Bloom

by Delilah S. Dawson

The modern world is severely lacking in magic, and those who crave it are at a constant disadvantage because they are desperate and it’s in short supply. Some places—amusement parks, country fairs, museums, old bookstores—can temporarily fill the void, but there will always be people who check every armoire for a door to Narnia, every rabbit hole for a road to Wonderland.

Ro would like to be breezy, but she seems to swing between periods of dedicated, obsessive effort and slothlike, stubborn inertia.

Words are her world, and yet she is speechless. This happens sometimes. She understands books so much better than she understands people.

She briefly wonders if eating the girl’s food is anything like Persephone slipping rose-red seeds between her lips in the Underworld.

She is aware that for someone who has always considered herself to be straight, she still looks at girls’ butts, but she always assumed this was because she was comparing herself, maintaining an inner rating system to see where she landed because that’s how internalized misogyny works. Now she wonders if maybe she looks for another reason.

“Vanilla grows in hot, wet places. It’s a climbing vine that produces a beautiful flower that blooms for only a day. If the right kind of bee comes along during that day, carrying exactly the right kind of pollen, you get vanilla beans. Society has decided that ‘vanilla’ means plain and boring, but it’s actually quite rare and special.

This is still her; a version of her. There are many, she tells herself; she can try them on as needed.

People are difficult—they don’t always tell the truth, much less know the truth—but books are honest.”

Why hide weird, she has always assumed, since it’s going to come out sooner or later?