“It’s your basic magic wand exercise or situation, you know, from magic school? Where you have to figure out that there is no such thing as a magic wand, or rather that anything can be a magic wand, and so so so … there I was,” I make a sketchy, expansive looking gesture with my hands at the guy next to me on the bus I’m telling this to. “They wouldn’t stop coming, I didn’t know what to do, so I picked up the flat screen, just the first thing that came to my mind to grab, I just yanked it out of the wall and did my best to wave it around, yelling ‘Magic Magic Magic’ in my loudest, most confident voice.”
“It worked?” asks the guy.
“It worked,” I tell the guy. “I’m here, am I not?”
“As far as I can tell,” the guy says.
“But then the third or fourth time I waved it around the damn thing just flew out of my hands, right across the room, until it struck one of the walls and shattered, shards and bits everywhere, and because I had used this particular flat screen for magic, violating its own sense of self, silvery clots of Netflix just splattered all over the place, leaving holes where there shouldn’t have ever been holes.”
The guy makes the nodding gesture of the I’m reinforcing the newborn narrative spell, the one that transforms the past into something that makes sense. “And that display,” he says, as our seats on the bus begin to heat up. “Of such mighty magic, must have made them mad, so then you ran, and now you’re on a bus, looking over your shoulder like they’re still chasing you, speaking more ornately than a person like you should, using gestures, some of which have potency,” replies the guy next to me, yes, still the same one, with the beard and the hair and the glasses and a face you think you can trust, after you tell him your story, not exactly a magic user, more like a therapist who won’t keep his distance, touching your arm like he cares about you.
“So, instead of currency, permissions, or rights, those standard magical models, you still choose to think magic is a form of will: something everyone’s got, they just got to want it hard enough. Magic doesn’t work for you because you just don’t want what you want hard enough.”
“I believe in realism, straight up, sir,” I tell the guy. “As far as I’m concerned, this bus is plenty magical enough. I wanted really, really hard for it to show up, and behold, that’s just what it did.”
“But you’re not entirely sure you want me to pay attention to your story, which is why your gestures and vocal control in this situation are self-sabotaging at best.” The guy lightly taps each of his fingers against his thumb, like he’s trying to do something but isn’t sure yet what it’s going to be, then he runs those same grimy fingers through his beard.
“If we’re so willful, and magic is all around us, waiting to be told what to do, wouldn’t you think we ought to know how to magic up some money?” he branches. “That, and also make the money stick, not turn into monsters that chase after us unrelentingly.”
“That’s just the adulting spell they make you memorize after you graduate: ride the bus, lay off the magic,” I chant back at him. “Finish that degree. Go to work. Leave the flat screens on the wall. Let the monsters take care of themselves.”
Fuck his branches. Feel the wild magic. I suck on my thumb and smear the print on the window, undoing that spell before it can take effect. Let someone else’s seat catch fire, I’ll say it was an accident.
“Think of it more like unemployment,” he says, sensing my resistance, trying a new path through the conversation, reaching over me to open the window a crack. “You want to use it sparingly, only when you need it, because you know it’s going to run out. And then it won’t be around when you really need it.”
“I’m going to have to ask both of you to get off this bus if you’re going to keep talking about magic like that,” the bus driver lets us know, using her magic for emphasis because it’s part of the job, but not the part that lets her not have to drive a bus. A little cantrip, easy to let slide.
“Hmph,” the guy I’m talking to says. “Magic,” he whispers, and a little wasp climbs out of his hair, two or three of its legs tangling with its wings like there’s some sort of cleaning going on, and then it buzzes over to land on my hand, looking up at me with its two dots for eyes, and then right for my ear it goes, right down into my ear, while the guy just continues going on and on about how crappy his job is, how lazy his students are, how back in the old days they used to really engage with the ideas, the oh so important ideas, you never had to spoonfeed them back then, you didn’t have to hold down two or three extra jobs besides teaching …
In my mind I imagine this guy with a giant spoon teeming with ideas: magic, writhing wet mealworms, tipping them into the mouths of his students, like they were little baby birdlings. Like it hasn’t occurred to him that magic is just words and gestures, that if you say/do enough of them you can get what you want. Like he can’t read my thoughts already with his wasp in my ear.
“You do not have to be so literal,” he says amidst my visualizations, like a jaded older grad student would correct the all too eager first year person in seminar. “And you’re leaving out the corollary, that if you use the wrong number of words you won’t get what you want, you’ll get what you deserve. And besides all that, you really should have just used a chair for your spell instead of the flat screen; those things are expensive and admin will charge you if you wreck them.”
“That’s good to know. I’ll keep that in mind the next time monsters come after me.”
“Would you like my wasp to sting you?” the guy asks. “It opens doors.”
“I’m good,” I tell him in my steadiest voice, mindful I’ve got his wasp in my ear, trying not to get into any more magic than I already have.
“You look like you need it, bub, so I’m going to let you have the first one for free,” and I can hear the wasp whisper sorry before this red wave crashes through my skull and I’m back where I began, holding onto that heavy monitor blasting out sheets of you know what, and on the whiteboard in big black letters is scrawled choose your own adventure™ just fifty bucks a dose, only this time I’m walking away from it, the whole scenario, looking behind me just in case, at the version of myself waving the flat screen around from the first time this happened, and I’m going “Magic, Magic, Magic” in a sharp but soft-spoken way, just different enough from the last time so the monitor in my hands doesn’t fly away too and that jerk from the bus can’t reinforce all the wrong sorts of parameters.
Of course, because the spell still wants to circle me back to the original scenario, I’m still stuck with those vaguenesses, the same ones from the last time, plus all the ones I brought with me, the monstrous whatevers that won’t stop, narrative details begging for a voice so that their version of what was might reproduce all the more easily, like wasps in a person’s mind.
Instead of chasing me, the vaguenesses brush off the other me’s pitiful attempts at magic, they open their mouths real wide and set to, chowing down until there’s nothing of him left, they even lick the blood spray off the ceiling with their panther tongues. Then they go right ahead back to daubing all those holes, with broken monitor bits smoldering everywhere because that’s part of the spell, because now there are two monitors, and twice as many monsters, doubling being the backdoor of the spell, the fun part of the spell a person might say. The part without all those unnecessary words, you might say. The easy part of this narrative, okay?
One me, two monitors. One ruined, belonging to them. One in really good shape so far, belonging now to me. Shit tons of monsters not paying so much attention to me anymore. So not stealing, alright?
I ask the vaguenesses if it’s okay if I just sit there watching them work, and one of them resolves just enough to grin with way way way too many sideways teeth, like the money you asked for, like the money that’s already spent on what you owe. It says, “It’s easier for us to do our jobs if you’re not watching us.”
Then it spreads four or six of its arms, making two or three parallel sketchy, expansive looking gestures just like the one I made on the bus. “Or some of us could devour you,” it says. “If you’re still willing to stand still on that spot.” It’s one of those magic rules: deals and shoes. Grains of rice. Nests of wasps. Pick your spots and take your shots. Never poke around. Never look too long.
I take off, using just a tiny bit of magic, to briefly undo the parameters, to let me go, lugging the unbroken monitor, practicing my pawnbroker spiel, wondering how much I might get. No sir I’ve never once used it for magic, it’s just a nice monitor hardly used at all. Look at how many ports it has, you don’t see ports like those on monitors these days, why I bet you could use this monitor for just about anything you might want to watch, why yes it’s magic ready, it says so on the label right here, oh no that’s not magic leaking out of the power cord, like I said I’ve never once used it, hoping the monitor stays real long enough for me to sell it, as I sit at this here bus stop, waiting for that there bus, the one I have to take because I don’t have a car, and I don’t have enough money to afford the kind of magic that’s going to take a person places, or to keep what’s following them far enough away that they get the goddamned hint. But I can use a tiny, tiny grain of magic anyway, just like the last time, to get the bus on over here just a little bit faster.
I get back on the bus, and at the next stop who else but that guy with the glasses, the beard, and a face you definitely shouldn’t trust gets on, and he sits next to me like I’ve been saving a seat just for him.
“Well?” he says. “What do you think?”
“Thinking is every bit as bad as magic,” I tell him, trying not to get stung again and have my credit dinged by this asshole, because the next trip will definitely not be for free. “I try to do as little of it as I can get away with.”
“That makes you a lucky person,” he says, trying his best to resemble someone who will not get thrown off the bus for being too full of magic. “You’re not part of a franchise who has to go around with a mind filled up with wasps,” he says, like he knows what everyone knows about what the job market has always been like.
“But look,” he says, like a few more student loans wouldn’t be that big a deal. “You used 2,094 magic words telling this story, a number you have to change every single time you revise and retell it to me (I’m counting eighteen, mas o menos), and now you have this lovely magic ready solid-state monitor on your lap to do with whatever you like, minus the cost of the wasp of course. It can be a win-win for both of us. I know you’re good with gestures and words. Wouldn’t you like to go back into the narrative and grab a couple more?”
Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s fiction can be found in X-R-A-Y, Roi Fainéant, ergot, Western Humanities Review, and Denver Quarterly, as well as several times previously in Heavy Feather Review. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic/Black Lawrence Press. He lives in Barcelona, where he’s the fiction editor of Mercurius. More: https://linktr.ee/hughsteinberg.
Image: Dušan Tizić, unsplash.com
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