There Is No Escape #2

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broken-magic-wandBeatie was small for her age and wore thick glasses. Her dark hair was naturally untidy, and her clothes didn’t fit. Instead they hung from her small frame and seemed to shout “charity shop” to the cruel hordes of eleven-year-olds that comprised her class at school. No one wanted to be her friend, so she stuck to her books, stories about dragons and fairies and goblin treasure. One day in June, right before the end of the school term, she was walking home with her nose in the pages of a book about magical rings, when she hooked her toe on a jagged piece of paving stone. She braced herself for a hard fall on the coarse surface but instead fell atop a soft, velvet cushion, purple with gold trim, where none had been before. She squeaked with surprise and jumped to her feet just in time to lock eyes with a boy at the end of the street. She recognized him from school. He also kept to himself and had a scar on his forehead that you could see if you caught him at the right angle. Beatie looked back at her feet to see that the pillow had vanished. And so had the boy. When she got home, her mother feebly asked her about her day. She mumbled that it was fine and retreated to her small room, little more than a closet, at the back of the house. The following day, the year six students were dismissed at midday. It was the start of summer holiday, and Beatie looked around the crowd of children kicking footballs and listening to music from portable cassette players for the boy with the green eyes and the scar. Suddenly the crowd parted and she saw him, standing alone by the corner of the school library. He looked at her and smiled sadly. The two began to move deliberately towards one another when a shout rang out, causing the boy to start. “Oy, you! You’re dead!” A pudgy, pink-faced brute with a prominent cowlick lumbered towards the pale boy who took off running around the library.

That was the last time Beatie ever saw him. Once, a few weeks into the start of year seven, she had seen the pink-faced bully at the local drugstore and had asked him about his skinny cousin, “the boy with the scar.” The fat boy’s mother seemed to condense out of the air in the candy aisle, snatched her son by the back of his shirt, and gave her a cruel, stinging look. Beatie spent the remainder of her school years reading in the small bedroom at the back of her parents’ rental. She was offered a scholarship to a small university nearby, but by then, her father had taken ill, so she went to work in a dress shop. When he died a few years later, Beatie and her mother moved in with an aunt who lived up north. In her thirties, Beatie tried online dating. Her profile read, “Seeking a life of magic and adventure, a partner who is kind, considerate, and brave; not averse to scars; I’ve got my share.” Nothing ever came of it.

There Is No Escape #1

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Tornado Outbreak Slams Through OklahomaFantasy puts me in a dark mood. Rabbit holes and wardrobes, obscured bloodlines and secret parentages, otherworldly visitors, ethereal lovers, swords from stones, wands from shops, powers and prophecies that, once discovered, offer a way out – there’s a subtle tragedy in escapism. When we indulge characters who, according to chance or destiny, are lifted out of mundane lives, we must simultaneously acknowledge the untold billions who never will be.

Ebenezer Gale had died with 1200 acres. His was the biggest farm in the territory at the time, but with eleven children, the original homestead had been divided and subdivided over the generations. The Ogburns farmed a 60-acre plot, sorghum and millet, on the southern fringe of what had, since Ebenezer’s day, been incorporated into Muckum County. Joe Ogburn and his wife Bertie (Ebenezer’s granddaughter) had one son, James, who at sixteen had tawny blonde hair and broad shoulders from the long summers threshing alongside his father. The girls who gathered on the porch of Grissom’s Seed & Mercantile had that summer started to pick on James, who they called Jamie-O, for not coming to any of the dances hosted by the Ladies’ Temperance Auxiliary. They prodded him, suggesting that he only had eyes for his Gale cousin, a girl from three farms over who liked small dogs and blue gingham dresses. But they were disappointed when he didn’t rise to their teasing.

James hoped to leave Kansas one day. He was haunted by dreams of eastern cities, where women with golden hair danced in silver shoes. On the road leading east from the Ogburn farm was a tannery and a rail crossing. The yellow phosphate salts that the tanners used spilled across the road where truck drivers, careless or drunk, had hit the rails at speed. The county had installed a green electric crossing signal on the tracks, and as the light lengthened in the evening, James would stand in the farm yard and look eastward. He would hold his eyes open until the wind whipping across the darkening fields caused them to water. Through the tears, he believed he could see a golden road stretching out before him and at its end, a hazy green light, the glow from an emerald city. On this particular evening, the wind out of the east was full of grit and malice and Jamie-O was forced to shut his eyes against it. When he opened them again, the sky had gone green, not the emerald green of the crossing light but a septic, angry shade. Jamie thought he could hear his father shouting but the roar of the wind drowned out all other sound. Jamie watched the black funnel descend from the sky and turned to run towards the house where his father was gesturing wildly from the doorway. The boy never saw the fence post that took his head clean off his shoulders.