The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  There had to be a hiding spell or something. A don’t-stalk-me spell. A spell for being left the fuck alone.

  “Dad,” I croaked before he made it out the door. “Do we have any new occult books, or anything?”

  He paused and glanced over his shoulder. “I theoretically might have found something particularly cool at the last auction. Said theoretical particularly cool book was meant to be a theoretical Hanukkah gift, or maybe Christmas gift, depending on whether we’re going to my folks’ house this year. You know. Theoretically. However, given the circumstances, my plans could change. Would you like that?”

  “Yeah.” I ran my nail under the edge of a heart and fought the urge to peel it. “I’d like that a lot.”

  “Then you shall receive.” Boris heaved a melodramatic sigh, and with a wave of his hand and a wink in my direction, he turned again and left. He whistled all the way.

  There was music. It was barely perceptible, but I felt the chord progressions in some blood-deep way, the same way that I knew how to exhale and swallow. It was instinctual. I let myself be lulled awake with the chorus on my lips.

  It was Julian’s music. He must be downstairs.

  My red curtains stained the light, which stained the walls, which made my waking up warm and hazy pink. Sunlight poured across my Dracula-themed sheets and caught all the spinning dust particles, lit them up, suspended them like a beam from a UFO. My eyelids were sticky. My tongue was fuzzed. I sat up, yawned like a bear, and rubbed my fists against my eyes, which was a bizarrely pleasurable experience. I rubbed and rubbed until I saw spots. My hair still hung wet against my neck, and when I worked up the will to stop mashing at my eyelids, I clawed up my soggy locks and tied them in a knot. Hair ties were optional with curls like mine.

  It was eleven, easy. Eleven or noon or maybe later. School started at seven, so I was thoroughly skipping at this point, skipping past the point of Julian changing his mind and making me go. Boris would never go back on something he said to me, particularly something that involved me having a “glorious rebellion against The Man,” but Julian was both a lawful good and a chronic worrier. It’d be totally in the realm of things he might do, making me show up for the second half of classes. Did he even know that I was skipping?

  I sat up, snatched an oversized t-shirt off my bedpost (where I typically discarded them when I gave up folding), and tossed it on. This was not a bra kind of day. Fuck bras. This shirt, a Siouxsie and the Banshees relic that had been Boris’ before I stole it, was big enough to hang off one of my shoulders. I followed it with a pair of mostly clean sweatpants from the floor and willed myself out of bed.

  My room was a wreck, but an organized wreck. I knew where everything was, give or take. The walls kaleidoscoped with alchemical diagrams, horror flick posters, pages of blackout poetry. I’d scribbled notes on the blank spaces with lipstick and Sharpie. Candy wrappers were taped to posters, a running record of how much more chocolate I can eat than Boris. There was barely any wall left under all my stuff. I had a thing with Halloween decorations, specifically obnoxious witch paraphernalia, so witchy likenesses cluttered my bedside table and my desk. Coffee mugs sat abandoned, a few growing fuzz. My books sat stacked around the perimeter in crooked, precarious pillars, and on top of the books were sketchpads and mason jars filled with rusting nails, rose petals, and salt. A bestickered television sat in a corner, which was mostly comatose, as Netflix owned my ass these days. Six different incense burners peppered the windowsills, each with its own fragrance. All my stuffed animals (which I refused to throw away) covered the length of my bed. A box of tampons rested on my laptop.

  Then, of course, the floor. Two summers ago, I’d painted a ring on the floorboards. It was two fingers thick and one jump rope around, and it vaguely resembled a halo of spilled milk. The ring occupied the space between my bed and my window, and it was the only space on my floor that wasn’t covered with clothes, because I’d shoved the catastrophic mess two paces away in every direction. The medicine box I kept my tools in—the chalk, the candles, the knife—sat in the center.

  I licked the grime off my teeth.

  Time to take the new spell book out for a spin.

  NINE

  LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN CUZ I’M GOING TO

  Babies have gills when they’re purple in the womb-dark. They’re like little fantastical mercreatures, not quite human, far from finished. They exist suspended in liminal water space, so they need gills to breathe. I picture my own as having been the angriest pink little jaggedy slits, bright as gooey papercuts on either side of my neck. We cannot keep our gills, though. The world outside is colder, thinner. Breathing there requires sputtering. Mouths gasping, flared nostrils, that sort of thing. Babies are stripped of their primordial gills and learn to survive without. The papercuts zip themselves up and vanish, and the babies turn into people who forget they ever had them in the first place. This forgetting is normal. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. Everybody who has ever had a body has done it. It’s just part of a human life.

  Magic is like that. It’s intrinsic to who we are, it’s innately temporary, and forgetting it is just part of becoming a person. We’ve all got some ephemeral strangeness that shrivels and fades every day. It’s the part of us that doesn’t understand how we’re separate from the cosmos. If the cosmos is part of us, we can move it like it’s part of our body. We could shape it and tear it and flow seamlessly in and out of it, because we are it, or at least we were. Keeping our magic isn’t possible. This is because the world isn’t magically inclined. The fabric of reality as it’s been made is defined by this lack of magic. There are laws governing physics. We’ve got clocks that tell time and standardized ways to measure space. Things don’t happen without explanation. There is always evidence and cause and effect. Gravity doesn’t make exceptions. The sky is blue because of how molecules scatter light. Sickness is made of itty-bitty beings, and even though you can’t see them, they crawl all over every surface and might murder you unless you murder them first with orange-smelling soap. You can’t just wish something into being. You’ve got to work for it. See how magic is a fucked-up framework? You’d be a mess if you kept your magic. You’re better off leaving it with your gills. It’s not like you’ll ever be the wiser.

  Scenario: There’s a flood.

  If there’s a flood, and the universe snatches you up and slam dunks you into a whirlpool, you’ve either got to grow those gills back, or you’re going to die. Realistically speaking, you die. How could you not? You barely remember your gills, and even if you do, they’re gone. You can claw your throat and thrash and scream, but they won’t come back. You lost them in the process of being a normal human person. Your lungs fill until they pop. Belly up.

  But sometimes, you live. Ridiculous, no?

  She was there when I woke up. My mother, infinitely tall in a pea coat and Birkenstocks, rapping her knuckles on the kitchen table. She wore at least seven rings per finger. I think a lot about her hands. The ghost of last night’s lipstick was still peachy on her mouth, and she gnawed a strip of skin off her bottom lip, smiled at me all crooked. Why don’t we get ourselves Italian for lunch? We can split something at that cafe on fourth street. My mother, wondering aloud next about where she left her fake Rolex. Her fingers twisting braids down the back of my head with her shiny coffin nails, tapping the jean pocket where her cigarettes had been before she quit, covering her teeth as she laughed, because I must have said something funny, though I’m not quite sure where the joke was. My mother, the most beautiful being to ever exist corporeally, with features I inherited that actually looked proportionate on her face, looked lovely even, neither feminine nor masculine but regal-androgynous like angels must be, telling me that I was going to have to learn to braid my own hair one of these days. She found her car keys in a wineglass and tucked them in her breast pocket. Winked at me, still laughing. Just a few errands. Twenty minutes, tops, then lunch. You’re a big girl. Think you can handle it?

  Uh
-huh, yeah, sure. You betcha.

  I could hear it from inside the house. The smack. The strike. It rattled the walls and the windows. It was not a sound that nature could produce, sounded like a spoon-through-a-meat-grinder, a bovine howl, a brittle crunch. The smashing of glass and steel. There went little seven-year-old me, braids a-swinging, darting out of the front door with my disposable camera, hoping in my morbid way that someone had hit the telephone pole with a riding lawnmower again. Little, painfully naive me, taking the time to play hopscotch in my neighbor’s driveway before I investigated. Thinking that a noise like that could mean anything other than an irreversible End Of The World.

  We only lived five houses down from the tracks.

  Someone’d taken a video on their phone and sent it to the local news station. A couple someones, actually. There were enough voyeurs that the station could stitch the shitty flip phone videos into something cinematically presentable. I watched it, of course I did. Knees pulled to my chest, nose to the television screen, chipped nails chittering between my teeth. A passenger train had dragged the smithereens of a cream-colored car two miles before it stopped, and by then, it was barely a car at all. The car was smoldering rubble, crumpled like a ball of paper. They found a body inside, but it was barely a body. They weren’t sure who the body rubble had belonged to. I knew, though. It was our car. My mother was in that car. Also, she was not. Parts of my mother’s body lined the train tracks just like breadcrumbs leading home.

  The rules shattered. How was there a smear where there had been a person? How was twenty minutes also a decade? How was I motherless when I had a mother, who was coming home in twenty minutes to take me to lunch? When I was starving, I wouldn’t eat, because I was waiting for her to take me out. I bit the social workers who tried to unbraid my hair. Whenever they tried to explain what had happened to me, I spilled scalding coffee on their knees, or carved notches in the upholstery of their car seats, or broke their office lamps with a mighty swing of my yo-yo and reigned sparks all over the desk. Anything to get the explanations to stop. There was no cause and effect. There wasn’t an algorithm, or even a vague hypothesis about why she didn’t exist anymore that I could fathom. There wasn’t anything. What was created had been destroyed. Reality went ragged. I didn’t like things that I usually liked. I didn’t like things that reminded me of her, but I didn’t like new things, either. I liked being nasty, because I hadn’t done nasty before, but it’d probably been inside me all along. I liked throwing dishes off the roof. I liked traipsing through doors marked No Trespassing. I liked using words that made adults curdle. I liked picking locks, picking pockets, picking scabs. I broke the rules of girlhood. I tossed them in the pyre with the rest.

  My mother willed me the lot. It was my very own dragon horde, except that I wasn’t allowed to touch it until my magic eighteenth birthday, because that was when I’d grow my responsibility bone, the one that lets you vote and make porn and go to Big Kid Prison. My mother neglected to name who would take me in her stead. Must have forgotten that part. When people asked me, I couldn’t name a single blood relative aside from my mother. At the time, I didn’t know she had a living brother. I didn’t know where she was born or what she did with her time or with whom she kept her company. They couldn’t find anything on her. As far as they knew, my mother had started existing when I was born.

  Anyway. Sunburned agents pried me screaming from my motherless house to a place where the blacktop was broken and the schoolkids made each other eat worms.

  Foster mom had a name, because I wasn’t supposed to call her “Mom.” I didn’t bother to learn this name. I didn’t trust her not to dissolve into the next dimension without so much as a note. Not that it’d matter, because she unabashedly didn’t care. Maybe somewhere, some luckier kid had landed with a foster mom who loved and respected them, who adopted them and gave them a room and a puppy and a nice little slice of their heart. I wasn’t that damn kid. I was half-past rotten, and she couldn’t want me, because no one could. Foster mom slapped Nasty Kid on me like a price tag. Well, fuck her. I was too preoccupied with drowning to care. I’d wrap my hands around my neck and search for my gill scars, for places that proved I’d lost something, that I’d been different once, that there’d been a time when I’d been friends with oxygen.

  One foster mom was switched out for another. I was periodically asked if I remembered having a clandestine grandpa or something, or if I had the faintest idea who’d fathered me. I still didn’t, every time. I didn’t even fully grasp that it took two people to make a kid yet. My mother once said that she’d conceived me all on her own, maybe joking, and I’d believed her.

  I turned eight. I moved again. Lost teeth, got stitches, had on-again, off-again lice.

  Then, the miracle. Deus ex machina. I grew new goddamn gills.

  My gills were left on the front porch of my third foster home. No return address. Not even a stamp. It was a parchment-wrapped package, bone white, rectangular, and sturdy. The package was made out to Ms. Eloise Pike. If it hadn’t been, I doubt foster mom would’ve let me have it. It was the first piece of mail I received after my mother died, and I didn’t know anyone who cared enough to send me packages. Foster mom figured it was an ill-timed birthday present from a social worker, something like that. I’d ripped the package from her hands when she showed it to me. I clutched it to my chest, snarled at her, ran down the street at top speed like a bandit with a bounty. I clambered up a black locust and only unwrapped it when I was sure that no one, not even God, could reach me and take it away.

  It’d been tied shut with silk ribbon. It was dark and soft as batwings, and I held it in my teeth as I tore through the paper. There was a note tucked under the first layer of wrapping, and the note was written in the darkest ink I’d ever seen. Dark as the void. Darker than hell. Looping, slanted handwriting, the kind of handwriting that John Hancock would’ve envied. I could barely read it. I had to squint, sound some of it out loud.

  Everlasting condolences for your loss. We mourn the tragedy and we remember, we remember, we remember. Heal. Grow. Flourish.

  —PS

  The notecard was illustrated with a tangle of braided serpents, which ringed the message in glossy scarlet ink. Not quite an ouroboros, because an ouroboros is a single snake, and I counted seven. A wreath of snakes, a crown.

  Under the note was a shroud of gossamer wrapping.

  Under that wrapping was a book.

  The book was heavy. It had gravity. It beckoned like Excalibur or the Holy Grail. It pulled something out of me when I held it in my arms, like it was denser than earthly matter, like it could suck me inside of it and devour me raw. It was bound in oxblood leather. The edges of the pages were dusted with copper. It had a pewter pheasant-claw clasp. The snake pattern appeared again, this time emblazoned on the spine like a scar. It made my fingertips throb, my mouth water, my palms itch.

  I opened it, and for the first time in months, I could force myself to breathe.

  The title was VADE MECVM MAGICI, VOL. I. It was written in thick ink, and it was so shiny that it looked wet, like brushing it might stain my fingertips. There wasn’t an author or a date of publication. There wasn’t a table of contents. I thumbed through random pages and was consumed.

  The first page read like a diary entry, and the page after that detailed a series of botanical illustrations. A lock of hair was embedded in a block of trochaic prose. There were advertisements for children’s books with the words blacked out, spiraling geometric sketches, fragments of poetry etched on illustrations of ribs. Two pages didn’t have any ink on them, but were entirely written with embroidery, and described the types of objects that can hold curses, and the uses of each phase of the moon. There was a page dedicated to listing feminine names, with a mineral beside the name, as well as a planetary alignment and a time of day. There was a chapter that outlined various theories of the universe, why there is life, why there is death, why these things are all magic, and why magic is everything.
The text was broken up with randomly placed illustrations of alchemical symbols, Enochian runes, Roman numerals, and dozens of dead alphabets twisted around ink circles. The captions described the circle and the geometric scribbles within—this is for healing broken limbs, this is for tearing through the veil, this is for making you love yourself, this is for petitioning the stars. There was a page that sparkled like fine glitter and listed the benefits of biting the thing you cursed, or kissing the wounds, or suckling poison. There was a page on how to lace a spell into an instrument, and how to entreat cats, crows, and boys with its tune. The chapter on incantation was comprised of red paper and written with white ink, and it repeated the same phrase over and over again: Cast the word, make it so. It was written in a dozen different hands and every font imaginable: MAKE IT SO. MAKE IT SO. MAKE IT SO. There was a section on summoning that looked like it belonged in an illuminated manuscript, complete with medieval-style depictions of monstrous beasts. The chunk on sigil making was written upside down, and when the book was held upside down, it was written right-side up.

  I read it cover to cover. Then, I read it again.

  My Magici gave me the bones I was missing. New rules replaced the withered ones. Time moved forward again. The world made sense. I had guidelines on how to exist without my mother, how to exist in the world at all. Order was restored in my universe. Witchcraft, my life was saved by witchcraft. It was my only mode of survival. It sutured my soul to Earth.

  Three days after I received the book, I looked for a spell that might make me feel loved again. I thought, stupidly, that it might make my mother manifest outside my shared bedroom window, that she might reach her long fingers between the curtains and pet my hair, might lure me out onto the roof and whisk me away into the night. The spell looked easy enough. I wrote a stupid little rhyme and drew circles on the sidewalk with green chalk.