I Will Teach You Magic

From: Issue 4

My child, this is my promise to you: I will teach you magic.

We will find snatches of time together, on sunless mornings before you make your way down the outside staircase to the school that does not want you, and in the evenings as I brush out and braid your hair, hair I already know will be dark and thick like your father’s. I will teach you magic in the roof gardens at night and hurriedly in the doorways of shops closed on a rest day. You will learn to learn anywhere, in brief snatches of time, looking out for intruders all the while.

You are but a year old, in a restless sleep in your cot-bed in the room behind the kitchen. A year is not long enough for you to say more than a few words to me, or understand many more in return, but I can see so much of your future in my past that it is as if we have already lived our lives alongside each other. And, as any parent would, I ransack my own life, my own memories, for anything that will aid your future.

And so I will teach you magic.

I will teach you magic in secret. It is not illegal to learn magic without an Amateur’s Permit, nor to teach it—unless one is paid for doing so—without a Professional Licence, not exactly. But should they catch you, should they catch us both, I can expect to be pulled up on any of several hundred infractions which are otherwise considered to be technicalities, never enforced among the licensed. There will be people who will ask why we do not wait until you get your permit, insist that twelve years is not so long after all, that we should not take the risk. But twelve years are slow when you are in pain, and so much slower when you’re powerless, at the mercy of physicians and gatekeepers, laws written as if you are an inconvenience at best. I will not force you to wait those long years, and I will teach you far more than you will be taught when you are twelve in those bare rooms that smell of carbolic acid.

More of a risk than any legal consequence, though, is the damage to our reputation. There are some who say we don’t have much of a reputation, because we live in three rooms and the third just big enough for your bed, and share a bathroom with two other families. Because this building isn’t well repaired and the zigzagging staircase along its east wall shakes as I climb it, five flights, my joints feeling like they are ripped into fire even walking with my crutch, even using magic. Because the job I love does not pay well, and your father balances one short term contract after another, and every day we have to count coins and hours.

My child, you don’t know what a reputation is until you lose it. Until people start insinuating that you cheated to get where you needed to go, until they tell you that everything you’ve had to work so hard at was just given to you on a plate. That you are lazy, that you lack impulse control, that you are greedy and indulgent.

There are some who will say it about you anyway, even when you get your Amateur’s Permit. There are some who say it about me, and the words still sting even though I’ve heard them a thousand times. But when you play by the rules, there will be some who defend you, a sense of legitimacy to your actions.

You will decide how important that is to you. Perhaps your answer will change, as mine has, over the years.

And yet you are so young. Let us not think of such things.

Let us think though, of your first magic lessons. You are old enough to learn now, but not old enough to understand not to use magic where others can see, so it will be a few years before I begin to teach you. It will be hard at first. You will sit on our uncarpeted floor desperately trying to move some beans from one cup to another without touching them. Perhaps you will cry. Perhaps you will scream and sulk and throw the cups and the beans across the floor. But you will try again. And perhaps it will come so suddenly, at the point where you’ve almost given up, that you will barely realise what’s happened, barely believe the beans are in one chipped cup and not the other.

Once you have the basics, I will teach you what I have taught myself over the years. I will teach you how to ease a dislocated joint into place without touching it, to grow a protective layer over your flesh to hold it in place. I will teach you how to use magic against your pain, to watch the orange glow move through your body and feel some relief, to unfold a sheet of metal to walk over across a gap you cannot leap, or to form a step up for a distance too high to jump, metal which will vanish into nothingness as soon as you have walked it.

These lessons are not all you will learn.

The condition that I have, that I can tell even now—watching as you move—that you have, is passed down through family lines. Not everyone, but an uncle here, a grandparent there. But it does not manifest in the same way each time. Not only that, but we are different people. It would be easy, having this commonality between us, to see you as someone repeating my own path, but I must resist that temptation. You will want to do different things to me, be bothered by different things to me, and you will teach yourself the magic to do things that I have not been able to.

Perhaps some day you will teach me.

I will teach you magic year after year. You will use magic to ease your pain, magic to hold your joints into place, magic to protect yourself each time you fall, cushioning yourself on air that suddenly becomes thick beneath you as you fall. There will be some who suspect. I hope they will tell themselves its none of their business, hope there will not be an outcry, hope you will not be bullied.

Your magic will not always have to be secret, though most likely you will want to maintain some discretion, as I have done, throughout all your life. When you reach the age of twelve years you can apply for your Amateur’s Permit. It blights a joyful time, in many ways, coinciding with your naming ceremony, when you confirm your gender and your adult name. But it is a mark of independence, of being able to make choices for yourself, and in that way, I suppose, the timing is fitting.

The application process will not be easy; after the long form you must complete, and the references you must collect, you will have to appear in front of a committee. You will have to tell them all the ways in which your life is horrible, all the things you wish you could do but can’t, over and over as they try to trip you up or catch you on a half-truth. They will push you deep into self-hatred, deep into self-pity, and by the time it’s all over you won’t be able to see anything you love about your life; you won’t be able to think about how much you love to sit on the long metal balcony with your friends, your legs hanging over the streets far below. You won’t be able to think about family trips out of the twisted metal skeleton that is this city, spending savings on a one room hut beside the glistening river. You won’t be able to think about the music that you love (and that I will, in the fashion of parents everywhere through all time, hate) or trips to the travelling theatre.

You will only be able to think that you are broken.

I will do my best to warn you, but I cannot protect you from this, as my parents could not protect me. But afterwards I will take you to Tephali’s, the little third floor cafe that has been a refuge for me so many times, and buy you cake with money that I put aside and tell you once again that you are not broken, you are not defective, and that things being hard and painful do not cancel out any of the good that is in your life.

The cafe’s owner, Kal, seated behind the counter, holds an amateur’s licence, as I do. We’ve never really talked about it but there’s been so much left unsaid on my long lonely visits here, sipping at black coffee past closing time. I know only from snatches of overhead conversation with his family about his deep fatigue, the muscle pain that held him near immovable.

Magic helped him, first, to move around some of that energy. To borrow it from one day in the future, to predict whether he could rise from bed. Later, he used it to help him get proper rest, to sleep, to ease the pain, and that meant he could find more energy that wasn’t spent on managing pain.

He is still in pain all the time, of course, as am I. That is why it is his husband and daughters who do the baking and shift the sacks of flour and clean the tables, and he who sits on a high-backed chair behind the register, greeting customers, totalling up their purchases.

It won’t take him much more than a look to know what you too are going through, and he won’t offer any words of comfort but perhaps you will find he’s cut your slice of cake particularly generously, added some extra cream to the side.

Your permit will come freshly printed within a week or two, and you carry it everywhere, at once a ticket to a new kind of freedom and a burden far heavier than the thick paper on which its printed. Permission to practice magic as compensation for all you cannot do, for all the ways your body hurts you, for all the ways they have judged you deficient. You will have to renew it every year until you are twenty, and then every five. I want to tell you it gets easier, but it hasn’t for me. I can only tell you that as long as I live you won’t be alone.

The official classes will be hard. You’ll resent having to go to the dingy ground floor clinic room two days a week after school, when you could be hanging with your friends or lying in the privacy of your bedroom—I hope we will have moved by then, hope you will have siblings—mouthing the words to the new songs that come through the radio.

(Perhaps you will learn you don’t need a radio to pick the waves out of the air. Despite the pleasure it brought me I will not be teaching you that one. Some things are all the sweeter for thinking you’re the first generation to discover them.)

Those classes, though hard, will teach you technique. Teach you the right ways to use magic, the socially acceptable ways to use magic. I do not expect you to only use those, but you will find them strategic. Because people will say things about you. When you’re doing an apprenticeship or a practical test they’ll scoff and think you have it easy because they see only how the magic eases your path and not the hundreds of ways this haphazard, towering, twisting city pains you, excludes you, limits you.

Your friends will want you to do tricks for them, but you will tell them with a new-found gravity that your permit is very serious and you have to only use magic for medical reasons and only to give yourself the abilities of a typical person, no more. But later, when it’s just a couple of your closest friends, and you’re out past curfew but I’m letting you get away with it because you’ve had such a hard time recently, you will make coins leap from the balcony and fall to hover just a finger’s width above it, and then you’ll grin and laugh and make colours flash from them as they all crash down and leap up at once, a cacophony of noise until someone opens the window above to yell at you damn kids making a racket and you will laugh and run together.

I hope you will have friends who use magic too. I hope you will not make the mistake I did, in shunning those other users, as if you could insulate yourself from the insults and the prejudice, as if you could prove you were not one of those magic users. Because when I pushed back against my own fears I found so many people; people to love, people to complain to, people to share a drink with in a semi-legal bar as the evening sun hit the windows. People who used their magic to create a barrier between them and noise, people who used magic to lower seats enough to sit on or to raise them when they wanted to get up, to turn words to sound and sounds to pictures.

But that is all for later. For now the songs of street sellers—one tune for fish, another for noodles, another further away that might be bread—are drifting up and through the open window. Your father will be home soon, and we will eat a hurried meal together before I must leave for work. I linger beside you, my child. I see you now so young, and yet I know the years will go so fast. I cannot protect you from all that is in this world. But I promise to do the one thing that I can.

I promise that I will teach you magic.

© 2021 Andi C. Buchanan

From: Issue 4

About the Author

Andi C. Buchanan lives among streams and faultlines, just north of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Winner of Sir Julius Vogel Awards for From a Shadow Grave (Paper Road Press, 2019) and their short story “Girls Who Do Not Drown” (Apex, 2018), their fiction is also published in Fireside, Kaleidotrope, Glittership, and more. You can find them at https://andicbuchanan.org/ or @andicbuchanan on Twitter.