literature

Everyday Magic

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Going home for the holidays has always been something I’ve looked forward to.  I’m twenty-six this year, finishing up grad school earlier than anyone expected and getting ready to choose a workplace.  I’m almost a doctor of biology, and my parents couldn’t be more proud.  My sister…well, Katrina tries to be proud, but I know she always wanted me to be an engineer, like her.

Growing up, she was the biggest influence in my life.  Our parents were great, don’t get me wrong.  We were their whole world, and we knew it, but they didn’t spoil us except with their love.  But there’s nothing like being born into a family with a companion already waiting for you.  We started out the way sisters do: always together, inseparable, best friends.  But when the rest of my friends with older sisters began to complain that they never had time for them, Treenie and I were still close.  She’s two years older than me, so she had her own interests and her own friends, certainly, and I wasn’t always invited, but she never once made me feel like I wasn’t wanted, just let me know that she needed some space and that I could come along next time.  At the time, I may have been upset; I really don’t remember.  Now, though, with age and experience, I’ve come to really appreciate that my sister never treated me like a pest.

I’m writing this on the bus, mostly for something to do, so forgive me if I ramble.  Not that I’m really even writing to anyone; it just helps if I pretend there’s an audience.  I don’t have much of a purpose for writing this, just a lot of memories that I feel a need to put down before they fade from my head.  One of my professors had a heart attack last week and passed away, and I guess I’m just thinking about my own mortality.  When you’re this age, it feels like there’s so much to do and everything’s so final; but I had a moment of clarity last night when I realized something.  I’m just now finishing my last year of school.  My life is just starting!  I’ll choose a job, and I’ll work there for a while and get the necessary experience, and someday if I want to, I’ll move on.  Eventually I’ll buy a house and maybe I’ll get married, and I’m not really a fan of having my own kids but maybe my husband and I will adopt some, who knows?  There are so many things that are undecided about my future still.  Why should I feel like my life is over when it’s only just starting?

All the same, it can’t last forever.  Someday I’ll die, and if I’m lucky my brain will outlive my body, but if I’m not, there’ll come a day when I’ll be lucky to remember my own name, let alone those of my friends and family, if they’re still around.  But it’s too painful to think about who will outlive who, so I’m just going to get to the point of this rambling memoir.

Treenie.

Katrina, really, as I think – yes, I mentioned that before.  But growing up and learning to talk, you get stuck with some unfortunate nicknames.  Katrina was too hard for me as a toddler, so Treenie was what I called her, and it stuck.  I lucked out; there’s not all that much you can do with Lisa.  Through juice boxes and picture books, through makeup and gossip, through SAT practice and college applications…I called her Katrina or Katie when we were in public or with friends, and she called me Lisa, but when we were alone or when one of us was upset or excited, Treenie would pop out and Leesy would reappear.

Anyway, she was always older and smarter than me, and neither of us is exactly stupid.  Our father is a medical doctor and our mother is a professor at the local university; they met in a shared math class in college, married immediately after my father graduated from med school, and had Treenie a few years after my mother got a tenure track position at the college.  I came along a little unexpectedly, but never unwanted, and they made sure I knew that.  So, growing up with Doctor Dad and Doctor Mom, as we called them teasingly, I guess we were held to a higher standard than our peers.  It never felt that way, and I don’t think we really put it together until we were old enough to have friends over and they mentioned how strange it was that my parents read after dinner instead of watching television, or that we played trivia games together instead of watching movies or playing board games.

But I’m rambling again.  Our parents were smart, and we were raised to be smarter.  Our dad always said “Someday you two will be smarter than I am, and if you aren’t, I haven’t done my job.” So from a young age, we were interested in science and mathematics over sports and games.  In fact, I can remember my fifth birthday and Treenie being jealous because I got the chemistry set she wanted.  We were still kids, of course.  I had dolls and toys and we played kickball at recess just like the other kids, but we had our birthday parties at the aquarium and the science center instead of the skate rink or one of those game centers for kids with skeeball and the ball pits and things like that.

Of course, since Treenie is two years older than me, she was always the smarter one.  I knew if I was stumped with something, she’d know, and it was rare that I had to ask our parents for help with homework when my big sister was right there.  She’s always been the more serious one, too.  I’m from a family of academics, and I love them dearly, but if you show them a flower, my father will tell you about some Amazonian flower they just discovered that’s being used as an experimental treatment for asthma, my mother will launch into a history of flowers as a means of communication in Victorian times or the art of flower arranging in Japan (her area of expertise is history), and my sister will tell you how the modern flowerpot is a flawed design and the thousand ways it could be improved upon.  Admittedly, I’m right there with them; I could explain to you how the pollination process works and how bees know to do it and why without them we wouldn’t survive.  But I am and always have been the only one of the four of us who would think to take a second to look at it, smell it, and appreciate it just for being pretty.

My first real memory of this is from when I was six.  I must have been six, because it was after I got the set of encyclopedias for my birthday, and after Treenie got one for hers, which is three months after mine.  Well, if you want to be technical, I guess that means it’s a year and nine months before mine, but in a calendar year mine is three months before hers.

We were sitting on our back porch, bored because we couldn’t go bug hunting like we had wanted to because it was raining.  I remember that much because our parents had gotten us nets and carriers and a field guide for bugs that were native to our area; they supported our interests whole-heartedly even if they didn’t understand them.  I looked up and saw a rainbow, and I think it was the first one I had seen in person.  I remember gasping and grabbing her and saying something like, “Look at that rainbow, Treenie, it’s so pretty!  It must be magic!”

She looked up at it, and she smiled, but she shook her head. “Rainbows are just what happens when light goes through water before we see it.  That’s why it has to be raining for us to see them.  It’s not magic, Leesy, it’s science.”

“Oh.” I still looked at it, and I don’t remember if I was smiling or not.  All I remember was grabbing my bug net and my carrier and saying, “Let’s go play chemistry.  All the bugs are hiding.”

Looking back on it now, I know that first rainbow was the only one I ever smiled at the way I did before I knew it was just science.  Treenie wasn’t being a know-it-all or trying to ruin something for me; she was just telling me something she knew so I’d know it too, because that’s how we always did things.  Now when I look at a rainbow, I understand the science, and I don’t think it’s magic anymore, but now I also understand that light really looks like that all the time, that our entire world is full of rainbows, we just can’t see them unless the water bends the light so our eyes can process it.  I know it’s science, but nobody said it can’t be magic too.

I wish I could’ve told her that when we were little.  She’s happy, and so are our parents; I just think they’re missing out on a whole part of the human experience.  I never told any of them, but I actually double majored as an undergrad.  I got my bachelor’s for biology and it’s what I’m getting my doctorate in now, but I also have a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, quite literally ‘the study of people’.

Anyway, Treenie always thought like that, that anything unexplained was science she just didn’t know yet, while my first thought was magic.  When we were a little older, I think eight and ten, I remember we had ordered a ‘grow your own butterfly’ kit from some magazine.  We kept vigilant watch over our caterpillar, making sure it had plenty of food and a well-tended habitat, and when it cocooned itself, we ran home from the bus stop every day, hoping it was a butterfly and hoping it wasn’t because we wanted to see it come out.  We were there on a Saturday when it finally emerged, and we watched with wide eyes as it unfolded its wings and showed us that it was a fully developed adult Monarch butterfly.

I remember looking at Treenie then, knowing with my heart or my soul or something else that what I had just seen was magic. “Look at it, Treenie.  It was just a dumb caterpillar, and now it’s that pretty butterfly.  It’s gotta be magic.”

She shook her head, shrugging and getting up from the table we had the bug cage on. “It’s metamorphosis, you know that.  A caterpillar eats and eats and stores up all that energy, then it makes its cocoon and its body knows to start changing right away so it can be a butterfly.  It’s not magic, Leesy.  It’s science.”

I remember sighing, “Oh.”

She had plopped down on the couch with whatever library book she was reading at the time, and she already had her nose in it.  I looked at the butterfly then and took the cage to the back door.  I put my hand in, let it crawl onto my finger, and carefully took it out of the cage.  It flapped its wings experimentally a few times, and as it did, I remember saying quietly, “I still think you’re magic.”

It flew away then, and I glanced at Treenie to see if she’d heard me, but I don’t think she did.  She was already lost in her book by then with that same all-encompassing focus that got her through the engineering program at the top of her class.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but what I wanted more than anything was to teach my big sister something, and I knew exactly what I wanted to teach her.  She was always the smarter one, always the more clever, always ready with the answers that I didn’t have yet, but the one thing I knew for sure was that there was a kind of magic in the world around us, that even if it was science, it was still magic, still a miracle, when plain old water showed us a whole spectrum of light we would’ve had no idea was there or when a fat little grounded caterpillar morphed into a butterfly, fluttering free with literally the sky as its limit.  I have the words for it now, but Treenie’s never been interested in words; she’s math and science all the way.

Like, for instance, when we were fourteen and sixteen.  Our school was small enough that we could conceivably hold a dance for the entire school, which was grades seven through twelve.  Our parents didn’t believe in private schools, which now that I think about it was surprising; Daddy’s doctor friends and all of Mom’s fellow faculty members all sent their kids to private school.  But both sets of our grandparents were from middle class backgrounds: a welder and a seamstress on one side, a high school math teacher and a beautician on the other.  Neither of those income sets sent either of our parents to private school, and Mom always told us that if her and dad’s money bought our way into college, we didn’t deserve to go.  So it was public school for us, again another round of that human experience, and a small one at that.  Small, friendly in its way, but still just as brutal and painful as high school can be for two smarter-than-average girls with admittedly a little more money than the others.

My point is, everyone knew everyone, and the school was small enough that we could hold dances for all the grades, though we didn’t often do that.  Seventh and eighth grade had a Halloween dance and a Valentine’s dance, a month away from tenth through twelfth’s homecoming and prom, though homecoming was a month earlier and prom was a month later.  When you got to ninth grade, you could go to the valentine’s dance, the Halloween dance, and homecoming, but prom was still off limits until tenth.  All of the grades, though, were invited to the winter formal.

I was in eighth grade, fourteen to Treenie’s sixteen, the year I really wanted to go to that dance with a very special boy.  I can’t even remember his name, now.  He was taller than me, with dark hair and light eyes, though now I don’t remember if they were blue or green.  A nice smile.  The reason I really wanted to go with him was because he could always make me laugh, and every time he caught me reading, he just asked what book I was into.  I don’t know if I ever told him how different that made him from every other teasing, rude boy who thought he was so funny when he made fun of me for reading a new book every day.  I should’ve.

I spent all of November wondering if I’d have a date, nervous that another boy would ask me first, even more nervous that no boy at all would ask me.  The dance was in late December, a last hurrah before Christmas break…I’ve been at college too long, it was vacation then, Christmas vacation.  December came around, and finally, he asked me.  It was perfect; he cornered me in the library when he knew I’d be down there.  He was browsing some shelves, and he sighed, a little too obviously now that I look back on it, but at the time I didn’t think anything of it.  He asked me for my help because he knew I was in there a lot, and he needed it for a class, did I possibly know where he could find Romeo and Juliet?  I found it for him, happy to help, and when I took it off the shelf, there was a bookmark in it.  I can’t remember the words he used, but he wondered what page it was, so I opened it, and inside was a slip of paper, inscribed with the words, ‘Will you go to the dance with me?’ written in sloppy boy’s handwriting.  I looked at him to see him looking just the right amount of embarrassed, and I laughed as I handed it to him, not understanding, saying that somebody was going to be upset that she forgot something so special.  He laughed then, really laughed, and laughed harder at how much I blushed when he told me he had put it in there and was trying to ask me.

Of course I said yes.  I passed the rest of the day in a hazy blur and ran home, excited to tell Treenie and share my good news with her.  I had band practice or play practice or something that day; it was winter, so it might have actually been the junior league quiz bowl.  All I remember is running home from where the activity bus dropped me off, coming inside, and finding Treenie in her bedroom, bouncing onto the foot of her bed and talking a mile a minute as I told her that he had done it, he had finally asked me, and how he had done it.  I remember grabbing her pillow, sighing in that lovestruck, my-life-is-complete way only a fourteen year old girl can manage, and flopping onto my back as I squeezed her pillow. “Oh, Treenie, I can’t believe he really asked me, I just can’t.  This has to be magic!”

She laughed at me, freeing her pillow from my stranglehold and leaning back against it as she thumbed at the page of her book. “You’ve been talking about him for a month.  It’s clear that you like him, and it’s clear that he likes you, so I’m sure your pheromones are in sync and your biologies are compatible.  It’s not magic, Leesy.  It’s science.”

I remember sighing then, mumbling, “Oh.” into her comforter.  I remember getting up then, saying something about homework and letting her get back to her book as I walked out of her room and went to mine.

I couldn’t understand then why she wasn’t as excited as I was, and I know that because that was one of the rare times my sister’s reaction had hurt my feelings.  Looking back on it now, though, I remember that she went to that dance with her friend from the debate club, a skinny, awkward looking kind of guy who looked like his bones had grown overnight and caught his muscles off guard.  I don’t remember his name either (Glen?  Gary?  It was a G name.) but I do remember that without fail, Treenie and Gordon, that was it, Gordon went to whatever dance it was together.  I don’t think Treenie was really interested in Gordon, although he might’ve been in her, it was hard to tell with him.  I think he was just a last minute, if-nobody-asks-us-let’s-go-together kind of thing.

The joke was on me, though.  My perfect boy was actually the perfect date, and when he asked me out to the movies, he was the perfect gentleman.  Patrick.  That was his name, Patrick Johnson.  When Pat came to the house to watch a movie, he was great, too.  He was sweet to my mother, complimenting her on the snacks she brought up to us, and he wouldn’t go upstairs with me until he had met and said hello to my father, which turned into me being bored for a fifteen minute talk on coin collecting when he saw Dr. Dad’s collection.  Our dog loved him, and he even got a smile out of Treenie when he admired the model bridge that was in construction in our living room, attributing it to my father and looking impressed when I told him it was Treenie’s design.  Even watching a movie alone in my bedroom, which was allowed because my parents had enough trust and respect for me to know I didn’t need the threat of being caught to keep me from letting a boy get too physical, he was the perfect gentleman.  But perfect Patrick Johnson and his family moved away halfway through ninth grade, and I was inconsolable for two long months.

Treenie was there for me then, and she was there for me three years later, when I was eighteen and she was twenty, going for her undergrad at a school halfway across the country.  I missed my sister more than anything, though she called twice a week when she could and visited as often as she was able, and I knew she was busy with her own life.  I was getting ready to drive myself and my bags to college, ten hours from home and another twelve from Treenie, but somehow she arranged it so she could take me instead.  I was beside myself.  We said goodbye to our parents, who knew I wanted to test my wings and do things without their guidance but were still relieved that Treenie was going to help me and I wouldn’t be alone right off the bat.  Then, we got in the car.

She was driving first, I remember that.  I wanted to take the second half so that anyone who might see me when I got there would see that I was driving, I was the one in charge.  I was babbling excitedly the whole time, flip flopping between excited and scared to death.  I was going to my dream school, the first choice on my list of colleges, and I was going with a full ride thanks to the scholarships I had won and the essays I had written.  I had a workstudy job lined up for when I got there, starting during the second semester because my generous parents, expecting to pay for four years of undergrad and now freed from that burden, had given me enough money from my college fund to last that long so I wouldn’t be overloaded at first with the rest to be legally mine when I was twenty-one.  I was babbling, almost forgetting who I was talking to, which is why I said, “I just can’t believe it, Treenie.  I’m eighteen, starting college, starting my life!  I got that scholarship, Mom and Dad gave me part of the college fund so I don’t need to work the first semester, everything just fell in line.  God, it feels like magic!”

I regretted it as soon as I said it, and I think Treenie must’ve sensed that.  She didn’t look over at me; she was always a careful driver, like me, like our whole family, always kept her eyes on the road.  But her voice was smiling when she said, “You worked hard for your scholarships and your admission application.  Since you were little you’ve always put in the extra effort, never settled for anything less than your best, and it showed in everything you touched.  You put extra effort in, and you got extra reward because of that.  It’s not magic, Leesy.  It’s science.”

Surprised, a little pleased, all I could answer was, “Oh.”

Treenie and I aren’t as close now as we were when we were little girls, but we still understand each other perfectly, still call twice, sometimes three times a week, and when we’re together it’s like we’ve never been apart.  I love coming home to see Dr. Dad and Dr. Mom, but I get the most excited when I think about getting to see Treenie.  She’s busy now planning her wedding to a wonderful man who loves her the way she used to love sneaking into Dad’s workshop to play with his power tools, and I’m in my fourth and final year of a doctoral program that’s supposed to need six to complete; call me an overachiever, I guess.  So it’s nice for both of us to catch a break and come home.  I’ll get off this bus, get into the rental car that I hope is waiting for me, and drive home.

Such a nice word, isn’t it?  Home.

My stop’s coming up, so I guess that’s it.

~~~~~~~~~~

Lisa stepped off the bus and headed into the bus station, shivering against the cold.  She pulled the keys she had received out of her pocket, walked through the station, and walked back out into the cold air of the parking lot, looking for the parking space number she had been designated.  She found her rental car, got in, and turned the heat on, waiting impatiently for it to warm up before turning the fan on as high as it would go.

She hummed to herself as she headed along the highway she knew was leading to her childhood home, remembering the road in a place deeper than her mind, almost down to her bones.  Her foot was on the brake slowing her down before she thought to do it for each stop sign, her hands were adjusting the wheel before each turn, and her eyes were looking for each landmark long before it was a speck in the distance.

Lisa’s foot began to touch the brake along a stretch of the road next to a river, remembering that it was a nasty spot with a high likelihood of black ice.  Like the rest of her family, she favored the ‘better safe than sorry’ approach, and she knew she was going slowly enough that she would be just fine.

That was the reason why she was stunned more than surprised when she felt the car start to skid on the ice.  She had checked the tires; she knew they weren’t bald.  She had gotten a feel for the car within the first five minutes of driving it, so she knew that she had been going slowly enough that she shouldn’t have slid.

All the same, the car was determined to slide.  She grasped the wheel with white knuckles, touching the brake gently, trying to slow the car but not wanting to slide into the river or the other lane.  She felt the car begin to turn, and with a groan of frustration, she let go of the wheel, squeezing her eyes shut and letting fate take her.

Far from the crash she had expected, the car only slid into a stop.  Cautiously, she opened her eyes, blinking in surprise as she realized that her car had spun in a one hundred and eighty degree circle and that she was now facing the wrong way though she was still perfectly centered in her lane.  Bumping her flashers on, Lisa heaved a shuddering sigh as she shifted into reverse, getting ready to turn around to keep going. “What are the chances…?”

A screech, an inhuman, ear-piercing screech.

A bone-jarring thud.

A head, smashing against glass.

A trickle of blood down skin.

Lisa groaned, sitting up in the driver’s seat, a hand to her head where she had hit it on the driver’s side window. “What…?”

Her eyes widened as she looked at what remained of the passenger’s seat of her car.  It had been completely smashed in, folded around what remained of the front of another car, and the second-closest spike of torn metal was an inch away from Lisa’s kneecap.  The closest was in her arm, a spike roughly five centimeters long that had penetrated two centimeters deep.

She winced as she freed herself from it and tried the car door.  It opened freely, and she stepped out to see her flashers still flashing even with a station wagon halfway through the car.  The man who had been driving was on his phone, clearly talking to 911, and a hysterically crying woman rushed Lisa, asking a thousand questions at once, mostly about if there had been anyone else in the car.

“No.  No, it was just me.  I’m fine.” Lisa murmured, still staring at the car.  She walked back to it, opened the back door, and took her suitcase out of the driver’s side of the backseat.  The bag, even luckier than Lisa, didn’t have a scratch on it.

An hour later, Lisa was in a room in the hospital where her father worked, her bag keeping her company.  She looked up in mild surprise as Katrina ran in, urgent, worried, crying.  Three things that were utterly unlike her sister.

“Lisa, oh my God!  I can’t believe you’re okay!  You are alright, aren’t you?  What happened?  The doctors are on their way.  Mom and Dad, I mean.  Your doctors have already been in to see you, right?  What did they say?”

Lisa laughed then before she told her sister what had happened and that she was alright, though her doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation since she had hit her head, and probably because she was the daughter of one of their own.

Katrina had managed to pull herself together by then, wiping at her eyes. “Thank God that black ice got you first and turned you around.  If you had decent tires and hadn’t skidded first…” She shuddered. “But your car was engineered so well, too.  I’m so grateful for the science that let it crumple that way to stop the other car and save you!”

Lisa smiled, a warm feeling radiating through her chest as she looked at her sister. “I was being so careful and going so slowly.  Those tires were good; I checked them myself.  There’s no legitimate reason I should’ve skidded on that ice, and especially not enough to turn the car the whole way around like that.  There’s also no reason it should’ve stopped me exactly a hundred and eighty degrees from where I started so the other car would hit the passenger’s side and not the driver’s.  It’s not science, Treenie.  It’s magic.”

Katrina’s eyes welled up with tears as she stared at her sister.  Then, with a smile as the tears began to once more slide down her cheeks, she whispered, “Oh.”

This is a short story I did as a commission for Stryker2012 as a Tier 3 reward for my donation pool.  His only real stipulation was that he wanted something written about magic, possibly with some tie-in artwork.  I'm working on art for another person right now, but I may do some later :3  I hope you like this!  It's maybe not about the kind of magic you expected...the title says it all. (If you're not happy with it, let me know.  I had fun writing this so I don't mind writing something else if you prefer!)
© 2015 - 2024 IAmFandomHearMeRoar
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JenLaFayette's avatar
This is about the most beautiful kind of magic. 
I swear, I had goosebumps halfway through. I feels like you really poured your soul into this story. Very, very well done.
I love that Lisa never lost that sense of magic, even if she went into science. 
You must write more! It doesn't even matter what you write, just more :D