A Maze of Wires ⧸ Magical Thinking ⧸ From Fire & Ash

A Maze of Wires

He said my name as if it were a poem condensed into a single word. He’s been to juvie, they whispered, as he walked down the hallway next to my brother. He’s bad news. I heard he tried to kill someone. It was an image I struggled to reconcile with the quiet, respectful boy who came to the house after school. He knew I didn’t want anyone to see us together, but he smiled whenever he saw me, walking close enough so that he could whisper my name. Sometimes, as I stood with friends at recess, cloistered together at our lockers, I would feel a soft, feathery caress slide across my back, only to catch a glimpse of his thick black hair as he walked by. At the school fair, I tripped over a maze of wires behind the tilt-a-whirl. He quickly reached out to stop my fall, his soft voice gently scolding: be careful, Chantelle. The popular boy started coming around that summer, the kind of guy everyone loves and the one your parents hope will take you to prom. He rented scary movies and plunged his tongue deep into the back of my throat as I choked and stammered to breathe on his parents’ worn, plaid couch. Within weeks, he was pulling at my clothes, expecting me to go all the way—but I had never done that before. One hot night in late July with my parents out of town, he changed the rules: If I come over, I’m staying the night and I’m not coming back home until morning. You understand—you know what I’m saying? I wasn’t sure I did know what he was saying, but I knew I didn’t want to cancel our plans. We’d been waiting weeks for this night alone together. He hadn’t said anything before. I was wearing my favourite pair of Levi Strauss 501’s, with the button fly and low-cut waist. He didn’t even take them off. He pulled off just one leg of them, only as he much he needed, and thrust his hard body into mine, his sharp pelvic bones digging so deeply into my soft thighs I was left bruised for weeks. I moved away that summer. I didn’t get to walk those same hallways again. But I sometimes wondered if he was still there—the soft-spoken boy who went to juvie and said my name as if it were a poem.

Magical Thinking

The phone blinks, accuses me with its annual reminder, a dizzying strobe of light and time condensed in the palm of my hand. I push it away, wishing it would disintegrate, that I could will it so with my mind. The belief that we can alter the physical world using only our thoughts was once called telekinesis, now it’s just magical thinking. I don’t want to remember it, the embarrassing mundanity—can you believe all the rain we’ve had?—the weird randomness of it, as if we didn’t know each other, searching for anything to say before the hurried goodbyes that always felt like failure. The screensaver on my TV flashes and I open Netflix, a patchwork of distracting, luminous choices I cannot make. I check the time. It’s half past noon, the hands of my watch like magnets, repulsed. I had wished it then. As soon as we hung up, I had wished it. I stare at the TV, its pixels compressing the smallest fractions of a millisecond into a single moment of time. I wish I never had to make this call again. The loose papers in my lap fall to the floor. Without my glasses, the inkjet lines bleed into one another, a blurry rorschach test, but I don’t need them; I know what it says—date of death, social insurance number, relationship to deceased: daughter. I close my eyes. The thought persists, sticky. My therapist said I should picture the thought as a cloud moving slowly across the sky or hitch it to the back of an imaginary train that rolls it straight out of my mind—isn’t that just more magical thinking? Maybe it’s better than the alternative, the ridiculously tired clichés of the un-thinking—because all I can hear is be careful what you wish for.

From Fire & Ash

Make me a bird, she dropped to her knees. 
Please God, she whispered.
So I can fly far, far away. 

This familiar script—ear-marked, tattered, worn—was not my own. Mine was not so beautifully imbued with childlike enchantment as hers. Even then, I knew better than to ask for a fabled pair of magical wings. I knew there would be no phoenix born from fire and ash, no bird of prey strong enough to defeat my foe; no myth, no magic, no might.

This story is rarely told with such simple measure. The audience demands its gratuitous gore. Stripped of its resolution, the truth is so much less satisfying. A tragedy, this. Because hers, just as the paper horrors you consume, features innocence lost and monsters untamed. But here, the darkness moves in shadow, veiled by virtue of her youth; and to this conceit you cling. So you keep company with the refined, respectable gentleman while she remains tethered to his unleashed inner brute. Forsaken, she falls to her knees and invokes a prayer, her last gasp flung into the abyss.

Somebody stop him, she pleads.
Or send him away.
I need you to save me.
Please, God. Please