Six
Yvette
“Tell me about magic.”
We’re on my back porch sipping coffee, the most tranquil place I have ever lived. It faces the Great Smoky Mountains, which called to me for years. Not the Rockies, or the Cascades, or Sierra Nevada. The Smokies . They yanked me from Texas the moment I had enough saved up to make the move. I left my best friend, my dad , the only “home” I ever knew. I left my mother’s resting place. I left all my trauma, too.
“You actually cast spells and stuff?” Ward continues his line of questioning. He doesn’t judge anything I say, even though I know how new all of this is to him. He just takes it in and lets it be what it is.
In some ways, we’re not all that different.
“I cast spells. There are many different ways,” I tell him. “The main thing about spellcasting is to set your intention. To know what you want , in clear terms, precisely, exactly. To be pure of mind and heart when you do. Never base it on fear.”
“Pure of mind and heart…so you can’t cast a spell to like, hurt anyone?”
“Do you think that I would?”
“I really don’t.”
I take a long sip of my coffee. “No. Hurting people, selfishness, power-hunger, it’s all in the domain of black magic.”
“So, you’re a good witch.” He flashes me a smirk.
“Good at heart. Not very good at…not setting fires.” I grimace.
“True story,” he confirms, nodding. I brace for a lecture to be tacked on to that, or for the questioning to now go down that path, but he sidesteps. He’s really into the magic. Or he’s really into me. Or we’re just sex drunk from last night and wish to stay far, far away from potential conflict.
“You can’t make people fall in love?” Ward asks next. “That seems like a noble intention.”
“No. No one can. Not truly.”
I watch as he does that thinking dance with his eyeballs. They touch everything, the clouds, the trees, the dirt, the coffee. Then finally when he’s ready, he looks keenly at me. “You can’t…bring people back?”
“Of course not.”
“Ah.” He brings the coffee to his lips, lingering there as if communing with it.
“Who would you want to bring back, Ward?”
“My entire family,” he says to the coffee. “My parents, my older brother and our little sister.”
“Oh my god, Ward.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Car accident?”
“Yeah.”
“Where were you?” I ask.
“I was there, I was the only one who…” He stops right there. “I made a covenant, never get too attached, never get married, definitely never have kids. Never love something so much it will hurt too much to lose it.”
There it is. The source. The weight he carries. The reason he’s the first to run into my house to face who-knows-what kind of catastrophe. It’s never that bad. But it could be, and he wouldn’t do a damn thing different.
“I respect that, Ward,” I tell him, and he finally looks up from the coffee he’s been having an exclusive religious experience with for the last ten minutes. “Your covenant,” I explain. “It’s yours to hold on to, as long as you want.”
“But?” he raises an eyebrow.
“You are intuitive.” I half smile.
“Well, let’s hear it.”
“But don’t kill yourself just because you think you have nothing to lose, or you think no one else has nothing to lose because you haven’t made any official attachments.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Oh, no?” I tilt my head at him in challenge. “You have a bit of a reputation amongst the firefighters. When they’re over here, they talk. You’re the first to run in, the first one willing to self-sacrifice. Not just here. But that you always have such, such…” I dig around for the words but can’t quite catch a grip on them right away.
“Such what?” he presses, more curious than combative.
“Utter disregard for your personal safety.”
“You could say that.”
I hear my phone ringing from inside the house, but we trade a look that says, let it ring . The second it stops ringing, Ward’s phone starts going off.
“Okay maybe we should see what that is,” Ward says, smartly. He hands over his coffee and rushes inside to answer it. A beat later, he’s outside again, his cell phone in hand. “That was Penn, Hearth’s going into labor.”
“Oh, how wonderful!”
“His mom is still on her trip but she’s going to try to catch the next flight out.”
“And Hearth’s mom?”
“Doing a final show at that art show in Gatlinburg, she’s hauling ass back.”
“Someone needs to watch Laney so Penn can be there to support Hearth.”
“Tag, we’re it.”
“Well let’s go!” I jump from my seat, splattering a bit of coffee from both of our mugs but I don’t even care.
“You were right,” Ward says to me once we’re settled in his truck. His expression is a mixture of almost-afraid, and something like reverence. “How did you… How did you—” His eyebrows furrow so hard they nearly squish together as one.
“I don’t know, Ward. Sometimes I just… I don’t know how I know.” I lower my head. I wish I could explain it in a real way, a tangible way. A logical way . I can’t, so I don’t explain it at all.
Magic. Weirdness. Coincidence.
Who knows?