Magic Bitter, Magic Sweet

by Charlie N. Holmberg

There is an abundance of maybes in our broken village, but one of them has to lead to a yes.

He smiles in a half-mirthful, half-patronizing kind of way. “Surely after all we’ve been through you’re not still squeamish about the shrine.” All we’ve been through? I think. In so many ways, Cleric Tuck is a stranger to me. He wasn’t there for most of my story. He was a wish in the beginning and a support at the end, but there is so much he doesn’t know, doesn’t understand.

The quiet between us is not silence; it is more. It is speaking the unspoken,

“You cannot break that which was never whole.”