Sky Magic

When the world was first born, every atom of every stone and tree crackled with magic — contained energy that could be accessed by anyone at any time. In fact, magic was so commonplace, no one thought anything of it when the seemingly impossible would occur. The earth was like a new battery, fully charged and capable of making just about anything happen. All it needed was a small push in the right direction.

But as the millennia wore on and the world grew old, so did the magic it contained. In many places, it had gone missing altogether. In others, it had simply gone stale and unpredictable, like aging milk that was past its expiration date. There were still a few places where you could occasionally tap into something useful if the stars were aligned just right and your head was in the right place, but they were few and far between.

The magic people encounter in this day and age is often as random as it is unexpected. You could be going about your daily business with magic the furthest thing from your mind. Then suddenly, reality’s been pulled aside as casually as a gauze curtain, often to your great shock and horror, but sometimes to your great delight instead. It all depends on how you look at it.

........

Cara had a secret. She was a heavy person, but not in the everyday sense. She wasn’t obese or even overweight. She was one of the few people left in the world who are uncomfortably aware of the fact that the world used to be steeped in powerful but volatile magic.

When she was a little girl, she’d done the thing everyone’s mother tells them they must never do. When a strange, little old man attempted to talk to her in an out-of-the-way corner behind the corn dog stand at a county fair, she had obliged him. And then she did something even worse — accepted a piece of candy he’d offered her and eaten it.

She’d been heavy ever since.

When most people experience something hurtful or depressing, they feel poorly for a while, but then they’re more or less over it. The incident might hurt a bit if it pops into the person’s head at random in the future, but the thought that caused it is typically gone again as quickly as it appeared. When Cara experienced something like that, the feeling would always dissipate in time just as it would for anyone else, but the weight it carried while it was present stuck around and never left. The same thing would happen the next time, and the next, and the next.

After many years of this, Cara was quite heavy indeed. At first, the heaviness was more of a metaphor than anything else. It was hard to stay in a good mood and remain optimistic about life in general. But as she traveled further and further into full-fledged adulthood, the heaviness began to manifest physically, as well.

For instance, Cara was really very slim as far as her physique went. But by the time she was 35, she tipped the scales at many hundreds of pounds. The average scale was incapable of even measuring her weight, so she could only guess at what it was after a certain point. She felt heavy, as well. Some days were much easier than others, but on a bad day, it felt hard to lift her limbs and go about the business of everyday life.

........

Cara had known it was the little piece of hard, black candy she’d taken from the stranger at the fair that had caused the heaviness ever since her second visit to Madame Adelaide. On paper, Adelaide owned and ran a laundromat on the wrong side of town and nothing more. But anyone who had ever been invited into the strange little office at the back of the laundromat knew better.

That’s because it wasn’t an office at all. It was a seer’s room where Adelaide ran her side business as a fortune teller and hoodoo practitioner. A friend of Cara’s who was into such things took her there once for a tarot reading about a professional situation she was dealing with at the time. Madame Adelaide was everything you’d expect a Creole fortune teller to be right down to the oddities that decorated her strange office.

The shelves were filled with dusty books and every surface was home to piles of strange objects — bones, and stones, and idols, and feathers. Little jars of mystery herbs and concoctions stood in neat rows on a series of shelves in one corner.

The business reading Cara and her friend had come for was commonplace and informative. But as Cara was leaving, Madame Adelaide pressed a business card into her hand. “And you be sure to come back again on your own when you’re ready,” she’d said in a low voice with a vaguely French accent.

Cara didn’t have to ask Adelaide what she was talking about. She could tell she already knew, which was made clear to her when she returned to the little office at the back of the laundromat the very next day.

That’s the day Adelaide told her the truth about the strange man at the fair that day and the odd, bitter candy he’d given her. The man was a practitioner of dark magic and the candy was a curse. Most people who practiced used their understanding of the magic that was left in the world for their own gain — to become rich, beloved, or beautiful — but this particular man was the type who enjoyed harming others for no discernible reason.

Cara had simply failed to listen to the good advice her mother had given her at the wrong time.

Adelaide told Cara she could help her — for a price, of course, which just so happened to be the exact same amount Cara had in her checking account, down to the penny. She couldn’t remove the curse, but she could give her a charm that would do whatever she wished. It was up to Cara to decide how to use it.

A check was written. Some strange words were spoken in Haitian Creole over a piece of red candy which was then wrapped carefully and given to Cara. And Cara was told briefly how to work the charm. She was to eat the candy and speak her wish for herself out loud. Simple.

........

Later that night, after dinner, Cara unwrapped the strange, red lozenge Madame Adelaide had given her. It caught the light as she examined it and seemed to vibrate with a strange power. When she placed it on her tongue, it tasted of cherries, and honey, and something metallic.

“I don’t want to be heavy anymore,” said Cara aloud. “I want to be light.”

And just like that, Cara felt the unbearable heaviness leave her heart and her mind. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in such a good mood. Then she felt it begin to leave her limbs, too. She’d hardly had time to process what was going on when she began to feel herself rising off of the ground altogether.

After a brief moment of panic — “what if I just keep rising” — Cara realized the effect was controllable. If she concentrated, she could come back down to earth again. Once she realized that, she felt free to simply enjoy the weird, wonderful feeling that came with being very light after an entire lifetime of feeling like she was carrying the world’s heaviest weight.

By then, it was nighttime and the world outside was dark. The stars were just beginning to come out and a full moon was showing itself from behind a bank of clouds. Cara walked out into her back yard, feeling the cool evening breeze on her skin. She turned her face upward toward the sky, consciously let go of the desire to touch the ground, and slowly began to rise into the air.

She rose so high, she could see the tops of all the roofs in the neighborhood. The evening was slightly chilly, so some of the chimneys had curls of rich fireplace smoke rising out of them and high into the sky. Then she realized she could actually swim through the air as easily as she could through water — a manner of flying that felt natural and exhilarating.

She flew over her neighborhood, marveling at how small and strange everything looked from way up in the sky. As she soared over a street lamp, she heard the chirping of bats, filling their bellies with the mosquitos and moths the light attracted. She flew over a highway and admired the red and white lights of the cars down below from high above. She flew over the ocean and marveled at the way it was glowing that night because of the strange blue algae that bloomed in it this time of year.

Soon, Cara found herself having to fight the urge to simply keep rising into the sky until she reached the heavens themselves, but fight it she did. She came back down to earth, found her way home, and went to bed. She went to work the next day, and she returned to life as she knew it.

But now, she was light. Almost unbearably so. And she knew the day would inevitably come when flying through the air and returning to earth wouldn’t be enough. She’d eventually give in to the urge to push the limits — to ascend into the tropopause and beyond. And that would be the story of her.