was thrilled by the idea that Jocelyn might learn to fly, but she was also thrilled by the sparks Jocelyn had learned to create by snapping her fingers and the way she could empty a cup of water, drop by drop.
It took a while, but Aunt Ivy managed to track down the flying man. Over the holiday, she had gotten in touch with an old school friend, and the subject of Jocelyn’s magic had come up. The friend, who couldn’t do any magic of her own but had always been interested in those who could, not only knew the man Ivy was referring to but knew that he lived less than twenty minutes away from her.
The friend, who lived alone, suggested that she could host Jocelyn for a couple of nights, especially if Jocelyn were willing to do some repairs around the house - nothing that would take more than a few hours for any young person, magic or otherwise. Jocelyn, of course, was ecstatic and agreed to go immediately.
The train ride was long, and so she left home while it was still, practically speaking, yesterday, in order to arrive in his city just after dinnertime. His address was written on a piece of paper that, as soon as it was torn loose from a notebook, spent the rest of its day balled up in her fist, where it seemed to age years in just a few hours, fading from white to beige, the crisp lines of ink bleeding until the small holes in the number eight were filled.
On the train, she practiced her magic, wanting to keep it sharp for later. She dried the socks of a man who had stepped in a puddle and returned a stuffed toy to a sleeping baby and his clueless parents. She warmed their train cars slightly, which she assumed would be appreciated by everyone until she noticed the man with the socks tugging on the collar of his shirt and rolling up his sleeves.
She enjoyed these small acts because she enjoyed the ends. There was a pleasure in taking care of others, of course, but there was nothing inherently magical about a warm train car or dry socks. She thought that this was the critical detail. She wanted to fly because she wanted to use magic to do something that was impossible without it.
When she finally reached the city, it was dark. She had known it would be, as it was the time of year when daylight is the exception, not the rule. The city, however, seemed oblivious to the fact that it was nighttime and was full of rushing people, beautifully dressed women, and open businesses. Jocelyn hadn’t considered this. She had planned to spend the night at her aunt’s friend’s house and then visit the man the following day, but as she walked past one crowded bar after another, she changed her mind and decided to go directly to his address.
She felt at home as soon as he opened the door. The walls of his house were smothered, from floor to ceiling, with images and written descriptions of countless mythical and magical creatures. The pieces were hung with varying degrees of care. The precious things were mounted and framed, while others had been slapped up hastily with nails and tacks. Corners had sprung loose and begun to wilt, frames collected dust, and newspaper clippings were badly faded.
“I’m a collector,” he said in response to her staring.
“I love it,” she smiled, realizing that he might consider her inspection of the walls rude, especially given the circumstance.
Unsurprisingly, he still did not invite her in, so she started over, this time from the beginning. When she finally explained why she had come, he seemed equal parts mortified and overjoyed. He pushed back against Jocelyn’s claims of his genius and ingenuity but not so hard as to dispute them altogether. More than happy to chat, he invited her in for a cup of tea and some stale cookies. She followed him eagerly.
The house, which had looked tiny, perhaps even like a one-room worker’s cottage from the outside, opened up generously when they left the foyer. The main room, in fact, proved to be quite grand with beams, arched leaded glass windows, and a fireplace where an impressive fire was kept alive by a single log. On the hearth there was a large cauldron, and next to it, a small round table held a crystal ball. Hundreds of ancient books, the kind she had hoped to find stashed away in her aunt’s house, filled the room. The bookshelves that lined the back wall were stacked two rows deep, and there were dozens of piles scattered on the floor, on the mantel, and on the table in front of her. Carefully, she opened one of the books and flipped through the pages. They looked new and were blank.
“As I said, I’m a collector. I’ve been buying props from productions of Macbeth for over a decade. I also buy from street magicians who went bankrupt or eventually stopped doing certain tricks. I practically have a buyer’s monopoly in the area,” he said proudly. “Or maybe I’m just paying for things that would be thrown out otherwise.”
“Oh,” Jocelyn let the cover fall shut.
When he had discovered his magic, he assumed that it was only a matter of time before he was initiated into a secret society of living myths and legends. Ultimately, however, after decades of research, he had accepted that no such society existed. But he never accepted that there were any limitations to his magic. That is how he decided to learn to fly.
Jocelyn listened to him, thrilled that somebody else felt the way she did. He promised to show her how he flew, but first he wanted to explain how he had taught himself. She was grateful that he was giving her so much of his time and didn’t want to seem impolite, but she was anxious for him to get to it. So anxious that she had become overly aware of herself. She listened to him intently, trying to demonstrate just how interested she was. She was afraid to ask a question or even to shift in her seat, sensing that any interruption in his stream of consciousness might suck the energy out of the room, and he’d have to build up his excitement and willingness all over again. Finally, he stood up and kicked off his shoes.
"Are you ready to see?"
"Yes!" she exclaimed. It was so long since she had last spoken that the sound of her voice, as it caught in her dry throat, surprised her.
He walked to the entrance to the room and began rubbing his hands together. He shifted from side to side and bent over to touch his toes.
"Watch closely. Usually, I can only do this once a day."
Jocelyn stopped breathing. She stopped blinking. She watched.
The man closed his eyes and cocked his wrists so that his hands were parallel to the floor. His face turned red, and his muscled tensed. Then, finally, he rose, an inch off the ground, maybe less, and moved in the air towards the wall of windows ahead of him. He moved slowly, slower than walking, and Jocelyn got down on her knees to watch the tiny space between his feet and the floor.
Just after reaching the fireplace, the room's midpoint, he came down. He landed hunched over, practically choking on his breath but grinning nonetheless. Jocelyn applauded.
“Ta-da," he said, collapsing onto all fours before rolling onto his back.
She looked away. It was uncomfortable to see anyone, let alone a stranger, this exhausted. Even though she was a guest in his home, he seemed vulnerable, laying on the floor, red-faced, trying to catch his breath. She felt embarrassed that she had turned up to his house unannounced and asked that he show her this incredible thing. Why had she expected so much more from him with so much less effort?
"So?" he asked after a minute or two of silence. "What did you think?"
"Amazing," she said, and it was. She had just seen a man fly. Although, if she was in his place, she might not have chosen the word fly. Glide, perhaps, or hover, would more accurately describe it, she thought. But regardless, she had asked him to fly, and he had flown. Shouldn't that be enough?
The next afternoon, after a morning of improving her host's water pressure, painting her trim, and hemming some curtains, Jocelyn returned to the man's house. The pinch of desperation from yesterday had gone, but she enjoyed being in his home and loved his company. He was a cheerful person in a way she found delightful. He had spent years learning how to fly, and even though he had originally hoped for more dramatic results, he was pleased with himself. He talked her through the many ways he went about the endeavor. He had notebooks logging his efforts, and he gave her the best advice he could, although admitted it would probably come down to practice for her as it had for him.
But mostly, they talked about stories, which were his true obsession. He was in love with the magic that had lived in man’s imagination for centuries. He wanted to compile a list of every superstition, rumored sighting, and invented beast he had discovered. Someone, he argued, should write a comprehensive history, and by now, he thought that he was the person most qualified to do so.
As she left that evening, she promised to keep in touch. He asked that she let him know if she learned about anyone else doing big magic, and she promised she would.
The next day, when Jocelyn got home, her mother was beaming. She wanted to know all about the trip, the man, and the flying, but first, she had to show Jocelyn a painting she had done, in a whirlwind, while Jocelyn was gone. The rare paintings that happened like this, from conception to completion in a matter of hours, were always special. It made Jocelyn nervous to know she was about to see something incredible - the kind of nerves she felt at a concert, in the seconds between the hush of the audience and the start of the music.
She followed Iris up to her studio, where the painting was waiting on the easel. It was of their garden, just after dusk. But this garden, unlike the one Iris tended diligently, was situated at a vantage point where the rooftops and third story windows of their small town were visible, pocketed in a grove of trees. The lake, dozens of miles away from their town, had also been dragged closer to their home, reflecting the light from the town's buildings and the hazy early night sky.
Jocelyn stared, awestruck. Her mother was brilliant. The painting was calm, ambitious, and contemplative. It made Jocelyn feel small and yet as though she contained within herself hundreds of miles and infinite time. She had seen these rooftops for years. She had known these flowerbeds and this lake all her life, but she had never thought to force them all onto the same hillside, to force them under the same night sky. In the distance, so small it would be easy to miss, a swing hung from an oak tree. The tree, Jocelyn knew, had been there when her parents moved into their house years ago but had been lost in a storm before she was born. There was a girl on the swing, looking away from the viewer, towards the town and the lake. Jocelyn knew the girl was probably her, that most of the girls in her mother's paintings were her. And yet, she envied her. She longed to be that girl and take in the view from that swing, but, of course, none of it was real.

***

RL Morris is a New York based writer and singer. Her short fiction focuses on periods of transition and twists of fate. When she's not writing or singing with her band, she's hanging out with her 8-year-old dog.