A Possibility of Magic

by Rachael Ann Mare

The boat was lost. If he didn’t start swimming, he would be lost along with it.

  Gritting his teeth, Matthew began to tread water. He didn’t want to swim; he didn’t want to move; he didn’t want to go. He couldn’t shake the ache from his chest, and it was interfering.

  His hope had sunk with the boat.

  In his sorrow, he had stopped paying attention to Izzy. She had swum away from the boat and toward the shore. Now, he noticed that she was thrashing—and saw instantly that she hadn’t gotten more than ten feet from the boat.

  She leant back in the water to keep her head out of it, but curled the rest of her body inward as though she were trying to access her ankle?—he thought, but couldn’t tell. Whatever she was trying to do, it wasn’t working, and her growing panic wasn’t helping; she kept scissoring up, curling forward, and then being forced to lean back again as her face started to plummet toward the water.

  He had never seen her look like that. Something in him recognized, in a flash, that she was terrified, that something had gone wrong, and the heartbreak of the shipwreck dropped away in the next heartbeat; at the same time, Matthew pushed at the water and swam in earnest. He stretched his arm out in as long a front crawl as he could muster and scissor-kicked with all the power in his body.

  Get to Izzy, his heartbeat said, again and again, and the boat lay forgotten. The water tried to stop him; it reared; it tussled well. But he had to get over there. He fought back against the water, slicing through it, and crossed the distance to Izzy faster than he thought possible.

  She had stopped thrashing; she was sinking, and now if she were to reach for her ankles, it would mean diving face first into the water. A peaceful look flickered across her face, and Matthew’s heart skipped a beat.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  But he didn’t wait for an answer, and he wasn’t sure Iz would’ve answered him. She was leaning her head back to keep breathing the last few sips of precious air before being swallowed by the pond.

  Matthew dove, thrusting down, down, down along her side, reaching out for her hip, then her leg. He slid his hands down both sides of her leg, searching. He hated to open his eyes underwater, but he couldn’t feel anything, so he forced himself.

  Fat lot of good it did. The pond water was so murky he could barely see Iz’s leg. It was like looking through thick nighttime fog into a stand of trees. His lungs burning, he held her waist and swung himself around to the other leg. Down his hands went, searching. He knew there must be something, but where—

  There. Wrapped around her left ankle, a rope. Or string. Or something, whatever it was, that strapped her to the sinking boat. Matthew desperately needed to breathe, but he didn’t think Izzy could anymore, so he ignored the pain in his lungs and yanked at the thing around her ankle, scrabbling with his fingers, pushing, pulling, whatever would get the thing to move. It didn’t want to go, but Matthew dragged up every last bit of whatever thing he had in him that made him live, every ounce of heart and strength and muscle and courage, every shred of him that had loved that boat and everything it represented, and he made that piece of string come free of his friend Izzy’s ankle.

  Then he shot up to the surface of the pond and dragged her with him by the shoulder. He gasped mouthful after mouthful, lungful after lungful, of sweet, clean, life-giving air, nearly laughing with it as it rushed back into his body. He started to swim back to shore, feeling large and full, dragging Izzy behind him.

  For a minute, she let him.

  Then she struggled and fought and smacked and would have clawed him if he hadn’t let her go as soon as she started to wiggle.

  “I can swim fine!” she shouted.

  “OK!” he shouted back, letting go and verifying that it was true. As he headed on to shore, Izzy kept her word and followed.

  Matthew reached the bank and pulled himself up, then turned to lie on his stomach and reach out a hand to Iz. It was a large-ish pond bank, and she was tired, and try as she might, she could not pull herself up, and so in the end she put her hand in his and let him pull her up, giving him a ferociously judgmental look.

  Izzy spat water out and hit him in the eye.

  “That’s the thanks I get?” He laughed. “Save your life and get spat in the eye?”

  “I would not have drowned. I was fine.”

  “You were not fine, Iz. You couldn’t get that rope off your ankle. You could have died.”

  Izzy didn’t respond. For once, she took a moment to breathe.

  The boy figured they both needed it.

  And so, sitting on the banks of the Great Pond of the Sinking, two pirates gazed out over the placid body of water that hid all trace of their momentous and unfortunate ship.

  Eventually, the boy said, “That was a great boat.”

  “Yeah? What made it so?”

  “She gave me something. I don’t know what, exactly, but it was important and it felt right. It’s a tragedy she’s gone. There’ll never be another boat like her.”

  “It made you Captain ol’ Spikey.” Izzy said, as though she knew exactly what he was talking about, but Matthew wasn’t sure she did. She called the boat “it,” for one thing. However, with the boat gone, so went Dauntless Jack and Captain Red-Handed Spike, into the abyss of pond water, and the flicker of himself that Matthew had felt turn up with the appearance of the boat disappeared once more, and Aristotle returned in his place, sopping wet, uncomfortable, exhausted, and quite ready for pirating to be finished so he could go home and change into dry clothes.

  But when he turned to suggest that very thing, Izzy was not beside him.

  Being the Story in Which Izzy and Ari Get Thrown Out of a Zen Garden for Dancing (Well, Izzy Was Dancing)

  Aristotle leapt up and spun round. There she was—across the street. The absolute bonkers girl! She had almost died. Where was she going? Sighing, Ari trudged after Izzy.

  “Look,” she said, pointing, her eyes glowing, once he had found a brief gap in the traffic and scurried across the street. “What is it? Have you been inside?”

  The sign read “Zander Bealebright Zen Garden.”

  “Let’s go in,” Izzy breathed, already following the arrow on the sign that pointed to the right, along the fence around the park, toward an entrance halfway up the block.

  Aristotle trotted to catch up with her. “Iz, it’s a zen garden. Zen is a… well, I think you’re meant to be quiet.”

  “Oh, good,” Izzy said. “That will be just the thing after a whole afternoon sailing like pirates and wearing ourselves out, won’t it?”

  Aristotle couldn’t deny the truth of that. But it didn’t erase his doubts on the subject of whether Izandria Dauntless could be quiet for much time. Also, he thought he had heard something about this zen garden charging a fee. Perhaps that would save them. He certainly didn’t have any money, and he doubted Iz did.

  But when she marched up to the entrance and asked, “How much for two?” of the lady inside the small ticket house, her head barely coming above the shelf, the lady mumbled something back that Ari couldn’t hear, and Izzy dug in her soaking wet pockets, from which she produced five soaking wet dollars, which she proceeded to hand over to the lady in the window. Aristotle could imagine the lady’s reaction, so he stayed out of sight behind Izzy.

  Apparently the woman hadn’t any more idea what to do with Izzy than Aristotle did, as she accepted the soaking wet money. Or at least he assumed she did, because Izzy turned and waved at him to follow her through the turnstile into the zen garden. He trotted past the lady in the box, giving her a little wave of his own, and followed Iz inside.

  The gravel garden path wound through two sets of soaring pine trees on either side. The air around the boy and girl seemed to hush in partnership with the trees, forcing a certain silence on the path, on them, on every living thing thereabouts. It was marvelous.

  “It feels like it’s taking us to its secrets,” Iz whispered, and Ari wondered if he had been wrong to doubt her ability to be qu
iet.

  Shortly thereafter, the pines opened to the view—an open space full of small, highly manicured trees; low-growing hedges; and stone fountains. The path meandered around a pond and then over the pond on an arched bridge and round stones that seemed to Aristotle to be meant for jumping. A pagoda gazebo presided over the whole thing at the other end of the garden.

  Aristotle watched Izzy’s eyes light up, and his heart sank.

  “Ari, it’s delightful! Let’s go!” Izzy danced down the path and over to the bridge. “Look!” she shouted, pointing. “Fish!”

  Aristotle hurried to catch up with her, looking around. “Iz—”

  “Can we feed them? Look how orange they are. I want to feed them.”

  “I don’t think we can feed them. What do they even eat, do you know?”

  “They’re fish. I suppose they eat smaller fish. Given how wet we are, I wouldn’t be surprised if we managed to find a small fish or two in a pocket. Do give yours a look, Ari, in case you have a small fish on you.”

  While Izzy and Aristotle amused themselves with the koi, someone stood behind them on the path, back near the turn, a bit out of sight, watching them. In fact, this someone, a she, had been watching them for some time, almost since they entered the garden. She had small, flat, pale eyes that poked out from beneath hooded eyelids. She followed the bouncing (and still soaking wet) progress of Izzy and Ari down the manicured path, mildly agitated, and plodded after them, refusing to hurry but certain that trouble was afoot and she must stop it. It was her duty. She was the park docent, and she wore a uniform, and she took being a park docent 100% seriously. Her name was Dolores.

  Dolores wasn’t even certain that children were allowed in the zen garden without a parent. If they were, it didn’t seem proper. If they were, she would speak to her supervisor about changing the rules so that they weren’t. She was certain that these two were going to cause a ruckus before long.

  Down the path, Izzy and Ari had moved on from the koi pond and discovered a thing they had not been able to see from the entrance—the sand box. Neither of them had ever seen such a thing—a garden made of sand?—and were quite tickled by the idea of it. Concentric circles had been raked into the light beige sand, and a small rock lay at the center of each set of circles.

  Neither of the two children noticed the sign at the edge of the sand that read “KEEP OFF.”

  They were too busy exclaiming (well, really it was Izzy doing the exclaiming while Ari looked on in rapt fascination) over what a wonderful place it was—specifically, for dancing.

  “It is the most fantastical place I can think of for having a dancing party,” Iz said, with her hands on her hips, as though that settled it.

  Dolores, from a few hundred feet behind them, listened carefully. That girl was trouble, there was no doubt about it. She was the kind of girl who didn’t follow rules, even when they were right there in front of her face. Or her feet.

  Dolores approached as soon as she heard the word “dancing.”

  “A dancing party!” she exclaimed. “That will not be possible.”

  “Why not?” Iz didn’t see Dolores’s uniform; she didn’t realize she was speaking to a docent. Otherwise surely she would have changed her tone; otherwise surely she wouldn’t have argued back and forth in her usual way. “Look at the spaces. Look at the shapes of the trees. Look at the brilliant orange fishes. It’s like a fairy tale. Fairy tales always have dancing in them. And look at that sand! Think of all the footprint patterns a person could make in it.”

  “Footprint patterns! Absolutely not!”

  “But why not? It’s perfect!”

  “This is not the place for it.”

  “But you haven’t answered why not. What makes it not the perfect place?”

  “Well.” Dolores found herself flustered. She hadn’t had to defend her garden against someone like Iz before. But then, there weren’t too many someones like Iz, so one could hardly blame her.

  “The sign!” she crowed, getting a spark of an idea. “The sign says, Keep off, quite clearly. So you must. No dancing.”

  Iz gave Dolores a pitying look. “I say foo to signs. Signs can be made up to say anything in the world by anyone in the world. There’s absolutely no reasonable reason to think that a sign knows more than I do in any given situation. In fact, they almost always know less.”

  Izzy bent down and tapped the sign from the back. It fell over, face down, in the sand.

  “There,” Iz said. “Now there’s no sign at all. It’s the perfect place for dancing.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Dolores said, a deep ugliness rising in her chest. She wasn’t sure she could defend her garden against this sloppy little pig-tailed monster without the help of the sign, but she was going to give it her best try. “It’s not the perfect place because… dancing parties need music. This is a zen garden. It is not for music, young lady.” Of course she added the “young lady” to strengthen her position and show that she was an authority, as is important to do in an argument, if you want to win.

  However, it wasn’t the sort of thing that worked on Izzy.

  “I’m not all that young, you know. I mean, I suppose compared to you, but not compared to a cat. Compared to a cat, I’m middle-aged.”

  Dolores, feeling the ugliness turn her a bit red now, said, “I’m quite certain you are nothing like a cat. For one thing, cats are quiet.”

  Izzy gave Dolores the side-eye. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. Haven’t you ever heard a cat talking when it wants something? They are the loudest creature on earth, and the most demanding.”

  “You’re right; I take that back. You are exactly like a cat.”

  Somehow it seemed Dolores did not mean that as a compliment, but Iz, for her part, could not see what was wrong with being demanding. It was a form of elegance, wasn’t it? It meant you had high standards for things, and who could argue with high standards? For that matter, who could argue with cats?

  “Anyhow, you’re wrong about something else—dancing parties do not need music. It’s nice if they have it, but we can most certainly dance without it.”

  Dolores’s mouth turned down, and she backed up a step or two, contemplating exiting the conversation, but in general, docents are not that good at telling children where to stuff it, so she kept on with trying to explain, although she had all but concluded at this point that it wouldn’t do her a bit of good.

  “Dancing, even without music, is not appropriate here. A zen garden is a place for contemplating the great mysteries of the universe. For connecting to the universal consciousness. For praying. Not for dancing, even quiet dancing.”

  “More silliness, and the most silliness! The great mysteries of the universe? You mean like what Ari had for breakfast? I bet I could guess for you. And why would I care about connecting to some universal consneezenousness when my own brain is more mysterious than any?”

  Dolores twisted the fingers of one hand around the fingers of the other. “Think of it this way, then, dear—it is a place for being silent and reflecting on your thoughts.”

  “How do I be silent and reflect on my thoughts at the same time? If I’m to reflect on my thoughts, then I’ll need to say them out loud to Aristotle.”

  Ari flinched at being included in Izzy’s trouble.

  “Sweetie,” Dolores bent down to speak more closely to Izzy. “What if you simply thought your thoughts? Instead of saying them?”

  “But then how would they come out?”

  “They wouldn’t. They’d stay in.”

  “But then how would I reflect on them? I can’t reflect on something that hasn’t come out!”

  The gray-haired lady sighed a giant puff of air, and Ari wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t bother, but he had a feeling that the fat lady was as attached, in her own way, to her arguments as Iz was to hers. This was about to look like a long, wet, and not very zen day.

  “And the other thing,” Izzy said, “is that dancing can help my th
oughts along. Like… if I’m not sure what I’m thinking, or I’ve got a little idea and I’m trying to turn it into a big one, then wiggling my arms and stepping around with my feet, like this”—Izzy demonstrated a tiny jig—“can help me see where it’s going! So it seems to me that a zen garden is the perfect place for a dancing party! A thinking dancing party! Let’s have one.”

  Ari and the fat lady sighed at the same time.

  “I’m sorry,” Dolores said, resigned. “You can’t dance here. I haven’t any more ‘why’ to give you, beyond what I’ve tried to explain. It’s only—those are the rules. And you’ll obey them, or I must escort you from the premises. I am the docent, and I enforce the rules.”

  “Rules! Foo! Rules are the worst. Rules are only for adults who are bored silly with themselves and haven’t got a clue how to have fun, so they need to be told what to do. I’ll grant you there may be some ill-behaved little ones who could benefit from a learning or two, but they won’t be helped by rules, only teaching. And experimenting. You should let some dancing in, Miz”—Iz looked at her name tag—“Miz Dolores. You might find that more people came to your zen garden.”

  “Then it wouldn’t be a zen garden.”

  “All right,” Iz said. She had this way of giving up that wasn’t like giving up at all, but like she had seen the reasonableness of whatever the adult had told her, even when as soon as Dolores turned her back, if she ever did, Iz would dance a wild footprint trail all over that finely raked sand. “So we shan’t dance. What shall we do instead?”

  Ari grinned.

  “Well,” Dolores the docent said, putting a finger to her mouth. “The garden is a wonderful place to meditate. Have you tried it?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “It’s part of being zen. It takes you away from the stress of life and helps to calm and relax you. Some people say it’s healing. It’s a way to relax and reset.”

  Izzy frowned. “Why would you have gotten so broken that you need to reset? It seems to me you shouldn’t have done that in the first place.”

  “Wait until you get older,” the fat lady said. “You’ll understand then.”