Conjured

Epilogue

There isn’t a carnival tent, but the audience comes anyway. Zach and I had written in the sky with wisps of clouds, inviting them, and we’d used fireflies at night to guide them. And so they come, whispering and laughing, through the forest, trampling the ferns and ducking under branches, to see the magicians.

Our stage is the base of an oak tree. Fireflies collect around the stage, defining the edges. The audience sits beyond it on moss and roots and rocks. They wait, and from behind the tree, I can hear the buzz of their anticipation. Zach squeezes my hand.

“Ready?” he says.

“Ready.” I kiss him. For a moment, I don’t hear the audience or the wind in the branches or the chirp of the cicadas. His arms are warm around my waist, and he tastes like the strawberries we shared for dinner, fresh from a field on another world.

Hand in hand, we walk around the tree. Our audience is small: twenty or so, but word will spread. Tomorrow, more will come, and then more the next night. We’ll leave before word of us can spread too far.

I begin with a deck of cards. I shuffle them fast from hand to hand. The cards arc through the air, landing neatly in my palm. I have practiced this, and I have some skill at it, which both surprises and pleases me. I toss the cards in the air as high as I can toward the branches, one card after another in rapid succession.

Zach steps in front of me as if to catch the cards—and the cards transform into paper birds and fly up, up into the tree branches. The audience gasps and then claps.

We change positions, and I give him my breath again. He then kneels, and I step onto his cupped palms. He tosses me, and I fly up too, higher than he could have thrown me. I pluck half the bird-cards from the tree and plummet down. He catches me, breathes in my magic, and tosses me again, still higher. I capture the other half of the cards, and then I land in his arms again.

Standing, I spread the cards in my hands and fan them before the audience, to show that they are ordinary cards, and then I toss them in the air again, one after another, rapid-fire.

This time the cards dance in the air, weaving an intricate pattern. As they dance above the stage, dozens of flowers poke through the earth in the midst of the audience. The stems stretch, leaves unfurl, and buds blossom until the audience is awash in flowers.

Zach picks a bloom and tosses it in the air. He gestures for the audience to do the same. Eagerly, the kids yank the flowers out of the ground and throw them into the air. The men and women are more hesitant, but then they begin tossing flowers as well. The flowers join the aerial dance, twisting and twirling with the cards until they are all paired, each card with its own flower.

One more kiss, and the flowers melt into the cards, becoming part of the design. The cards tumble from the sky, each with a painted flower on it that wasn’t there before. The children in the audience leap up and catch the cards.

As the audience whispers, laughs, and trades flower cards, I bring out a cup full of water, and I throw it at the audience. The water arcs toward them but never lands. Suspended, each drop sparkles like a star. Zach shapes the water into horses that ride through the surf, a castle that rises out of foam, dragons that breathe water instead of fire.

After drawing the water back to the cup, Zach then transforms me into a dragon, a cat with wings, and a pink rabbit. He repeats this with volunteers from the audience, changing each for a few precious seconds into whatever they choose.

When we end the show, the audience leaps to their feet and claps. Some of the adults have tears in their eyes. The children are jabbering and chattering excitedly to each other. They leave full of beauty, magic, and wonder.

We melt into the oak tree, joining the wood, until the audience is gone.

Afterward, we walk out of the tree.

There is a pile in the center of the stage—blankets, clothes, tinder to light a fire, fresh-baked bread, some oranges that look like clementines. We asked for nothing, but they left it anyway.

The first time this happened, I had wanted to return it all.

“I don’t want to take,” I’d said. “I’m not him. I want to give without taking.”

“Maybe they feel the same way,” Zach had said. And my objections had died.

We scoop up our gifts and retreat farther into the woods, far enough that we won’t be easy to find. We light a fire and lay beneath the blankets, along with the now-ragged stuffed monkey, as we eat the bread and the clementines. I have never tasted sweeter, and I can say that with glorious certainty.

“Are you happy?” I ask Zach.

“Yes,” he says without hesitation.

“Are you lying?”

“Never,” he says. I ask him this every night; every night, he answers the same. “Are you happy?” he asks me.

I think about it, turn the question over in my mind, compare what I feel to my memories. We are building new memories every day and with every world we see. The good memories are beginning to outweigh the bad memories. “Yes.”

“Are you lying?” he asks.

“Usually,” I say, “but never to you.”

Around us, the trees darken to shadows, and the sky deepens to azure then blue-black. Stars poke through the sky. I’m not tempted to count them. I’m content to lie beside Zach.

“I’d like a home someday,” Zach says suddenly. This isn’t what we usually say.

“You mean, you want to go home? Do you miss home? Your parents?”

“Sometimes, yes, of course. I love them, even as messed up as they are. I worry about them, that they’re worrying about me. But that’s not what I mean. I mean, I don’t want to travel forever. Someday I want a home that’s ours, that we stay in, that we fill with our things and our memories. It should have lots of skylights. Maybe be near an ocean. You know, oceans cover seventy percent of the Earth’s surface, and if you extracted all the salt, you could bury the continents in five feet of salt. It would be nice to be near an ocean.”

I think about a home by the ocean for Zach and me, imagine it with our own hall of photos, and decide it does sound nice. “All right,” I say.

“But not yet,” he says.

“Not yet,” I agree.

We lie side by side for a while more. The bread is gone. The clementines are gone. The cicadas are louder now, and the forest is silent. His body is wonderfully warm beside mine.

“Should we see another world tomorrow?” he asks.

“I’d like that,” I say.

I turn my head to look at him. He turns his. We are only inches away. He smiles at me, and then we kiss. We don’t do any magic. It’s only a kiss, magic on its own.