The Magician's House

Meghan Mccarron

Meghan McCarron's stories have recently appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. She has been an action movie researcher, a Hollywood assistant, a boarding school English teacher, and, briefly, a typist for an experimental philosopher. She lives in Brooklyn.

The magician's house looked like every other house in our neighborhood on the inside, except it had more doors. There were three doors in the foyer, two under the stairs, four in the hallway, one next to the fireplace, and another hidden behind the sofa. They were the builder's standard issue, painted the same blank white color as the walls. I pictured each one leading to a room in another house that looked exactly like this one. This house was the ur-house, the house that allowed all other houses in the development to exist.

We didn't go through any of those doors, like I had been expecting. Instead, the magician led me into the kitchen, opened the oven, and crawled inside. The oven seemed too small for a man that tall, let alone for me. I peered inside; there were no racks or walls or heat sources. There was nothing but darkness. I glanced up at the control knobs. They were turned to "OFF."

"Well?" said the magician's voice from inside. It echoed, as if coming from below ground.

I ducked my head into the oven; inside was strangely humid, and the air smelled warm and yeasty. There were no walls I could make out, only receding darkness. Taking a deep breath, I placed one hand inside, then another. I banged my shin on the oven's edge as I pulled my legs up. I crawled forward into the pitch black, the hard metal floor warming beneath my hands. Suddenly, this seemed like a terrible idea. But before I could turn around, the darkness enveloped me, and I slid down.

Inside the oven, a gas lamp flickered over upholstered chairs that I had seen in a dumpster a few months ago. I remembered them because they were lime green, and I had thought about hauling them home for my pink-and-floral bedroom to piss off my mom. The magician was already seated, waiting for me. He looked bored. I wiped the nervous sweat from my face, took a deep breath, and sat.

The magician was a tall, spindly man with surprisingly thick hands and dark, graying hair. He folded into the chair like a marionette. To meet me, he wore black stretch pants, a silk pajama shirt, a burgundy cardigan, and decaying black flip-flops. If I had seen him on the street, I would have laughed, but in the oven room he looked right at home, whereas I felt ridiculous in my khaki shorts and pre-faded T-shirt. I had even blow-dried my hair. For the first time, instead of feeling invisible in my prepster clothes, I felt exposed.

The magician stared at me for an uncomfortable moment. Finally, he leaned forward and said, "Tell me what you see when you see the color black."

I thought of the lightless oven tunnel. "I see . . . black?" I said.

The magician sighed. "What do you see," he repeated. "Black."

I closed my eyes. In the darkness, I saw a smooth, shimmering surface, taut against a woman's hip. Little black dress. Satin.

"Um," I said. I didn't want to tell him what I saw; it felt secret. "Um. Like, um, I see space. You know, outer space?"

The magician jerked forward and slapped me.

I yelped and pulled away. I pressed my hand to my stinging cheek. The magician gave me a knowing, angry look.

"Liar," he said. "You see a woman's body."

My eyes hazed over with tears.

"What did the woman look like?" he said.

I sniffled hard. "I just saw . . . her hip. She was reclining, in a black satin dress."

There was a strange light in his eyes when he heard this. Later, much later, he would tell me that when his master asked him this question, he saw the exact same thing.

"Why do you want to learn magic?" he said.

I blinked the tears out of my eyes. It was a stupid question. My mother had wanted me to find a hobby. She threw out suggestions: horseback riding, dance, music—I blurted out magic as a joke. But she'd had a thing for tarot cards at my age, and the suggestion delighted her. Since calling the magician, she kept recounting weird stories of things I did as a kid that suggested, in her mind, miraculous abilities. As far as I could tell, they were all about me eating dirt. I don't think she expected oven rooms.

But I didn't want to blurt out the lame, "My mother made me come." The magician had clearly already written me off, and I didn't like it. I said, "Because I want to know something real."

The magician sat back in his chair a little bit and glowered at me. "Come back next week," he said finally. "Dress like a human being. And bring a shovel."

I came back in ripped jeans and an old band T-shirt of my dad's. It felt like just another costume, but the magician nodded when he saw me, pleased. My dad had done the same thing when I asked to borrow the shirt.

The magician took me to his backyard and told me to dig. He gave me no other instructions, just a shovel (the one I had brought was "too puny"), and permission to destroy his yard.

At first, I dug shallow, lazy holes, and the magician made me fill them all back in. Then he told me to stop digging like a girl. I told him that it wasn't a bad thing to be female, but when I went back to digging I jabbed the shovel into the earth, hard and angry, like I imagined boys to be.

My next holes were narrow, deep, mysterious things. I dug them all over the yard, turning up rich, dark dirt that used to grow corn, back when this development was a farm. I turned up the occasional rusted can, too, lids hanging off in a lewd way. I sweated through my dad's T-shirt and covered my jeans with dirty handprints. As time wore on, the digging started to feel a little like dancing, or a little like making music, with the rhythmic bite of the shovel, and the flow of my body. I found my holes very beautiful.

At the end of the day, the magician came out to inspect my work. He stuck his leg in a few holes to see how deep they went. He tasted the dirt. Then, he sent me home.

When I came back the next week, the holes were gone; I stared at the grassy, unblemished yard with something like grief. The magician wasn't home; instead, a diagram waited for me on his kitchen table, which overlooked the flat, hole-less yard.

The next hole I dug was sinewy and undulating. I thought of it as a drawing of a heart, taken apart and bent. The digging had grown easier, the magician said because the earth knew me better. I was pretty sure it was the arm muscles, but I didn't argue. I liked his idea more. While I dug, the magician played blues records out of a second floor window. Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, Son House, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie McTell. Men with names that told you something about them, all except Robert Johnson, whose name was a black hole, a mystery. When the records ended, the magician would lean out his window and lecture me about these men, their genius and strangeness. They understood the earth, according to him. They understood where they were from.

As soon as I finished my hole, the magician jumped down into it with me. I was covered with dirt and sweat, and my arms were still shaking. The magician guided me by my shoulders, eyes closed, through the twists and turns of my labyrinth. His breath blew against my neck, and his hands were warm on my skin. When we reached the end, he took his shovel and told me not to come back until he called.

The magician didn't call until December, when he sent me a text message at two a.m. that read, "Come over." I squinted at the message and wondered if I was dreaming. But the phone beeped again, and I stumbled out of bed. I crawled out through the dog door so my parents wouldn't hear me sneaking out. The magician was waiting for me on his front lawn, bundled up in a blue and orange ski jacket from the eighties. He wore a red hat with a pom-pom. He looked like a tall, skinny bear dressed up in clown clothes. Cute at first glance, but ultimately sinister.

"Do you know what today is?" he said.

"The solstice?" I said.

The magician patted me on the head, so I guessed I had the right answer.

"Tonight the earth is in her deepest sleep. We will go learn some secrets. Then we will do our part to wake her up."

We tramped through the woods in silence, passing abandoned Boy Scout cabins, a rusting Coke machine, and a massive sign that said MILK. The woods used to be the trash heap for the farm—somewhere a whole car was buried. The magician picked his way along the path ahead of me, a blare of orange over invisible legs. I pretended I was tracking him.

We climbed to the highest point, where there was some exposed rock and a tiny cave. Kids went up there to drink, and when the magician climbed inside on his hands and knees I heard the clatter of empty beer cans. Inside was pitch black and freezing; it smelled faintly of cigarettes and dirt. I shivered against the frozen rock.

"Turn your face to the rock and whisper your question," the magician said to me across the darkness.

"My question?" I said.

His clothing rustled as he turned, and his voice hissed against the rock as he whispered things I couldn't hear. I sat with my cheek against the cold stone, silent, listening to the magician's breath move against the cave wall. I couldn't just rattle off questions to a rock at two o'clock in the morning. If he had warned me, I'd have thought of the perfect questions, the questions that would tell me everything I needed to know about my life, but instead I was sitting here silent and alone—

The magician's whispers stopped, and he crawled towards me in the dark. His hand found my shoulder.

"What do you want?" he said.

"What?"

"What do you want in this world?"

I pressed my cheek against the rock and thought.

"You don't have to tell me," he said. "Just ask."

He crawled out with another clatter of empties, and the silence in the cave lulled me. The rock was freezing my cheek, so I lifted my head and whispered, "How do I become a magician?"

Images cascaded into my head, too many too fast, like I had asked a question too big to be answered. I gasped for breath. When it was over, all I had left was my desire, sharper than before, more focused. I hadn't even realized until then how much I wanted it, but now it was desperately clear.

While I had been in the cave, the magician had built a fire on top of the hill. When he saw me crawl out, he smiled. I wondered if now we were friends.

When I opened my mouth to say something, however, the magician turned back to the fire. He held out his hands to warm them, then stuffed them back in his mittens. In one quick, violent movement, he threw his head back and shouted, "WAKE UP!"

He began to dance around the fire, a funny, undignified dance, lots of flailing arms and bent knees and shuffling. I couldn't stop myself from giggling.

He ignored me. He threw his head back again and shouted, "WAKE UP!"

He didn't invite me over, and at first I was too scared to join. Instead, I lingered at the edge, just outside the fire's halo of heat. When I finally joined in, it was as much about the warmth of the fire as the ritual. I ducked in the dance right after him, but I danced better than he did. I moved my arms up and out like a rising sun. I shook my hips to remind the earth of the pleasures of spring. When he threw his head back, I threw mine back too, and together we shouted, "WAKE UP!"

We danced and shouted until dawn, then put out the fire and tramped back through the woods. He cracked some eggs and made omelets, filled the room with the smell of coffee. While we ate, his wife came in the front door, fresh from her own magic's solstice. The magician had told me she was bound to fire; maybe that was why her face was flushed in an athletic, almost sexy way. She was tall and elegant and graceful when she kissed her husband on the cheek. I found her terrifying.

"Good solstice?" she asked.

"Oh yes," the magician said.

She faced me and smiled a big hostess smile.

"Nice to see you again, dear," she said. "Good solstice?"

I smiled and nodded.

When it was time for me to leave, the magician walked me to the door, then swooped in to kiss me on the cheek, a dry, awkward peck. I made, belatedly, a kissing noise in the air near his own cheek, but I was too shocked by the gesture to get the timing right, so I air-kissed his neck instead of his face. His wife called from the kitchen, "Is she too tired to drive?"

"She's fine," he called back. "She had coffee."

I nodded along, as if his wife could see me.

"Happy solstice," the magician said.

He stood in the door as I left and watched me drive away.

In the spring, I began to have tasks. Not like the hole digging, which had been more of a test. Real magicians have deeds, but to learn to have deeds, first you must have tasks. To be honest, I was a little fuzzy on the distinction, but I guessed you got more credit for one than the other.

The magician sometimes talked about other students he had. They were all boys and, in his opinion, dull. When I asked him if they had tasks, the magician gave me a secret look. "No, none of them are ready for tasks," he said, waving a hand as if brushing them aside. Then he smiled at me again and said, "None of them are like you."

I carried those words around with me for days, shivering with pleasure when I replayed them in my head. The magician believed I was like him. He believed I would be great, like him. I would be nothing like the person I'd thought I was.

My first task was to connect two places that had yet to be connected. I couldn't feel the earth through the wheels of my car, so I went for walks. I quickly discovered, to my dismay, that most places were already connected in the suburbs, albeit in terrible ways. Thoughtless roads linked houses to strip malls, churches, synagogues, schools. Trees clung for dear life to other trees by the roads of their roots. Animals left roads with their scents, roads that faded over time, but provided all the connecting they needed. I could connect houses to other houses, but people put up wardings to frustrate me: wooden fences, electric fences, stakes marking exactly where their property ended, even in the middle of the woods.

I explained these problems to the magician, and he laughed at me. "You're being very literal," he said, like it was cute.

I walked on the cul-de-sacs and main roads and driveways and unfinished dirt tracks in the development the magician and I shared, feeling the way the earth groaned and strained against the ill-placed swaths of asphalt. The people who didn't drive around the neighborhood—children—zigzagged in all directions, flying past property markers, hopping fences (much to the consternation of family dogs), and avoiding the roads whenever possible. The only things that hemmed them in were the big busy roads that surrounded the development, when clearly all they wanted was to run, on and on and on.

A four-lane road separated us from a farm that sold ice cream. Children crashed against the barrier like waves on a cliff, looking longingly at the freshly plowed cornfields and dairy cows and signs announcing Cho-co Mint Chip! At first I thought about building them a bridge, but I didn't know the mechanics of air, even if a road was involved. A crosswalk was a silly idea, but I considered anyway; I drew scale diagrams and observed the road late at night, to see if the cars disappeared for long enough to paint (they didn't). I already knew how to dig. A tunnel it was.

There was an undeveloped lot across from the cornfield, so I started digging there, at the edge of the road. I dug at night, and dumped the dirt in the lot next door, where they were digging the foundation of a house. The earth was wet and heavy from the spring rain, and at night I could still see my breath. It was exhausting work, and by the third day, I wasn't sure I could go on. But when I arrived the next night, I found a little boy waiting for me, holding a plastic shovel. I let him help. The next night there was another child, then three more, then ten. Thirteen children dug along with me using sandbox shovels, garden trowels, and even a real shovel or two. Bikes were rigged with buckets and hitched to wheeled trashcans, and the children hid the dirt in their playhouses, in their parents' mulch piles, or out in the dry, grassless plain of the undeveloped lots. On the twelfth night, we finished digging and planted mailboxes on each end of the tunnel, though there were no houses in sight. On the thirteenth, I slept in the center of the tunnel alone and asked the earth to remember what it was like to be a hard and sturdy stone as the cars rumbled above me.

The next afternoon we were together, the magician and I walked across the development to see my handiwork. We had spent so many hours together in the basement that the sight of him in the sunlight was shocking—he was so strange looking, tall and translucently pale, with his too-big T-shirt and long, skinny pants. I was embarrassed that someone might see him loping beside me; I was ashamed to feel that way, but I still hid my face from passing cars.

We crossed the scrubby, vacant lot to the lone mailbox. It was shaped like a goose in flight, flying towards its sister mailbox. I had given in to a little bit of silliness and bought another one shaped like a swan, also in flight, so it looked like they were heading for an epic battle. Goose vs. Swan.

I made this joke, but the magician didn't smile.

"So?" he said, nodding at my twin mailboxes. "What is it?"

"Pull the goose's beak towards you," I said.

The magician reached out a long wiry arm and pulled. The whole mailbox came with it, as well as the piece of earth the mailbox was rooted in, revealing a ladder that glinted in the sunlight, and a dark tunnel below.

"Ha!" the magician said. He climbed down, and I followed, closing the trapdoor behind us.

I had instructed the kids to leave a stash of flashlights at the foot of each ladder, but they hadn't done it yet, and the tunnel was pitch dark. I had dug it, dreamt it, but this perfect blackness paralyzed me. The magician breathed next to me.

"Do you have to stoop?" I whispered. It seemed wrong to speak normally.

"A bit," he said.

"Follow me," I said, and fumbled backwards for his hand. He took mine loosely, leaving it up to me to hold on. His fingers fidgeted over the back of my hand.

It took us only a minute or two to cross the tunnel, but every second felt essential as our two bodies moved through the cold, clammy dark. Even the sound of cars overhead disappeared. The magician bumped his head twice, and once he inhaled sharply, as if something surprising had occurred to him. His hand continued to fidget over mine; the space between our palms grew warm.

"This is remarkable," he said. "Just remarkable."

He squeezed my hand when he said this, and then held on tight. I shivered.

"Cold?" he said with an odd urgency.

"No!" I said, equally jumpy. "No, no, I'm fine."

I walked right into the ladder with a deafening clank. I giggled and released his hand. After a brief hesitation, he let go too, and laughed.

I put a foot on the ladder, ascended a rung.

"This really is remarkable," the magician said again. "You have real talent."

I paused mid-climb to bask in his praise, and the magician's chest brushed against my arm; we were closer than I realized. "Thank you?" I said. My chest was tight.

The magician reached for my hand again. In the darkness, his breath brushed my neck. The sensation was delicious, but my stomach felt sick.

I took back my hand and climbed.

I busied myself with brushing the dirt off my clothes in the sunshine as the magician emerged from the tunnel. The field beneath my feet was a dark, wet brown, freshly turned and rich. Green shoots rose in rows all around me, fresh and alive in the sunshine. The magician set the mailbox back in place and laughed to himself in a high, odd way. I kept my back to him. I didn't want to see what an absurd figure he cut in the sunlight, what an ugly person made my heart hammer, my skin sweat.

"You made a lovely road," the magician said behind me. I turned around; he was running a finger along the edge of the swan mailbox, taking it in. He looked up at the roaring cars between us and home. "Should we . . . go back down?"

My stomach jumped. "I'll just run across," I said.

He had been holding my eyes, and when I said this, his face crumbled.

"All right. Run away," he said with a small laugh. "I'm going to take another look."

For a long, tense moment he hesitated, while I waited for a space to open between cars. Finally, he pulled the trap door open and disappeared below ground. A second, maybe two, of space opened between the cars, and I ran. When I got across, I forced myself to slow to a walk, but I walked hard, like I knew someone was following me. My fists balled at my sides, and a steady stream of fuck you fuck you fuck you ran through my head. But all my skin could feel was the caress of his thumb across my palm, the rush of his breath, and the thick, humid feeling of his warmth underground.

I did not see the magician for a few weeks after that. I had some legitimate excuses, a few fabricated ones. Family vacation, Easter, "sick" with the "flu." I wasn't leaving forever, but I didn't want to go back until I was more anchored in the real world. I had decided it was time for me to become a real teenage girl again.

My mom was thrilled to take me shopping for bright T-shirts and flowery flip-flops at the mall. My dad was equally thrilled when I joined the stage crew for the spring play (to put my building skills to use)—he called it "a healthy hobby." In school, I sat with old friends at lunch for the first time in months and started cracking jokes in class. I said nothing about magic, and no one asked. When I went back to the magician, we sat a respectable distance apart and were back to holes and blues records. He didn't offer a new task, and I didn't ask.

Then I started dreaming.

I couldn't remember the dreams at first. Images would bubble to the surface, ruined cities, swollen rivers, skyscraper trees, but I didn't know why I woke at dawn drained, disoriented, sometimes aroused, sometimes afraid. I finally put a notebook by my bed, and when I woke put pen to paper. My hand moved on the paper; I read what I was writing.

 
I had a sister, and we had to build a house. The house was also an ark—it would keep us safe from catastrophe. We made it out of stones, a dome. But when I went inside it was my parents' house, white carpets and sand-colored walls. I opened doors, looking for my dome house, but the rooms were burnt out. Charred, crumbled furniture. Horrible stains on the floor. I found my house in the oven. It was one empty room, dirt floor, with stone walls rising around me. Sunshine fell through an opening. A naked woman waited for me in the pool of light. She had gray hair, large beautiful breasts. I was ashamed. I kept staring at the triangle of hair between her thighs. I wanted her to kiss me, but when she did, my mouth filled with dirt. I stumbled onto my mother's flowered couch, choking because—
 

I didn't know how to finish this sentence. I slid my hand beneath my underwear and felt between my legs. I was wet and swollen like—like I wanted someone. But the dreams had left me terrified. Or, the choking left me terrified.

I went down to the magician's basement that week with my heart thumping. I could barely stay awake in school anymore, because I woke up every morning gasping for breath. Clearly, I had to ask him for help. But this dream felt too personal, too true, to share even with him.

The magician waited for me on his orange couch, fiddling with his guitar. I sat down on the opposite end of the couch, my butt on the armrest, and leaned forward, elbows on my knees.

The magician didn't look up from his guitar when he said, "What would you like to tell me?"

"How did you know?" I said.

The magician put the guitar aside and smiled at me in a way he hadn't since the tunnel expedition. "You look very intent."

I looked down at my feet, trying to find the words I needed. "I've been having dreams," I said. "A dream. About a stone house with a secret room." I trailed off, and the magician nodded at me, prompting me for more. "And . . . there's a naked woman. When she . . . when she kisses me, my mouth fills with dirt, and I choke."

The magician jumped when I said this. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I—I'm sorry," I said.

He looked down at his fingers, which were thrumming against his bony knees. He looked like a little boy thinking over a difficult problem. His fingers stopped thrumming, and he reached out for me—the only thing he could reach was my foot perched on the cushion. He held it.

"How much do you want to know about magic?" he said.

He was nervous, watching me carefully like I might bolt.

"Everything," I said without thinking.

He shifted in his seat; his slick magician pants made a swishing noise against the couch.

"There are a lot of ways to—manage surges in power, which is what that dream is showing you," he said. "Some ways are faster and more demanding. Others are slower, and safer. The time has come for you to—choose one."

The moment crystallized—the look in his eyes, his hand on my foot, my shaking legs—and I gazed at the scene impartially, as if from high above. I'd read all the standard texts, heard all the rumors, read my sensational novels. This was what always came next. But in real life, it felt unnatural and unreal.

The magician started talking again, like the silence spooked him. "Your dream is telling you that your magic—well, that your magic is tied to sex. Earth magicians, they get like that, especially as adolescents, with all the hormones, when I was your age I had dreams and the power and desire that pumped through me made me miserable. Because I couldn't focus it. I—I could help you get through this. Help you ground it, otherwise you'll continue to have these dreams. I understand if this makes you nervous because of the way you've been brought up, but I—"

I couldn't speak. I just nodded.

"Yes?" he said. "Yes to what?"

I had an urge to curl up on the couch and giggle like a twelve-year-old when someone says "sex." I hid my face in my hands.

"I want you to help me," I said into my palms.

He leaned towards me. "How?"

He drew my hands down from my face and rubbed his thumbs against the insides of my wrists. He was so beautiful in that moment, and his face seemed to have layers, like I could see him through time, my handsome old teacher, my hungry young man. I felt ill, I couldn't tell if it was with fear or desire. He had said I might be afraid.

He looked at me, waiting.

I kissed him, right on the mouth. He gathered me in his arms and pulled me down on top of him, straddling me across his lap. Our hips aligned, and he was hard against me.

Fear shot through me again, and I buried my face in his neck. I couldn't look at him. "You can't get tied up in this," he said into my ear. "This is about the work, not me. I'm a married man."

As he said this, he stroked my head, then slid his hand over my neck, down my back, and held my hip. No one had ever touched me like that, so softly, with such confidence. I saw him howling at the moon on the solstice, that freedom, that crack in the ice. His neck was dry and smelled like clay.

"I want to," I said, and pulled away from his neck. "I want to be a magician."

He took my face in his hand and stroked it. "You and I are very much alike," he said, and slid his other hand between my thighs.

* * *

Once the magician and I started having sex, I gave up on being a normal teenager. All I wanted to talk about was magic, and the magician, and no one wanted to hear that. My friends nicknamed me Silent Bob in the cafeteria, stopped calling me on weekends. My parents said polite things about my renewed enthusiasm for magic, but in insincere tones, so I would know they actually disapproved. A girl I had been close with on stage crew finally asked me, bluntly, "What's your deal?" and I told her what the magician and I were doing. She rolled her eyes and said, "Of course you are."

It wasn't "of course you are." It was dangerous and exhilarating. Our time together was full of color, where everything else in my life was grays and beiges. I'd had sex before, exactly twice, with a boy I'd liked so little I'd blocked his last name from my memory. It was fast and painful and existentially disappointing—This is it? This is what makes the world go round? He took more care tying the condom into a knot afterwards and tossing it, ceremonially, out the car window.

The magician held me like I was a precious thing. He kissed me deeply, brushed his fingers along my face. He buried his mouth between my legs and stayed there until I sweated, screamed, cried. He put himself inside me and told me to concentrate. "What do you see?" he said, over and over, moving inside me. "What do you see?"

I saw his face, his ear, his arms, his shoulder, his chest. I smelled rich and fertile things. We didn't do magic; maybe we were magic. When I walked home afterwards, the earth lit up beneath my footsteps.

I stopped dreaming about the house, the dirt, and the woman. Instead, in my dreams I was underground. Beside me were seeds, and corpses. When I woke up, I believed I was one of the seeds, but I thought of those dreams with dread.

A week before the winter solstice, I found the magician sitting upstairs in his kitchen with his wife. There was a cup of coffee waiting for me.

I wanted to bolt back out the door. But the magician looked calm, and his wife smiled at me. I looked down at my clothes, as if there were something that would give me away. If she didn't already know that I was sleeping with her husband—maybe magicians understood this kind of thing?

When I sat, the magician's wife announced that she would like to invite me to a women's solstice celebration. She and her husband had agreed that it would be good for me to experience a more traditional rite.

I looked over at the magician; his face was still blank. His wife still smiled at me. I had no idea what a "traditional rite" was, and that did, with reflection, seem like a flaw in my education. Most of the rites I knew involved messing around with her husband.

"Sure," I said. Somehow, my voice came out smooth and even.

"Great!" the magician's wife said.

Then the magician and I retreated downstairs and began to remove our clothes, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

"Does she, um, know?" I asked as he kissed my neck.

"Please don't discuss it," he said, and kissed me on the mouth, to seal the deal. This didn't answer my question, but I knew enough to let it drop. His hands were already fumbling for my bra.

"You're warm," he said.

I smiled against his shoulder. "So are you."

The solstice ritual took place in a park that had once been a battlefield. Cannons from the Revolutionary War pointed at me as I drove in the main entrance, the heat blasting in my little car. I hadn't had to sneak out this year; my parents had liked the sound of "a traditional rite." I had bundled myself in my thickest ski jacket and snow boots, though there was only a white film of frost on the ground. It had been dark since four thirty that afternoon, and now the dark was so complete that my headlights could not penetrate more than a few feet in front of me.

My car wound through dark, narrow roads up to a summit Washington's army had once seized from the British. Now it was nothing but frozen grass and hibernating trees, not a hint of ghosts or bloodshed. There was a single other car parked in the spot where I'd been told to leave mine, and a number of bicycles, which seemed like relics of another era on such a cold night. My feet crunched on the frost as I ascended the rest of the way to the hilltop, where a massive bonfire burned. At least ten other women clustered around another cannon; they were removing their clothes and draping them over the cannon's snout.

The magician's wife, about to pull her sweater over her head, spotted me and waved.

The women were greeting each other like old friends. They ranged from twenties to eighties, though most were middle-aged. There were a few girls my age, too; some of the women were introducing them as their students. The magician's wife put her arm around me possessively and introduced me to the group as her husband's student.

"She works with the earth, then?" one of the women said.

"She does," the magician's wife said, in a way that suggested she wasn't sure how that would go over.

A few of the women giggled, and one or two gave me uncomfortable looks. Another smiled at me, in a half-knowing, half-embarrassed way.

The magician's wife rolled her eyes and turned to me. "We do this ritual naked. You okay with that?"

"Of course she is," one woman whispered to another.

"Sure?" I said, not understanding anything.

"Go ahead and undress, then," the magician's wife said, and turned back to the cannon where she'd draped her coat. She pulled her sweater over her head, revealing breasts that spilled out of her black bra. I didn't realize I was staring until the woman who'd caught my eye caught it again and smirked. I crouched down to untie my shoe.

"She's cute," a naked woman said to the magician's wife, making it sound like a strike against me.

"You're lucky to have an earthy husband," another added.

"No, she's just lucky his students will never be interested in him," the first woman said with a laugh.

The magician's wife cast an uncomfortable glance back at me; I pretended to be engrossed in the mechanics of unbuttoning my pants. There was some reason I shouldn't be attracted to the magician?

"She's a talented kid," the magician's wife said. "It's been good for him to have a student like that again."

The rest of the women drifted towards the heat of the fire as I struggled out of my layers of clothes. My legs shook and pimpled with goosebumps as soon as I slid off my pants. I ripped the rest of my layers off as fast as I could and sprinted for the fire, expecting relief. Instead, the heat of the fire hit me like a wall. I felt trapped between two walls, the fire-heat wall in front of me, and the ice-cold wall at my back. The women around me stood comfortably, laughing and chatting. They were warm. Again, I was on the outside of their society. The magician was probably just crawling out of bed right now, getting ready to go out to the cave and learn secrets. It seemed much more dignified than public nudity and women talking about me like I wasn't even there.

"This ritual is hardest for people like us," a voice said next to me. It was the woman who had caught my eye. Her arms were crossed over her breasts, like mine, and she shivered with cold. "Our element is too asleep to warm us. But we're the most important. You've never done this before, have you?"

I felt like a kid on the first day of school, whose mom had dressed her and given her all the wrong advice. "Last year I went into a cave, with my teacher," I said.

"He is a private man," the woman said thoughtfully. "It's good you're here this year, even if you're cold and confused and . . . distracted."

"Distracted?" I said.

"Oh, you know. Earth women. Our blood runs hot, even when we're freezing."

She smiled when she said that, but she wasn't looking at me anymore; she was embarrassed. I looked around the circle at all the naked women, orange and beautiful in the firelight. Heat flushed me as I gazed at them, a familiar, latent feeling; I wanted to hold them, to kiss them and see if my mouth still filled with dirt. Is this what the women had been talking about? How looking at them made me feel?

The magician's wife lit herself on fire.

"Come on," the other earth woman said, yanking me out of my daze. "We're starting."

She crouched and dug at the cold, frozen earth. She worked it with her hands until it softened and spread it over her body in messy handfuls. I crouched and followed her lead. The dirt was grainy and dry in my hands, but it stuck to my skin as if I were the other side of a magnet.

Time jittered. My hands pulled up dirt, but didn't spread it. I dug, and then dug again. The magician's wife lit herself on fire once, twice, too many times. She was consumed. She was extinguished. She burned steady, like a wick. Time blurred completely. I spent days spreading dirt on my shoulder, my thigh, my cheek. Every grain of dirt worked into my skin, mingling with it, transforming me. The circle joined hands and rotated around the fire. I had the earth woman's clay hand in my left, and a wet, icy hand in my right. The air women blew counterclockwise, driving the circle; they floated in the air and pulled the fire and water women with them. But the earth woman and I had stone feet, and we kept the circle bound to the frozen ground.

At the same moment, the earth woman and I were crouched on the ground, whispering our questions, hopes, and fears through our dirty fingers. Questions flowed out of me, and insight flowed in with perfect clarity. I understood roads, I understood rocks, I understood dirt and plants and even dared to ask about the hot, rushing lava beneath. The water women slept on their backs, arms splayed as if floating. The air women had climbed trees. And the magician's wife, still aflame, stared at me with eyes full of disbelief, or perhaps anger, or perhaps sorrow, or the peculiar mixture of the three that comes when you discover the impossible thing you suspected was actually true.

Before I could react to her stare, I was back in the circle, and it turned faster and faster, the fire was driving it now, burning the ice off the water women, making the air women float to the sky, melting our stone feet to clay.

The water women's ice melted, and now the circle moved so fast it flowed. We rushed around the fire, moving from creek to river to ocean to rain, my feet broke and I fell from high above—

The circle stomped its feet, STOMP STOMP STOMP. Wherever my feet fell, shoots of green sprung up; they would only die again in the cold; it was cruel and beautiful. We no longer moved, or flowed, or fell; we shook the ground and shouted with one voice, "WAKE UP! WAKE UP! WAKE UP!"

This was not just a dance around a fire. The earth woman and I pulled the whole world around. We were the earth, and all these women shouted our name.

When the first line of light appeared on the horizon, the circle broke apart. The sun burned the magic off like a fog, and in the light of day we were sweaty, sooty, winded and undressed. The women hurried to douse the fire, to clean their bodies, to put on clothes. I stood stock-still as everyone else normalized around me, my thoughts racing, my heart crashing from an enormous high. The sky glowed blue in the east, and the earth opened its eyes.

Finally, the earth woman took my shoulder, and invited me to meet up with them at the local diner for pancakes and coffee. That reminder of the real world—coffee, breakfast, shiny red booths—shook me out of my trance. I shuffled back to the cannon and pulled clothes on, trying to put together what had just happened.

As I pulled my frozen hat off the cannon, the magician's wife approached me. Fear filled me, though I couldn't remember why. Something about fire. The sun was about to rise, and the light filled her singed, blackened hair. I could barely see her face.

"What did you think?" she said in a tone impossible to read.

I worked the hat in my hands, breaking off the frost. "It was—it was like nothing else."

The magician's wife crossed her arms. "Is that a good thing?"

"Yes!" I said. "I'd like to do . . . more magic, like this."

"What kind have you been doing—" she began, then trailed off.

The answer to the question—sweaty limbs, coursing energy—leapt to mind, and I saw her staring at me across the fire again, that devastated look on her face. I took a step backwards before I remembered that I couldn't run.

"Can I ask you a question?" she said.

Please don't, I thought. "Sure," I said.

She sighed, like she hadn't thought up the question yet. Finally she said, "When my husband interviewed you, what did you see?"

I was overcome by the urge to lie, but I knew she expected me to. "A woman's hip, under a dress," I said.

The magician's wife nodded. "And when you dream, what do you dream about?"

"Being underground," I said.

This threw her. "Well, I don't know what to make of that dream, but—"

"Before that," I interrupted. "I dreamed about a house, and a naked woman who kissed me and choked my mouth with dirt."

She fell silent, and looked at me. I wondered if I'd confessed too much. "Did you tell my husband about that dream?" his wife said.

"Yes," I said.

"What did he tell you, after you told him?"

Again, an urge to lie; I pushed it away. "That it was . . . about sex."

The magician's wife laughed once, hard and sharp. "You hadn't picked up on that on your own, had you?" she said.

Her words were a slap, both to me and to him. I grew angry. "Those dreams were terrifying," I said. "He said he could help me."

The magician's wife looked at me. "Magic is supposed to be terrifying."

The sun broke the horizon and the light, in one moment, changed. The magician's wife gave me another look, then walked away, to catch a ride to the diner. I waited until she was gone, and then I drove to the magician's house.

The magician answered the door in his robe, his hair wet from the shower. It was so warm inside that I started to sweat under my coat. I stripped off layers in his kitchen, draping them over the counter across from the oven. I wondered what would happen if we opened it now.

He watched me peel off my winter clothes. His eyes were red from the smoke of the fire, and his shoulders hunched more than usual. I wondered what he'd asked the earth last night. I asked for some coffee.

Coffee, the drink for talking over. I had questions, and I was going to ask them. He pressed a mug into my hands and stood too close as I sipped it.

"Good solstice?" he said.

"Um. Yeah," I said.

"I missed you last night," he said.

Missed me! my brain sighed. I smothered the thought. "Look, I—" I began.

He pushed my coffee aside and kissed me. He pressed my hand against his bare chest, slid it down between the folds of his robe. His skin was warm and moist beneath my palm.

I dropped the mug on the counter, because otherwise I would throw it. I tore myself out of his arms and turned away.

"I'm pissed!" I said, clenching my arms around myself.

"What—what's the matter?" he said.

"Are you really—helping me?"

The magician took a step towards me, then two. He put his hands on my shoulders. "I think you know that better than I do."

I shook my head, then turned and buried my face in his shoulder. "I don't."

He stroked my hair, and I leaned into him. He tilted my face up to his and kissed me tentatively. When I returned the kiss, he put his hand behind my head and pressed me to him. His hands tangled with my shirt, the waist of my jeans; he slid the clothes from my body, then let his robe fall on the floor. He held me naked for a moment, the warmth of the sunlight on our skin. Then he led me down to the basement, where we were safe. He bent me over the couch and slid himself inside of me, fucked me hard as I braced my hands against the scratchy fabric. Then I was on my back, and he kissed my face as he climbed on top of me. I started to wrap my legs around him but he pushed them away and sat up as he fucked me, watching me from above with a face I couldn't read. As he got closer, he doubled over me, moving his sweaty body against mine. I felt buried, underground. His breath was too hot on my shoulder as he came in a spurt on my stomach. He wiped it off and settled on top of me. I stroked his gray hair.

Before I could chicken out, I said, "I love you." I wasn't sure if I meant it, but I'd been wanting to say it for so long that I didn't want to miss my chance.

"Don't say that," he murmured, and kissed my ear.

After I left, I drove in circles around our town. I traced all the gray, groaning streets linking my neighborhood to the supermarket, the big box store, the pizza delivery place, the gas station, my high school. The parking lots were deserted this early in the morning, and the empty, anonymous buildings looked sinister without people. I didn't want to stare at these places, but I didn't know where to go. My house? Back to his? California? Where did you go, when you felt like this? I couldn't put a name to the panic filling me; I couldn't see straight.

The mailboxes still marked my tunnel, though the cornfield was frozen and the empty lot had a huge hole where the basement of a new house would be. Inside the tunnel, I found several flashlights, all of them dusty; I took the one shaped like a cartoon superhero. Its battery was low, but I could scry crumpled candy wrappers, gutted stuffed animals, a broken bicycle, a heap of frozen crayons. I had forgotten how disgusting kids were. I curled up on a pile of smudged dinosaur sheets, put my head on a lion leaking stuffing, and shut off the light.

No advice came to me from the just-woken earth, no visionary dreams. I cried, and the sleeve of my coat chafed my nose. A stash of fun-sized Halloween candy became dinner. In my sleep, a girl just like me threw up, over and over, into a hole in the ground.

When I pulled myself back above ground, it was already the middle of the morning. My cell phone was frozen from its night in the car; no missed calls. The magician's number was at the top of my recently dialed; I called it.

The speech I had rehearsed underground flew out of my head as the phone rang once, twice, three, four times. I had steeled myself to leave a dignified message when the magician's voice said, "Hello?"

"Hey," I said. My voice was so rough I coughed, and then repeated, "Hey."

"Hey," he said.

Silence stretched out.

"I want to come over," I said.

"Where are you?" he said. His voice was full of expectation. Maybe his wife still hadn't come home.

"Look, I can't—I don't want to—I can't, um, make out with you, okay?" I spat. I took a deep breath. "Can I just come over to talk?"

"Today isn't good," the magician said. "I'll see you at our usual time. Call me later in the week."

I was too shocked to respond. "Um. Okay," I said.

He hung up, and I stared at my phone's screen, as if an answer would appear to explain what had just happened. Nothing happened.

The car's engine took several tries before it turned over and slid into gear with a groan. I wasn't going to call him. I wasn't going back at my usual time. I didn't know what I was going to do. The car and I were moving; I hadn't noticed. I had exhumed myself, or sprouted. Farm land rolled by outside my window. The cornfields were dead and frozen, but in the corner of my eye they were seething beneath the frost. The earth was awake. So was I.