The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  The Magpie’s Return

  Curtis Smith

  The Magpie’s Return

  Text Copyright © 2020 Curtis Smith

  All rights reserved.

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  Published in North America and Europe by Running Wild Press. Visit Running Wild Press at www.runningwildpress.com Educators, librarians, book clubs (as well as the eternally curious), go to www.runningwildpress.com for teaching tools.

  ISBN (pbk) 978-1-947041-61-5

  ISBN (ebook) 978-1-947041-62-2

  One for sorrow,

  Two for joy,

  Three for a girl,

  Four for a boy,

  Five for silver,

  Six for gold,

  Seven for a secret,

  Never to be told,

  Eight for a wish,

  Nine for a kiss,

  Ten for a bird,

  You must not miss.

  One for Sorrow, children’s nursery rhyme

  To my grandparents, who lifted me up before they knew my name.

  I.

  I’ve been called a genius. The school psychologist in second grade, a parade of others through the years. Men and women with calm voices and busy pens. I solved their puzzles, repeated their ever-lengthening alphanumeric daisy chains both forward and back. When I grew bored, I questioned my evaluators. Did they enjoy their work? Did they have children of their own? What were their names? The testings took place in universities and hospitals, rooms made familiar by their sterile whiteness, their hidden microphones and two-way mirrors. Papers have been published about some of those sessions, journal articles heavy with footnotes and graphs. I don’t mention these things to my teachers and classmates, but the whispers swirl in my wake, a layer of distance I have cursed and embraced, depending upon my mood. And while I’m sympathetic to the vagaries of language and to the human desire to categorize, I’m not entirely comfortable with my label. My condition has less to do with intelligence than vision, for I see the world in layers, in ever-evolving webs of connection. A may well lead to B ninety-nine percent of the time, but given a twist, it might jump to C or H or crossover to delta or mu or a hieroglyphic character culled from a pharaoh’s tomb. Imagine a summer night streaked by branching lightning. That’s the slide show in my skull, all day, every day. A thousand burning paths lighting the dark.

  And for every light, there is a shadow. My shadow is no darker or wider than yours, but the same lightning that illuminates my outward gaze can’t help but splash back inside, and I am left with a more acute awareness of my shadow’s depth than most. This, too, is a gift, albeit a somewhat melancholy one. Gnothi seauton, Plato urged. Know thyself, a laudable goal of those fun-loving Stoics, although I must believe truly knowing one’s self isn’t a task for the faint of heart. My mother, the poet, strives to capture natural moments both mundane and telling, so allow me, her left-brained daughter, to begin with this image. A solitary girl, her face long, a reluctant, shuffling stride as she crosses her school’s campus beneath a leaden November sky.

  Every third period I attend honors AP Calculus 2 at the high school. Calc is the highlight of my day, an immersion in concepts and theories and an escape from the junior high circus of selfies and status and warring cliques. Every fourth period, I return. There are numerous theories of time beyond its lockstep march through linear awareness, and allow this trudge across the school’s playing field to be my exhibit A in the argument that the second hand sags beneath the weight of dread. I keep my head down, not to avoid the cutting breeze but to save myself the horizon’s rise of my school, yet even with a diverted gaze, each step melds the building’s brick and steel deeper into my bones. My pace slows as I kick a forgotten field hockey ball. The field’s chalked lines have faded, these hard-frost nights. Echoes sprint past, the warmth of early September, my strides across the grass, and the thwack of wood and rubber resonates in my hands. Another kick, and I estimate the ball’s circumference and velocity and its travels across an X-axis, its distance impacted by variables of cleat ruts and the gouges cut into the rubber by the groundskeeper’s mower. The numbers’ dance leads to new numbers, other variables, and for a moment, my anxiety fades until the ball rolls onto the parking lot macadam.

  The crows perched atop the lot’s light poles aim their beaks at me. One caws, and the others respond. The Stoics had their omens, and I’m not so grounded in the logical that I’m deaf to the birds’ warnings. I cross into the school’s shadow, a soft eclipse, and with the deeper chill, I pause and lean against a car. I have my calming techniques—belly breaths, positive visualization—but these are my parents’ soft skills, which might be nice in the adult world but which broker little sway in the weirdness of junior high. I’m weary and raw—this Thursday in a week when yesterday felt like Friday. My period with its bad electricity and evil thoughts. The Rudolph-pimple on my nose.

  Breathe, and I hold in the sobering cold. My reflection stares back from a minivan window. A curved face, a cloud-choked sky. Beneath my reflection, a still life under glass. A coffee cup and a Cheerio-littered child’s seat. A gym bag and sneakers. Envelopes waiting to be mailed. A picture of a life lived, but beyond the moment’s breathing fulcrum wait a thousand quantum possibilities, a horizon of futures, fragmented and radiating and infinite. Futures benign. Beautiful. Horrific. All plausible. All perhaps real. I close my eyes and imagine a future where I simply keep walking. The school dwindles and the gray weight slips from my shoulders. A smile on my face and not a glimpse back.

  The outside bell rings. My daydream evaporates, and I surrender to the only future available to a rule-following, professor’s daughter. A warm burst greets me inside the tech wing doors. I pass woodshop, its aromas of sawdust and the alcohol-sting of fresh shellac, its whir of powering-down drills and saws. Teen movies could lull adults into the false memory that high school hallways allow for leisurely milling and civil banter, but let me assure you that is not the case. The corridor floods, the shoulder-to-shoulder maw the fodder of an agoraphobic’s nightmare, the assault of voices disorienting after my walk’s hush. Conversations overlap, their coherence and meaning muddled. I squeeze my way into the flow and shuffle forward.

  Confession number one: for the past year, I’ve worked on what I privately refer to as my “Invisibility Campaign.” It’s a kind of subtraction, a math with rules both simple and as intricate as Euclidean vectors. I raise my hand in calc but nowhere else, the remainder of my day dedicated to window views and notebook doodles. It’s not laziness; it’s more a willful abandonment, my daydreams more entertaining than the swirling rumors of the previous weekend’s escapades of who got drunk and who got naked and who got arrested. I hunker in silence, comforted by the quiet’s warmth and dulled rhythms, distant but not oblivious because I always keep an eye on the herd, wary of its unpredictability, its desire to turn upon its weakest. I think of the nature shows I grew up watching and how I’d sob when predators picked off the young and stragglers. I’ve grown up a bit, my tears more guarded, but those images and their truths remain.

  I disengage myself from the current and pull up to my locker. A cackle pierces the din, and I’m thankful for the boy with blue hair and enormous headphones who shields me from Missy Blough. An unfortunate synchronicity crosses Missy’s path with mine every day. I shrug off my pack and take out my calc text, hoping the blue-haired boy will save me from Missy’s gum-cracking comments. As usual, she’s holding court. As usual, she broadcasts her opinions loudly and freely, a delivery of judgment and ridicule and venom. Her world’s simple division—her home girls and the school’s remaining multitudes of losers. She’s the unofficial leader of the Wolf Pack, an all-female clan familiar with the principal’s office and detention hall. Girls dropped off late
to school from muffler-rumbling cars, sloppy last kisses given by the kind of high school boys I don’t find in calc. The Wolf Pack’s allegiance signified by their fondness for fighting and the red bandannas they knot around their necks.

  I keep my eyes down. Deep breaths and I’m encouraged by the blue-haired boy’s dawdling, his head-bobbing techno-trance. I shift my books to my left hand and rub my nose against my sleeve. My lock spins, my fingers numb. Breathe and maybe today I’ll escape being noticed, a win for the invisibility campaign. The universe and fractured realities of quantum mechanics owe me as much. Just for today. Just until I can shake this threadbare weariness. Three other Wolf Packers surround Missy. The girls loud. Curses and sharp-toothed laughs, their collective scents of cigarettes and dime-store perfume.

  During this year’s shared moments of locker time, Missy has managed to spew her dim observations about my flatness and outbreaks and flyaway hair. She’s noted my wardrobe’s muted palate and questioned the sexual preferences of field hockey players. I pretend not to hear, another component of my invisibility. I grit my teeth and remind myself her jibes are the overflow of a shallow mind, utterances no doubt forgotten by the end of lunch’s free-for-all, yet irony awaits in the fact that I, the supposed smart one, allow myself to be haunted by her insults, the sting carried through my day, the replayed scenes knotting my gut as my bedside clock ticks away the sleepless hours. The blue-haired boy slides on his backpack. New voices join the hallway’s mix, the chaperoned line of the life-skills class, a parade of untied sneakers and broad faces. A boy I’ve known since first grade calls my name and offers a high five. We slap palms, mine still cold, his damp. The girl behind him raises her hand too, a smack harder and wetter.

  Theories of time part two: the notion that the moment is all that is real, a knife’s edge of action and consequence, our futures unknowable, our pasts set in stone, but with a snuck glance, I flip the quantum lens and consider the tides that have brought Missy to this moment. Her frustrations and uncertainties, the whispers I’ve heard, a father both absent and criminal, a mother who showed up drunk for an elementary school open house. My heart softens, and I see her as less a rival than a fellow traveler. Both of us stumbling to define ourselves and to carry our burdens with a bit of grace. Lost in thought, I pass my combination’s second number. I curse under my breath, spin the dial, and start again.

  “What’s wrong there, Kayla?” Missy speaks through a wad of chewed gum. A thinned rock beat plays from her dangling earbuds. She ducks, checking her hair in the mirror she’s hung inside her locker door. “Thought you were supposed to be freaking Einstein or something.” A pink bubble appears between her glossed lips then pops with her laugh. Her red bandanna tied around her upper arm, no doubt to display her neck’s half-dollar sized hickey. The other Wolf Pack girls smirk. “Shit, even those fucking retards can remember their combinations.”

  My hand slows, and I’m cast adrift in an expansive moment. The last of the life skills class shuffles past. The click of passed numbers lingers on my fingertips. Breathe but my rawness flares, a fire along my spine that consumes any compassion I had for imagining this stupid girl’s past. I seethe at enduring another inane slight, a greater anger for the ease with which she slips into petty cruelty, unfazed by who she might hurt. I open my locker and unzip my coat. “Shut up for once, Missy.”

  The Wolf Pack chatter falls silent. Missy’s gum-chewing jaw slack. “What did you say?”

  I crouch and retrieve my books from the locker’s bottom. I should be afraid, Missy’s tough-girl reputation cemented last spring in a cafeteria brawl where she ripped a fistful of hair from Amy Gray’s scalp—but something has broken in me, a filament of caring, the desire to seek the high road or turn the proverbial cheek. I zip my backpack and slam my locker with a force that causes the nearest Wolf Packer to flinch.

  “You hear me, girl?” Missy asks.

  I secure my long hair into a ponytail. I will not go down like Amy Gray. “Unfortunately, I did.”

  Missy pushes aside one of her girls. “Sounds like you have something to say, smartass, so why don’t you go ahead and spill?”

  The hallway traffic slows, the lure of spectacle, a very public crash and burn for my invisibility campaign. I let the backpack drop. I’d always envisioned myself paralyzed in this kind of moment, but that’s not the case. “Every day you talk. You say shit. Sometimes it’s obvious shit. Mostly it’s stupid shit. But it’s always shit.” The words, bottled up these past months, flow, and although I’ve never sipped the cherry vodka or smoked the joints Missy and her gang like to whisper about, I can’t imagine their effects are any headier than the swell between my ears. The intoxication isn’t a blur, quite the contrary, my focus is scintillating and bright. “You and your crew are welcome to say all the shit you want, but I’m tired of hearing it.”

  “You’ve got a big mouth all of a sudden, girl.” Missy unhooks her silver hoop earrings and hands them to the girl beside her. The hallway a standstill. Murmurs, goadings, the jockeying for a better view. “Get the bitch,” one of the Wolf Pack girls hisses. Cellphones appear, the scene recorded from a dozen different angles. Missy steps forward, and with her first hard push, I rock back onto my heels.

  I’m neither the fastest nor the most technically sound player on my field hockey team, but last year, I led the squad in takeaways. My secret—the understanding that the ball is nothing more than a magician’s prop, a distraction. Truth waits in the body, and the grids I lose myself within during calc appear before me, and a sprinting wing dissolves into a fluid collage, a shifting collection of boxes on a coordinate plane. With a turn of my hips, I herd my mark toward the sideline, and if I’ve positioned myself right and my thoughts are clear, I recognize the impulse lurking in a shoulder’s dip or a wrist’s curve. When I’m close enough to hear my opponent breathe, a first step is all I need.

  “What’s the matter, bitch?” The voices and gathered faces fade, only Missy in focus. “The smart girl’s got nothing to say now?”

  Another push, and I stumble over my dropped pack. A guttural chorus rises, the anticipation of violence and blood. The grid appears and Missy melts into a jumble of squares and rectangles, her jaw stretched into a snarling, funhouse distortion. A target that expands until it accumulates its own gravity. Her mouth opens, a maw of teeth and gum and a waggling serpent’s tongue, her threats cut short by the fist that swings so fast it hardly seems to belong to me.

  I climb from my father’s pickup. The breeze stiffens, and I tuck my chin beneath the scarf my mother and I knitted last winter. My hands buried in my pockets, my right further buried beneath bandages and gauze, my knuckles less swollen but still carrying the crescent scar from Missy’s front teeth. My father stands beside me and sets down our dog Chestnut. Wooden stakes mark the empty lot, and atop the stakes, red plastic strips, a host of fluttering tongues. At the lot’s far end, just before the macadam alleyway, stands a fifty-foot oak. Around the oak’s base, a moat of yellow and brown. The breeze musty with the leaves’ decay, and the scent reminds me of my parents’ study, their books and paper stacks and leather chairs. I consider the oak’s laddered limbs and imagine how far I could climb.

  In my clinical interviews, I’ve explained my ability to think ahead, a chess player’s imagining of steps and outcomes, the calculations of combinations and probabilities. Add this sense of future time to my grid, a Z-axis that stretches into the mist of what could be, an axis I found myself rocketing along as my fist neared Missy’s mouth. The moment expanded, and I envisioned the talks with my parents, not the words so much as their tones, my father’s calm understanding and his hopes I’d learn from the experience, my mother’s nodding approval when she realized what a bitch Missy had been. I imagined the solitary days of my suspension, the boredom of daytime TV and the expanse of hours I’d have to replay the incident, for better or worse.

  And just as my fist met Missy’s lip, her gum dislodged, the left side of her face buckling, I imagine
d a moment like this. Not physically—I’m not a psychic—but this dynamic, my father and I in a quiet moment, our long talks behind us, the return to a more nuanced normal. “Shall we?” he asks.

  “It’s what we came for,” I say, and together we step onto the lawn.

  My Z-axis flickers, this time in reverse, the memory of how easily I once reached for his hand, a reflex, an anchoring, and the axis dissolves because I can’t decide if the distance between today and then is a lifetime or a nanosecond. Instead, I lift my hands to the clouds and cast myself into a cartwheel, only considering my bandages when they meet the soggy earth. My boots kick up, and my hair falls across my face. I right myself and tuck my hair back beneath my scarf.

  “Bravo,” my father says. I wipe my palms against my jeans. Chestnut barks in approval.

  We walk on, my footing bothered by the remnants of furrowed garden rows. I step on a crumpled flier. Red and white, the Reform Party’s colors. McNally’s the One. Arthur McNally, the founder of the Reform Party, his weekly vodcasts a cocktail of nationalistic Christianity, anti-intellectualism, and thinly veiled racism. Every week it seems I find one of his fliers in our mailbox or under our car’s wiper. “Idiots,” my mother says, the paper tossed into the nearest trashcan. My father does the same, but not before taking a moment to read them. A slight shake of his head, a heavy sigh. The papers balled in his hands. The election almost a year away.

  Our plot strikes a sour note in the neighborhood’s harmony of ranches and split-levels. A history lesson from my father—the double lot purchased by one of the development’s original owners. His home next door and the adjoining field claimed by the garden whose dimensions and maintenance mimicked the trajectory of his health. Tomatoes and watermelons. Zucchini. Strawberries, peppers, cauliflower, and pumpkins. A wooden bench by the sidewalk and his surplus free. Then a small stroke and, a year later, a larger one. The garden neglected these past three growing seasons. Its neat rows ragged with weeds and rabbit holes. Yellow jackets in the beds’ rotted wood beams. His sons placed their father in a nursing home and put the house up for sale. The property lingered for over a year until the Realtor suggested subdividing. The forty-three-year-old split-level picked up by a local bureaucrat. The once-garden purchased by my parents.