SS Domestic Magic (v5.0)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Domestic Magic

  June 6th, 2011

  The most picked-on kid at a high school for the magical has nightmares about J. Rutherford Wisenhaur II killing people with a fire spell. She can’t stop him. She only has domestic magic and can’t do most difficult spells. To make matters worse, no one will believe that her dream is important. What’s a young nearly powerless witch to do?

  A young adult fantasy story by USA Today bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Available for 99 cents on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble.com, and in other e-bookstores. Also in the collection, Five Fantastic Tales, which is available in trade paper for $7.99 or in electronic edition for $2.99 on Kindle, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble.com, as well as other e-bookstores.

  Domestic Magic

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Copyright © 2010 by Kristine K. Rusch

  The dream’s like the scenes on TV only with magic. J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Third comes into the cafeteria wearing his father’s black robes, points a finger at June Bauer and immediately she’s burning. Alive. A couple other kids use water spells to put her out, but when they do, he shoots flames at them, and they go down.

  Water spells are beyond the expertise of almost everyone in the room—one of the higher levels that a lot of us will learn in college (at least that’s what Mrs. Parnham says. She also says don’t worry about it; you won’t ever need them, which is bad advice considering the dream).

  I’m in line to pay for the slice of pizza I’m not supposed to be eating—Mom says you can’t use magic to get rid of fat; it’s not fair and it won’t hold (which turned out to be true in the case of my older sister)—when J. Rutherford starts his rampage. I scurry behind the steam tables, taking my tray with me—God knows why I think pizza will be helpful—and I watch him burn down half a dozen other students before Principal Haas, who is still in his office, douses the entire cafeteria in an ocean of water.

  We—everyone in the caf—get swept outside, but not before six die. They’ll stay dead too. Resurrection spells are black magic, and worse than that, they’re flawed. You create zombies or ghosts unless you’re really, really good at it. So as drenched kids run across the lawn—slow motion, just like on TV—everyone knows that what happened in there was awful, permanent, and terrible.

  And then I wake up.

  In tears.

  I’m not a precog. I don’t have a lot of magic skills and the ones I do have are disgustingly domestic—I can turn MacDonald’s french fries into the best garlic mashed potatoes you’ve ever tasted; I can clean your house with an eyeblink; I can iron your clothes just by rubbing my forefinger and thumb together. It’s so damn sexist. Boys almost never get the domestic magic gene. Some of our geneticists (yes, we have geneticists and other scientists as well) think that the domestic magic gene is carried on the X chromosome and becomes stronger in girls than it’ll ever be in boys.

  So I’ve accepted that I have girl magic—the most stereotypical type. I’ve also accepted what I can’t do.

  Among the many things I can’t do is see the future. Not in flashes, not in visions, and certainly not in dreams.

  So no one is going to believe that what I dreamed might come true.

  Maybe not even me.

  But I’m scared too. Because if I did see the future, then I’m duty-bound to stop this thing.

  Except I’m not the right person for the job. J. Rutherford and I have history.

  Bad history.

  The kind that makes anything I say about him sound suspiciously like I’m out for revenge.

  Which I’m not.

  At least, not any more.

  ***

  J. Rutherford and I grew up on the same block. He lived three houses down from me in this single-story suburban ranch thing that everyone thinks is trendy now, but they thought it down market then.

  His dad had just started the Magic Revival Hour on local cable access, but the show hadn’t yet been picked up by the Sy-Fy Channel, which led to repeat airings on USA, which made J. Rutherford Wisenhauer the Second (known around here as Number Two) the most famous real magic proponent in the country.

  That’s when the Wisenhauers bought the mansion on Pendergast Hill, although you’d more properly call that white elephant a castle, and after the rumors about Number Two dabbling in the black arts started.

  There’s lots of jealousy in the magic community. My mom always attributed the comments to sour grapes—it was pretty clear from the beginning that Number Two’s TV show was going to take off, especially when the Conservative Right sent its minions from all over the country to picket outside his cable access studios.

  But I wasn’t so sure jealousy was the source of the talk. I’d seen J. Rutherford around the neighborhood and he knew how to do stuff long before it got taught in Salem Township Elementary. Mean stuff, too, like hanging someone by his feet from an invisible rope or morphing a litter of puppies into a single entity attached at the tips of the tails.

  That stuff may not be black magic, but it is precursor black magic, and something most parents would never, ever allow their kids to read about, let alone try.

  Some kids knew how to undo—which made me wonder about them too—and more than a few parents got involved, privately talking to Number Two or his wife. They always promised to do something—and they did, but only about the problem at hand. The puppies got separated or someone cut the invisible rope and floated the poor victim to the ground so he won’t break anything.

  But the Wisenhauers never really did anything about J. Rutherford and we all breathed a sigh of relief when he moved to that hilltop.

  We figured he wouldn’t be our problem any more.

  But of course, he was.

  ***

  As for me and J. Rutherford, here’s the text message version. But first, you need a little background.

  What most people don’t know about small domestic magic is that it’s practical magic. I can do all kinds of small useful things that no one else even thinks of. I can stop your casserole from burning, or add golf spikes to your shoes so you won’t slip down an icy hill.

  I’m like the white vinegar of magic; no one even thinks of me until they spill red wine on their shirt.

  The thing I learned from my mother is that practical magic is subtle. I can’t resuscitate a blackened banana into nutritious food, but I can prevent a perfect yellow banana from going stale for an entire week. And that’s valuable, especially when you only have so much food, and it’ll all spoil before you get to it.

  Sometimes, by thinking small, you can make great changes.

  Mom told me all this by way of a lecture one night after a long crying jag—mine, of course. I was upset because I couldn’t make rats jump over the walls of their maze like show ponies. Everyone else could do it, but not me.

  I, however, could clean their cages with a wave of a hand.

  Mom said that cage-cleaning is a lot more important to real life than rat wall-jumping, which of course I didn’t believe. But she talked about the practical magic, subtle magic, small equals great thing, and I finally believed her.

  Then I decided to test it on J. Rutherford.

  Okay. I didn’t decide right then and there, but the next day, I’m outside and I see J. Rutherford picking on the new kid from down the block.

  The new kid looks pickable, the kind who just by his clothes is asking for trouble. He’s wearing obvious hand-me-downs—the worn knees on his jeans actually puddle around his ankles—and he’s way too skinny. He has a bruise along one chin and fragile glasses that someone has attached to his head with one of those rubber things that goes around the back of the skull.

  T
o make things worse, he doesn’t approach the world with confidence. He cringes as he walks, which is a neon red KICK ME sign to someone like J. Rutherford.

  J. Rutherford has the new kid in his sights. He’s calling to the kid, putting on the personal charm that he learned from Number Two, and making the kid feel welcome. I’ve seen J. Rutherford do this a dozen times, and it always ends badly.

  Actually, it always ends with the invisible rope, and a kid hanging by his feet from some obscure spot in the neighborhood until someone sees him and gets him down.

  Only I think this kid isn’t going to survive the upside down trick. It’s going to break what little spine he has left.

  I’m about to find a grown-up when I remember what Mom says about small things. I know magic theory. I know that the invisible items created—heck, any item created—has to be made of the same kind of materials it would have in the real world. Which is why, to go back to the banana example, I can’t create a new banana from a spoiled one (my magic isn’t big enough) but I can preserve a good one for a limited period of time.

  J. Rutherford’s invisible ropes are made of hemp. He’s never been any good at tying those plastic ropes or those slick ropes you buy at the hardware store. He can only tie—and we’re talking by hand here—the ropes made from coarse natural materials.

  Now if I were better at magic, I’d change the natural ropes to plastic ropes, but I’m not. I have to think domestically.

  I have to think small.

  And as J. Rutherford conjures his invisible hemp rope, I stand on the curb, just outside his eyeline and fray the weave. I fray it so badly the rope has no tensile strength at all. J. Rutherford doesn’t notice because rough unfrayed hemp feels pretty much the same as rough frayed hemp, especially when you can’t see what you’re doing.

  So he commands this thing, with its hangman’s noose, to wrap itself around the new kid’s feet. It does, but the minute J. Rutherford pulls the thing tight—that moment in which so many of us fell flat on our backs and screamed with surprise—the thing just kinda slips away from the kid’s ankles, leaving rope burns and little else.

  The kid still screams like the hounds of hell are after him, and runs home.

  I slide along the curb until I find a good tree, and wait there, but J. Rutherford never sees me. Instead, he picks up the rope, and tries to figure out what went wrong.

  He did that every single time I thwarted him—and I thwarted him a lot that spring. Then he finally gets the bright idea to make the rope visible (something the rest of us would have done right away; I never said J. Rutherford was the sharpest knife in the drawer) and sees the fraying.

  Even then he doesn’t figure out it’s me. He blames a bunch of other kids. None of them know how to fray a magical rope like that—the magic is too small, and most people never learn the small stuff because it seems too unimportant.

  So it takes him another month to find me.

  But when he does….

  Oh, when he does…

  I don’t like to remember that. It involved hanging—by the neck, actually—and real torture and six weeks in the hospital for me. By the time my throat had healed enough so that I could talk and my hands had healed enough so that I could write, Number Two had moved his family to their little castle and had given lots of money to local charities.

  So when I blamed J. Rutherford, no adult believed me.

  The kids did, of course. They knew how mean he could be.

  But the adults wondered why I was lying about such a nice kid (he knew to turn on the charm with them too) and urged me to tell them what really happened.

  The local police (magical branch) figured some drifter had done this. There’d been a lot of torture murders of little girls in nearby communities, and they figured this was just a different version of the same old song.

  Only they caught the torture murderer guy, and he confessed to killing dozens of kids all over the country, but he wouldn’t admit to attacking me.

  Even after that, no adult believed me and the more I pointed at J. Rutherford, the more people forgot my six weeks in the hospital (and the very real fear that I wasn’t going to survive) and the more they started thinking of J. Rutherford as the victim of some poor little girl’s delusion.

  Once I asked my mom if Number Two had cast a spell on the whole town, making them believe that J. Rutherford was a good kid.

  But she just shook her head. “If he cast that kind of spell, you would never say anything about J. Rutherford, and I would think he’s a saint too.”

  Still, I wondered if such a spell would work on people who’d suffered at J. Rutherford’s hands. Maybe the spell only worked on people who hadn’t paid much attention to J. Rutherford.

  Only I didn’t say that theory to Mom because she’d tell me to let it all go and to stay away from the Wisenhauers. It was just safer that way.

  And I couldn’t look up black magic spells without setting off alarms all over town. I was already seen as the kid who went crazy when that drifter tortured her. If I got viewed as the crazy kid who dabbled in black magic, I’d get sent away somewhere.

  So I successfully avoided J. Rutherford for four years—from elementary school to our first year of high school—and I never talked about him.

  But that didn’t stop everybody else from wondering if I ever got over the “trauma.” I have to see counselors every other week, and no matter how much I claim I’m over it, they don’t believe me.

  In fact, sometimes they act like I’m the one who’s going to blow up the school—even though girls never do those things, not even at the magical schools.

  Mom thinks I’m just paranoid—and she says that I’m not over it either and won’t be until we move somewhere far away from the Wisenhauer family (although I wonder how that’s possible to do, with Number Two being internationally famous and all).

  So I’m just hanging on until I get out of high school. I’m hoping for college somewhere that’ll appreciate my domestic talents or maybe even a trade school, like that magic chef school in Paris that I’ve been reading about.

  At least, I was hanging on until the night I had that stupid dream.

  ***

  The first time the dream comes, it’s at 3 a.m., and scares me so deep that I don’t want to go back to sleep. So I go downstairs and make Mom the best breakfast ever—without magic (or much of it anyway). It’s just the two of us now, with my older sisters married and making babies, and my dad long gone—as in he ran off, not as in he’s dead.

  I kinda like it being me and Mom, but I’ve never cooked anything just for her before, so when she gets up at her normal 5:30, she’s stunned.

  Over bacon, eggs, toast and this amazing pastry that I got from my latest French cookbook, I tell her about the dream and she says, “What an awful nightmare,” which sounds like she’s dismissing it.

  So I say, “What if it’s a premonition?”

  And she stifles a laugh with a mouthful of scrambled eggs, probably thinking I don’t notice.

  “Honey, no one in our family has ever had precognitive abilities. Visions don’t come to us. It’s just not possible.”

  I set down my fork. The food is good, but not good enough to eat when I’m this upset. “What if you’re wrong?”

  She freezes for a minute, then sighs. “Has he said anything to you?”

  “J. Rutherford? Are you kidding?”

  “No,” she says, but she’s talking like she’s not really paying attention to me. “So have the other kids said something, something you might have overheard?”

  “You mean like J. Rutherford confessing his plans to his friends?” I can’t keep my voice from rising. “Mom, that would mean he has friends.”

  She frowns at me. “You can’t tell anyone about this, hon. Everyone knows that we don’t have that kind of magic, and then there’s your reputation.”

  She makes it sound like I did something wrong.

  “I don’t have a reputation,” I snap.

 
“You know what I mean.”

  The thing is that I do know what she means. But that doesn’t make it right. “He hurt me. How come everyone around here thinks I did something to him?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, hon.”

  “But you said it that way.”

  “Just like the school officials will when you bring this to them.” Mom leans over her plate of eggs. She hasn’t touched the pastry yet and it’s the best part. “Hon, listen. It makes sense that you’d have a nightmare about J. Rutherford. I’m amazed you don’t have more of them.”

  “I do.” I get up, grab my pastry and my coat and leave the house. Mom can handle the mess I made. And I don’t need my books.

  I just need to get out of there.

  The one person who usually believes me, the one who understands me, and she tells me to blow this off. I’d love to, but I meant what I asked her.

  What if this is a true premonition? What if I have developed some kind of Sight?

  What if J. Rutherford walks into the cafeteria with a fire-loaded finger, and kills six of my classmates?

  What if I could have prevented it just by telling the right person?

  I don’t want to live through that. I don’t want to be the cause of six deaths.

  I just don’t.

  ***

  So when I get to school, I go straight to the counselor’s office. I have a private therapist, Mr. Marx, on Tuesdays outside of school, but my every-two-weeks meetings are with Mrs. Emerson who works in the guidance office. She doesn’t have a psychology degree. Her degree is in magical brain phenomenon, which is more like neurology and psychiatry as it pertains to magic.

  Or that’s how she explained it to me once.

  Mrs. Emerson is younger than my mom and skinnier too. She wears designer rip-offs, which automatically makes her suspect to me because I think anyone who wears designer-rip-offs has to have low self-esteem.

  But still, she’s the only person with some authority I can think of telling. Or, to clarify, the only person with some authority who has even the slightest chance of believing me.

  Her office has windows that overlook the parking lot. She has covered those windows in plants, many of which are hanging medicinal herbs. She makes me sit in that fake leather chair across from her desk and she listens attentively as I tell her about the dream and my fears. I don’t tell her what Mom said, although Mrs. Emerson repeats Mom’s sentiments almost word-for-word.