Laughing hurts. “Stop. My poor ribs.” I clutch at my side.
“But I also want to be your sleeping bag, so that I’m lying under you as well. The only solution is to clone myself.”
I laugh again, and my ribs protest some more. “You’re going to make me cry.”
Then I remember all the books I’ve packed, surely destroyed—some of them belonging to the library—and shed physical tears.The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine. The Royal Art ofPoison: Filthy Palaces, Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, and Murder Most Foul.Those poor pages! The staff at Moonville Library have already had it up to here with me—I’m going to get a ban.
On and on we run, in the direction of who knows what, propelled by adrenaline. “Are we going to discuss the fact that there’s a tiger and an elephant loose in Moonville?” I mention when we finally stop for breath, panting.
His eyes shine. “Iknewit. All those stories! There had to be some truth to them.”
I’d honestly forgotten the stories. They say that a hundred years ago, a circus train crashed in these woods and a few exotic animals escaped. Now and then, hikers claim to have spotted a cheetah or a monkey, but nobody ever believes them because the photographic evidence is…shall we say, unconvincing. I certainly thought it was hogwash. You’re telling me that you carry a phone in your pocket programmed with the capabilities of an expensive camera, and all you managed to capture of a cheetah is a grainy colorless streak in the distance? Pah. If it was real, it could be proven!
“Nobody’s ever gonna believe us,” I say, incredulous and exhilarated.
“Not in a million years.”
We grin at each other, and I wonder why this feels like such a good thing—Morgan and I believing in something that others don’t. Is this how my sisters have felt all along, believing in magic while others scoff from the sidelines? It’s like buriedtreasure. The only ones who are able to appreciate it are those who’ve discovered it for themselves.
Our legs are tired of walking, but we have to find shelter. We have no cell reception, no tent, and not much food. “All right,” I declare, relaxing my muscles. “Show us where to go, magic.”
Morgan holds my hand as I’m guided by feelings, a supernatural version of the “you’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder” children’s game.
This way.
Magic shows me the effect of font—how the same sentence can settle differently when set in Garamond versus Times New Roman.
And now that way.
It stirs the smell of old books, organic compounds in the paper breaking down to release faint fragrances of vanilla, almond, and coffee.
Yes, you’re going in the right direction now.
Old English words that have fallen out of fashion, antiquated idioms that tickle my brain most pleasingly. Discovering a mysterious book at a flea market that I can’t find any information about on the Internet, as if it appeared from nowhere.
Favored words and phrases.Decanter, night fever, shiny laugh, patina, put the kettle on, quicksilver, tooth in the brain.I levitate my mental keyboard, typing a few of them out. Each letter floats into the air. I follow the ink so closely that my senses strengthen with each one, until I know intrinsically where to turn in order to continue collecting them.
Emulsion. Emollient. Austere. Alacrity.
Misreading a sentence while editing, and finding I like it better the way it wasn’t.
“Slow down,” Morgan says with a laugh. (Ashinylaugh! Ah, there it is!) “What are you going so fast for?”
“I want to catch up.” I know that what I’ve said doesn’t make sense to anybody but me. I pull him along, our steps never faltering, never tripping over a root or a plant. Emotions fly swifter and swifter, whirling about me in a warm, wonderful wind, and I let it rush all over.
What do you love about writing?magic asks. Then it shows me the answers.
Popping down research rabbit holes. The aha moment when I find exactly the right term I’ve been hunting for. How joy can swell a paragraph bigger and bigger until your heart bursts, and tension cinches it tight like an emotional corset. I love rewriting, comparing material to older drafts to see how far it’s evolved. Grafting stronger prose over frail areas, stitching it all together with transitions. I love the immortality of storytelling, how my daydreams will outlast me, how in a way I’ll exist forever as long as my stories sit on somebody’s shelf or in a digital file.
I love how certain songs are irreversibly connected to scenes I’ve written. Figuring out, with my agent and editor, how to make a scene stronger. Rewriting, deleting, sacrificing to the pacing gods, then taking back my offering because no, I want that in there, I will be indulgent. What a miracle language is. Letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, chapter by chapter, all of it culminating in this stressful, exhausting, satisfying,rewarding outlet for all of the noise that collects in my head. It’s how I process my own philosophies, grief, desires. A hybrid of pure imagination and diary.
When I break down what writing truly is, it sounds almost magic. Minuscule, tedious squiggles of printer toner, lined up in soldier rows. You stare at the squiggles and forget where you are. They make you fall in love with people who don’t exist, they make you livid, they bring you to tears. They disappoint you, make your pulse sprint, make you swear you’ll never try that genre again. Change your life. Synchronize your emotions with those of hundreds of other readers spread across space and time, absorbing the very same words, but who will view them through the lenses of their own unique experiences—so that, in a way, nobody reads exactly the same book, and each variation is different still from the original, the one the author created.
Some stories you forget about as soon as you finish the last page, and some you carry in your soul forever, like an imaginary friend you understand so well, it doesn’t matter that others can’t see them. It doesn’t matter that they live only in you.
I think of every time a reader has reached out in a letter to sayIt feels like you wrote this specifically for me.
Something snaps beneath my footfalls, and I kneel to examine a chain of words.Once upon a time, nobody went into the forest and came out of it alive.
