A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping

by Sangu Mandanna

Not to get too dramatic about it, but Sera’s ancestors had not defied tyrants and broken free of empires for her to now give this man a single inch.

“Your foot’s not ugly. It’s never been ugly. It’s held you up all your life, even when it hurt. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s so much strength and beauty in that.”

He knew that too. He had seen enough of these strange, translucent fragments of memories to know that they were just echoes, pieces of history that the house kept safe, unaffected by the present. So why was Luke still there? He didn’t say a word. He just sat down on the floor, shoulder to shoulder with a ghost, keeping her company. In the hallway, Sera knew it didn’t, couldn’t, change the memory, because that night had already happened and Luke hadn’t been there, but what it could do, what it did do, was a simple magical act of transmutation. She saw the memory through his eyes. And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying. I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.