Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

Torres pulled a business card from the space between naught and nothing. I bit back annoyance again. She wasn’t doing it to antagonize me. Probably. She handed me the card, and, to my credit, I only hesitated for a couple of seconds before letting the paper touch my skin.

“You’ve never taken a TM class, so you may not understand—but it’s a very dangerous field even at the entry levels. It’s a lot like sticking your hand into a black box that may or may not have cobras in it.” I blinked. “That’s the most coherent explanation of magic I’ve ever heard.” “Ah, yes, well.” The corners of her lips pinched in an ironic almost-smile. “I imagine the only person who’s ever explained magic to you is Tabitha? And she’s … well. She lives in the black box.”

Something in my brain screamed, vomited, fainted. I didn’t blink. I didn’t look down at the place where my shoulder should have been, because I didn’t want to find out if it was still there. I suspected strongly that it wasn’t.

I took a deep breath. In my mind, I took what had just happened to my shoulder, and I put it into a box. A box with a tight lid. I dropped the box into a deep brick-lined oubliette. It landed somewhere next to my mother’s last words and my searing loneliness and everything else I needed to forget, and just like that, I was fine again.

Hey! This process I know! Works well too!

The thought you probably shouldn’t tell her about this wandered through my mind and smashed into you’re pretty drunk and fuck it. Only fuck it survived the collision.

“My phone’s been dead. And I lost the charger.” I said. This wasn’t exactly false—my phone was, in fact, dead. I hadn’t lost the charger, though—I’d just decided I didn’t want it charged. And the screen was badly cracked. It had fallen. At high velocity. Toward a wall.