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Author's note: This story is for everyone. There is no disclaimer. You can hear language like this on TV and you can get more sex in public. And remember: the moment that you zone out of a story and think about something else is usually the moment that an idea is presented to you- an idea that needs you to think about it. Of course, that's also what happens when a story gets convoluted and boring. Re-read and decide! This is for my friend Jen, from way back, and my friend Sarah, from now. Even though they'll probably never know it. xxl hoodie © 2003 Melissa Virus. [email protected] "From their position as mothers- or, at least potential mothers - comes the role of women, generally misunderstood as non-literal: creators. Understanders." -from "The book of magic," by Erica Rodian. Early December snow somehow feels more comfortable- furry like a cat- than the evil snow that comes down later in winter, that wicked January shit, the February snow that's worn out its welcome. Mark was sixteen and it was that hard, early snow, the day that he found out his aunt wasn't his aunt, but his mother's lover. The snow hung on the evergreens outside the kitchen window of their yellow house as thick as loaves of bread. That's a weird thought, Mark noticed. He was dissociating. Aunt Katie was fucking his mom? The women who raised him were dykes? It didn't feel real. The three of them were sitting at their kitchen table. It was a Saturday morning, one of those wasted snow days because there was no school to be cancelled and Katie had handed him a big yellow mug and told him to come into the kitchen for a minute. She didn't usually make him hot chocolate; she didn't usually make him anything. She was one of those bony women who looked wrong in the kitchen, dropping things and getting bits of eggshell into attempted omelettes and generally leaving the cooking to his mom. It was cold where Mark was sitting. It wasn't cold in the whole house, just right next to the windows and the hot chocolate was extra hot and sweet next to the icy window. He didn't say anything when his mom told him, he just looked out the wide window at the grey sky - the big fat snowflakes coming down. It was getting towards Christmas and it felt like it. His mom and Aunt Katie were sitting at opposite sides of the table. "I have to think about this," said Mark. He got up, stayed stoic and brought his hot chocolate with him. Up the stairs, in his room, he read 'The Sandman.' When he was done with all the issues he owned and found the day not over yet (it wasn't even noon), he scanned a couple photos he'd taken and messed with them in Photoshop. Made them black and white. Cropped them hard.He didn't think about what he was supposed to be thinking about. It was cold where he was sitting too. Because his computer was next to a window; he was zipping on a sweatshirt when his mom knocked on the door. "Yeah," he said, staring real hard at his computer and not his mom. "Can I come in," asked his mom. "Okay." She sat down on his bed, right by his computer desk, gently. "I don't want you to be upset. The only way it's going to make any sense to you, Mark, the only way you'll be able to live with this is if we talk about it. It's not going away if you ignore it." She had a way of knowing what he was thinking. "Mom," he said, "I don't know. Jesus. What am I supposed to think?" He turned toward her. "I mean this is big." Then he couldn't think of anything else to say, like when you walk into a record store, knowing that there is a bunch of albums you want, but you can't come up with one specific one at all. "Mark, it's almost eleven thirty. Your aunt Katie's going to make some omelettes, ok? Come down and eat with us." "'Aunt' Katie my ass," Mark said quietly. His mother slapped him, but not as hard as she probably should have. He felt like an asshole. "Mark," she said, pointing a finger in his face, "don't do this. Don't be difficult, don't reject it. Us. I know it's strange and it probably hurts, but we're still people and we're still your parents, so come downstairs for breakfast. Now." She left. Once she was out of sight, he followed. Then he sat down grumpy at the end of the table and waited for his omelette. "So, Mark," his mom started. Before she could continue, his Aunt Katie put her hand on his mom's arm. "Maggie?" she said. His mom stopped. They ate, Mark went back upstairs and didn't see his parents until dinner. At dinner they talked about school and work. Then Mark went upstairs again. He would have gone out, but everyone he knew was on a school ski trip to Vermont and he couldn't afford to go with them. His girlfriend Audra was there. She had a cell phone, but it was for emergencies. He wasn't supposed to call it. His mom and aunt weren't supposed to be gay, though, so he called her up. She was at dinner and told him to call her in an hour and a half. He told her to watch out that their friend Steve didn't get so drunk he couldn't ski the next day. She said okay. They hung up. He listened to the Alkaline Trio and played Quake, even though he didn't care, for an hour and a half, then called her again. "Audra." He stopped. She asked him what was wrong. "Uh." He paused for a second, then flooded his head with resolve. "My mom and my Aunt Katie? They're gay. They're fucking each other. Katie's not my real aunt at all." "Oh Jesus, Mark," Audra said. "Hold on, let me find someplace quiet." Pause. Shuffling. "Okay, I'm in a closet, nobody can hear me. When did you find out?" "This morning? You're in the closet too?" he smirked. "Shut up," she was smiling too, "are you okay? I mean, wow, I wish I were there with you. What are you doing?" "I'm playing with my computer, reading, I don't know- trying not to be freaked out. I mean, I don't want to be upset or anything but? whoa, like Keanu, you know? Whoa." "Yeah." "Yeah." Neither of them had anything to say, but at least she was on the other end to hear it, if he found he suddenly did. He decided to take up smoking. "Look," she said, "I'm in the lodge, at the bottom of the mountain; I'll be home tomorrow night. You'll be okay. Just? don't distract yourself from it a hundred percent, ok? Think about this, confront it in your brain and figure out where you stand. You know it'll be okay, you know you'll survive. I've got to go. If anything really bad happens, you know, you can call me? you'll be ok." He pictured her in her white and pink jacket, white cheeks and pink nose. He wished he knew how to paint. He wished he could've afforded to go up there and photograph her. He pictured her wide mouth- her thin lips. Her smile. "Ok," he said. "Have fun, okay? I just had to? you know, tell someone." "I know. I'm saving kisses for you; you can pick 'em up at eleven at night tomorrow, in front of the school." "Okay, I'll be there." Now he was smiling. "I love you." "Love you too. Bye." He hung up. He decided that he had to at least confront a little bit and with that realization came sweaty armpits. A plan occurred to him: he was going to go out and photograph things in the snow and he'd stop and say it was okay to his parents, on his way out. He rounded up the camera he'd signed out of his photo class at school, two filters and some film. He'd been playing with the zipper on his sweatshirt while he was on the phone; he zipped it up and put on his jacket over it and headed downstairs. His mom and aunt Katie were reading in front of a picture window as wide as the couch they were sitting on. This was where they read; this was where they spent most of their time. They both looked up from books with complicated expressions when he came into the room. "Um, hi," he said. "Look, I'm going to go out and take some pictures in this snow. I just wanted to say-" sweat and steam all under his insulated jacket- "I'm sorry if I seemed kind of freaked out and I still am a little bit freaked out, but it's okay and I know I'll be okay and stuff, I just have to get used to this. Um. Okay." His aunt Katie was looking up at him like she understood how uncomfortable he was - how hard he was trying. Maybe he was just attributing, he didn't know. But he found himself across the room, leaning over and hugging her and then he found his mom, next to him, hugging him from the side. And it felt ok, like a reminder that they were still the exact same family. And it occurred to him: now he was more a part of it, since now he knew. "There is a god, sort of, just not in any kind of way most people understand." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian. Sometimes, Mark wished he could turn his brain off, stop watching himself do everything, just kind of exist, because his self-consciousness didn't seem to be accomplishing anything, except making life more difficult. He'd gone out and taken pictures; he'd come home and uploaded a couple of them, he'd scanned and played with a couple on his computer. Only one of them was any good and that one looked exactly like something Ansel Adams would have done- "a tree with snow on it! Ta da!-" so while it wasn't bad, it wasn't exactly really good, either. It was new and it already looked played out. The rest of his pictures were pretty mediocre and he couldn't bring himself to Photoshop them into transcendence. This was how it usually went, with his photography and it sort of reinforced this sense of normalcy he had- this strange normalcy, in the face of his parents' revelation. Frustration with his art made him feel like everything was in its place. And he heard them arguing about something, downstairs. Not serious argument- they never really got loud, or threw things, or anything, just argument. You could tell from the tension in the vague word-burbles that came through his door, upstairs: how they were clipped, the length of the pauses before responses. He tried not to pay attention, because apparently? apparently, if it involved him, they wouldn't have qualms about telling him. So he read Anne Rice and went to bed. There were no omelettes or hot chocolate the next day. After yesterday, he'd kind of hoped that these would be the new pattern, but no such luck. So, he read the second half of the 'Catcher in the Rye' for school. At eleven, he went to pick up Audra. The mix tape in his car sucked, because Steve had made it for him and Steve had no taste in music at all, but Mark was sick of everything else. And there were a few good songs on it. Like "I Want You to Want Me," which tried to explode Mark's eardrums on the ride over. The school had been built something like ten years ago, so it wasn't any kind of big, respectable rectangle; it was one of those modern miasmal clumps of covered outdoor walkways and little buildings. It made the school district look richer than it was. If you looked at the buildings as arranged in a circle, even though they were more like a deliberately random setup, then the parking lot was in the middle. And between the two biggest buildings- four story, hundred-fifty foot wide brick things- was a sidewalk area with some benches, where kids waited for buses and unpacked buses from ski trips. Audra was there with her pink jacket and pink cheeks. She had blonde hair that came down to her chin and was longer in the front than it was in the back, but she didn't come off like a blonde. Especially since, that night, she was wearing a black knit cap that she thought made her look like a thug, but which actually just made her look cute, like a tiny little girl playing at being a thug. The bus had gotten back early and she'd been waiting outside for a half hour, which was why her cheeks were so bright. She was full of beans though and she ran up and jumped into a hug and he spun her around, once, off the ground because she was short. And she gave him that smile and the kisses she'd promised. "Hey kid," he said. "Hey! How are you?" She was twice as animated as he was. Always. "I'm good. I'm kind of tired. Um, and my parents are gay." "I know! I was thinking," she said, "if you're okay?" "Hey, listen, I haven't figured it out yet, you know? I'm still working on it- I'm not sure if I'm ready to get into this whole thing yet. So tell me about your trip, eh?" She looked at him like she didn't know quite what to make of that, then she kissed him. And then she pushed him up against a wall and kissed him like most people never get to kiss, once high school ends. And even though she wasn't that great a kisser (because she opened her mouth too wide) out in the cold, Mark felt perfect. She told him about the trip while he took her home and then they went to school for a couple weeks- they were the kids who were always making out in the hallways- and then school ended for Christmas. Mark gave Audra an embossed-cover notebook because she wanted to be a writer and Audra gave him some film and some chemicals she'd stolen from the school darkroom, because he wanted his own darkroom. And then they went to a New Year's party and got drunk and crashed there and woke up delighted to find that they weren't very hung over. And then things got allweird. "Similarly, the way that magic works is simply through a lack of pretense. You just do magic. The trick is in doing away with pretenses." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian. No matter how fulfilling the last week of your year is, no matter how many friends and family members you see, January first always feels like five minutes after empty masturbation. Mark was on his bed, looking at his walls. He was proud of them; he'd made them himself and he enjoyed looking at them, which was great, because even though he knew your art was supposed to suck until you got kind of old, or crazy, or addicted to drugs or whatever, he hated the fact that he was embarrassed by most of his artistic endeavors. Ideas always seemed good, but never turned out the way he wanted them too. He burned a lot of his photos. But his walls? He had one of those bedrooms without an inch of wall space visible. He had originally wanted to pull of some kind of high concept thing where you could look at the walls and enjoy the pictures up close, then pull back and see some kind of great design or something, like those portraits you see of people that are made up of tiny portraits of them. He hadn't quite pulled that off. But Mark was a magazine addict and he kind of disliked this aspect of himself, so he didn't mind destroying his magazines to post pictures from them on his walls. And he'd been doing this since he was twelve- his joke was that he'd either been precocious or retarded- so he'd pruned away pretty much all the bad pictures and was left with something he was proud of. The themes were girls, trees and flowing water. He had one wall with only black and white pictures; the other three walls (and the triangular corner) were anything goes. Nothing was happening. He was exhausted and he'd dropped Audra off at home and his parents were downstairs. After the shock had worn off he had pretty much gotten used to their relationship and had even started to laugh at himself - once you knew about them, it was pretty obvious. They shared a bed; they shared clothes, they didn't date anybody. Katie had a crew cut? But, whatever. Around two, she knocked on his door with a skinny knuckle and came in- she asked him to come downstairs. Katie and his mom were at the table. There was a sandwich out for him ? turkey - some chips and a glass of grapefruit juice, which everybody in his house knew was his favorite. He realized that he felt like he'd been smelling omelette all day, whatever that meant. "Mark," Katie said, "When we told you about our relationship, we sort of? that wasn't all." The turkey was already kind of dry. Mark's mouth went even dryer and his stomach felt holographic. He consciously made himself think that honesty was the best route, though, but all this did was lead to him saying, "Oh no." Katie looked like she might laugh and went on. "See? My god, Maggie, how do I do this? How do we tell him?" His mom shrugged. She didn't seem close to laughter at all. "Ok. Mark. Honestly, you're not going to believe this, but we're uh, we're witches. And not in some kind of Earth-mother born-again pagan sense, or in any sense like that. Really, nothing that I could expect you to believe. Honest-to-god spell-casting, potion-brewing witches." Of course, this was even less real to Mark than their lesbianism. Lesbian witches! Great. He had this bizarre, un-summoned vision of the words "Lesbian Witches" as a banner headline across his school's newspaper, spinning cinematically. "Shit, you're fucking kidding, right?" "No," Katie said. "No," his mom said. Then an invisible light bulb popped over her head. "And don't curse." The sense of unreality was so pervasive that even it couldn't be real. His head buzzed for a second and then things started to fall into place. He thought, if you had told him that his parents would be telling him that shit twenty minutes ago, he'd have expected to find himself incredulous, totally unbelieving, even laughing. But the mood? he couldn't quite say why, but he realized he believed them. He wasn't even a little bit skeptical. There's something about actually being in a situation, maybe just a sense of the visceral that is missing from any pre-assessment. Maybe it's just that you can't predict the faces somebody will make, when they tell you something. The atmosphere was full of believability and ozone. It didn't even occur to Mark that, before it happened, there was no way could even have invented this scene in his head. "Okay, okay," he said. He out his hands together and covered his face, thumbs on his cheeks. On the jawbones. His skin felt a little moist but not quite greasy. And stubbly. "Jesus." His mom was holding Katie's hand on top of the table. "Ok," he said, "What the fuck. Witches? So what, you hex people and shit? No. Right? You've got to ? what do you do?" He found himself laughing. "You don't even own any fucking cats!" His mom told him to stop swearing. But she was laughing. Tension was broken, just like that. "Oh, Mark," Katie said. "there's actually no way you can understand? it's completely based in an understanding of a philosophy, of the way we interact with each other and our world? it's a religion. It's not really that far removed from some Pagan stuff, some Eastern ideas, some other things and some common sense. Basically, we can really do anything. It's just? well, it's about learning, too." Christ that's vague, Mark thought. Sounds like bullshit. "Okay, so what can you do," he asked again. "A lot," his mom said. Still smiling, Katie looked at his sandwich. It picked up from the plate, spun slowly over and drifted back down. "Oh my God," Mark said. "No way!" He looked up from the sandwich with suns in his eyes. "Now Mark," his mom said, "this is going to get weird. We can explain it all to you - or at least, help you with it, because ultimately it's up to you to figure it out for yourself - but it's not going to be like you expect it to be. Did you notice how, when that happened, there was no fanfare, no noises, no strange signifiers or anything?" He had. It had been strangely mundane. He nodded. "That's a big part of the way that this works. It's not a secret - it's the opposite. It's so easy, it's just about thinking and relating more truly, like?" "That may be enough," Katie said. "I mean, are you going to explain everything to him in one day?" His mom looked at her. "Well? ok. There is a whole lot more and I can tell you want to know how to do it, right now, right away. I know that you're a smart kid though and I have to tell you: eagerness to be able to levitate sandwiches is only going to get in the way of your understanding how to do it, of figuring it out." She was smiling. It was strangely stupid and fitting that Katie'd chosen something so common and funny as a sandwich for a demonstration. "It's very Zen. It's just? this is where it gets really difficult." "Yeah," said Katie. Mark still felt like his chest was five inches higher than normal and swollen. Thumping. "Oh God, Mark, I can see you're excited, but calm down some," Katie said. "This isn't all fun, ok? There's no easy way to tell you this thing that?" Katie got a vision of Darth Vader. "Mark, I used to be your father." "This is what god is: somebody had to create all this universe. That famous clockmaker metaphor is not too far off the mark. The thing is, god is neither loving nor vengeful, just very, very interested and the nature of the reality that this god has created is that it cannot exist without an observer. And since a god cannot observe that same god's own creation without interfering, god created people through which to view it. That's it: we're here so god can experience creation through us. Vessels. It's an interesting inversion, isn't it?" -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian. Two hours later, Mark was back in his room, vacillating between disbelieving, enamored, elated and terrified. He never really got away from confusion though; everything that his parents - and now there was no more humor in calling them that - had told him was obvious, clear and simple. And grasping this made you able to control reality? Well, with one important difference: in reality, there would never be male Jedi knights. Katie had been born male and Mark's mother had loved him and he'd loved Mark's mom and they'd had a kid. Soon after, he'd lost his job - he wasn't a very good carpenter anyway - and they had been poor. Maggie had been a witch since she was sixteen, so she could keep them in food and heat, under the rose. Meanwhile, while he'd been looking for work, Mark's dad had started fraying. He was losing his cool and the more he lost it, the less he'd been able to find work - a weekend in a library basement, taking stock in a supermarket back room in the end of the year, endless garage sales, until they didn't even have a record player - until he was just not working. And they still had food? Maggie couldn't keep it from him any more, where she was getting things. It was driving a rift between them; she couldn't stop though, or her baby would starve and that was absolutely the last thing she could allow to happen. Getting the world to give her whatever she asked it for was second nature at this point. She was twenty-five and had learned it at sixteen, as was the custom. So she was young and experienced. And one day, she woke from a nap and realized that her relationship with her husband was simply not acceptable any longer-too false- and that this lie put a wedge between them that he didn't have the opportunity to comprehend. She knew she had to tell him. So she had. And his eyes had lit, just like his son's would fifteen years later. And her husband had looked like he had when she'd met him, like he believed in the world. And he'd wanted to do it. Magic? Yes. Life could be alive again. She'd explained that the way it worked was that women created- life in birth and then on down - and that men were really only there to help them out, to engage in the mundane tasks involved with the day to day living. You know that thing about 'behind every great man is a great woman?' What that clich? hides is the question of who's more important. The means or the end? If the end is more important, then life was meaningless, because it ends in death that negates the means getting the life to that death. And so what's left is the importance of the means: the importance of process, experience and life moment-to-moment. The important thing is creation and support - keeping the machinery of the world clanging along messily and life. Living. There was a joke you learned when you were a witch: if life is focussed on death, then it is masturbation. If every minute of life is transcendent, then it's fantastic sex. Mark's dad, when he'd been his dad, had chewed this over. Maggie didn't know exactly what happened when you explained this to a boy because she never had; she'd expected to be dismissed. Instead, this all had made so much sense to her husband that he decided he couldn't live the way he had been. It was pointless. It was stupid. Being male? Being some kind of breadwinner? That's all he got? Eyes open, he couldn't settle for that. Maggie had explained to him the yin and yang, the importance of both- that the ends in the equation were not simply irrelevant, that they were nearly as important- and he hadn't wanted to hear it. Simply? Maggie could make him into a woman. She could give him a uterus and a vagina and different hormones, a smaller body, whatever he wanted. She could wave her hand and dye his hair if he wanted, for fuck's sake - there was no reason to go to a salon. And it might be fun. The problem was that of attraction: but, since they were his parents, neither had really wanted to get into that; I mean, would you want your parents explaining to you how they are attracted to each other? Do you want to think about your parents that way? No, neither did Mark. The important thing to remember was you cannot magic away feelings; you cannot magic someone into being attracted to you. At all. Or at least, not without wicked side effects. So, she'd made her husband into a woman and - glossed over PG-13 version - they'd found they still loved each other. They'd been able to stay together and they left their lives in Reno behind and come to Connecticut. Which brought us to now and to snow. Which brought us to the second son in the Rodian family in seventeen years to consider becoming a daughter and learn to manipulate reality. So Mark was lying diagonally across his double bed, staring at the ceiling, at his walls and the pillows, at himself. He kept looking at a picture he'd posted on the black and white wall at eye level, or Kate Moss lifting the skirt of a black dress. For some reason, that seemed like a good metaphor for something. For his life, maybe. He was wearing his blue 555-SOUL hoodie. It was an extra-extra large. Last year, his freshman year in high school, he had written an essay on hoodies. He'd been interested in the fact that a kid who wears a size small t-shirt can feel completely comfortable in a sweatshirt that's four sizes too big. Pants that big would fall down; you'd get lost in a jacket that big. But a sweatshirt practically begged to be oversized, you know? Plus, they helped you feel tiny when you were sad. Of fucking course he wanted to be able to control the world around him. Of course. And he knew becoming a girl was worth it. The thing was, he wasn't quite ready to admit it to himself - yet. And what happened with Audra? What do you do with your girlfriend when you love her and she loves you and she loves you because you're a boy? This is what was bothering Mark that night. "Learning does not work like our school system would have you believe. People are not receptacles for knowledge; the only way to learn something is to figure it out on your own. I'm not saying that guidance is not helpful. I'm saying, you can't expect someone just to believe you. Whatever you're learning, it has to make sense to you. You have to make your own sense." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian. By late January, school had picked up again. Neither Mark nor Audra smoked cigarettes, but during lunch time, they were as single-minded as the smokers about finding a place on school grounds where teachers wouldn't bug them and so one day found them under some stairs in a stairwell in a building all the way on the east end of school. They were sitting Indian style across from each other on a mat designed for wiping shoes on. Mark was still trying to figure out how to talk about this witchy shit to Audra - he hadn't told his parents that he was interested and they hadn't invited him to it. "Oh my god," Audra said, becoming animated, "I forgot! Look at this!" She pulled up the sleeve of her baby blue sweater and showed him a complicated henna tattoo around her wrist. "Wow, that's really cool," he said. He meant it. "Yeah, my sister did it for me. It's kind of big and it looks so evil." "Yeah," he thought. Mark wanted a tattoo. How rad was the idea of having your body be art? It was so? it was the best thing he could think of and before he knew what he was saying, he was rambling about controlling the space around you and masculine and feminine energies and creation. He had been speaking for a long time before he realized he couldn't remember what he'd been saying. Audra was looking at him with her cute mouth open a little. "Um," he said. "I don't think I understood a word of that," she said, maybe smiling a little. "Audra," he said, "what would you say if I told you that magic was for real?" She looked at him. He felt like the announcer in a movie preview. "What would you say," he thought: come on, come on, come on, "if I told you it was possible to levitate things and make flowers grow and create things out of nothing? And a million other things? I'm not even kidding." She said the best thing possible, even though she was kidding because she wasn't sure he was serious: "I'd say, sign me up." "I'm not even kidding, kid." Then in maybe a bad-idea show of good faith, he leaned way over forward and kissed her on the mouth. "My parents? showed me. And I think I can learn it; I think they'll let me. Except, um, boys can't do it." "Can I do it?" she asked, suddenly intrigued. Mark realized he didn't know and said so. Maybe it was a bloodline thing. "Okay, but Audra, let me be really honest with you, because I'm really scared of this. I don't know how I feel about it and it makes the bottom fall out of my stomach to think about. In order to learn to do this stuff, I have to let my parents turn me into a girl. Do you know how weird that is? How scary? But I mean, how can I not? It's fucking magic! It's transcendence- literally!" "Whoa, Mark," she said, leaning back. She remembered that her sleeve was still rolled up and she pulled it down. "Whoa. I don't know. That's so weird. What do you do for school? What do you tell people? Where does that leave me? Where does my boyfriend go?" She kind of sank with every sentence. "I know, I don't know, Audra, you're my best friend and I haven't even asked my parents. I don't know what to do. I don't want to lose you, but this is the most powerful form of art I can think of. Plus, are you saying you wouldn't still love me if I was a girl?" Here is Audra's response, which years later she would realize was based on immature liberal idealism, but which seemed like the right thing to say at the time: "Of course I would still love you if you were a girl. You'd still be you, right?" "Yeah," he said. Then he felt all drained. Which was fine, since that was when the bell rang. "Ok," he said, "we should get to classes." They hugged and kissed and it wasn't weird and they put on their coats and left for their separate class buildings. Twenty minutes later, in biology, Mark resolved to ask his parents, that night, what they could do. If he could become a witch too. "The premise of science has been a lie since it was born. Analysis can only work on its own terms: it's its own self-fulfilling prophecy." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian. His parents had been waiting for him to ask them, because this decision had to be instigated by him; they couldn't ask him if he wanted it, because that wouldn't be honest. But, having both learned the way all this works, they had wanted for Mark to experience it too. And when he asked, they said they could work something out so he could go to school someplace else. A little cosmic wrist-flip and records were transferred, altered and he'd have been born a girl and gone to school a girl.The impossible thing was changing other people's recollection of him, so he would have to change schools and he would have to move - at least across town. It could work out. Mark wanted to know when they could start and Katie told him that tonight was fine. "Tonight?" Mark asked. "As in, you're going to make me into a girl tonight? I'm not ready! I haven't told people! What'll Steve say?" "You can't tell people, Mark," his mom told him. "That would just complicate things. They'll have to think you moved away." They could pull this off- Mark couldn't think of anybody who'd met his parents, except for Audra. If they moved across town, then nobody would be in their current house and nobody would know them at their new house. It was pretty perfect. Except that he'd already told Audra. "Um, ok, but I already told Audra," he said. His parents' eyes opened like stop-motion flowers. "You didn't!" his mom said. "Yeah, but we can trust her," Mark said. "Can I teach her magic, once I can do it?" "You don't understand anything yet," Katie said, looking more sad than angry. "It's not something you teach, it's something you just come to understand. And Audra? will make things complicated." This made Mark angry. Like, what, he shouldn't tell his best friend - the person he loved the most in the world- the only person who could really make him laugh- that his life was about to make a radical right turn?And he said so. He said that wasn't cool. "There aren't a lot of things in the world stronger than young love," his mom said, surprisingly tender. She resigned herself and said, "It's a complication, but it doesn't ruin anything. Still, we're going to get started tonight, because you'll want to spend as much of your life as you can, doing this, once you start; you'll rue every wasted minute." Mark's eyes opened all wide and fireflies started to light up in his crotch. Tonight? Oh no. That was scary. "Can I at least call Audra and tell her I can't see her for a couple days?" "Oh, hurry," said Katie, dismissing him with a thin hand. He called her. She sounded uncertain. He promised to call her back in a couple days, but not to worry because he was just starting to fill up with a sense of potential and it felt really good. He told her he loved her. She told him she loved him too and she didn't sound even vaguely uncertain when she said it. Then he stormed down the stairs, back to his parents. "Ok, are you ready, Mark?" his mom wanted to know. "I guess," he said. Probably. As ready as I'll ever be!, he thought dumbly. "Do you have any thoughts on how you want to look? Height, thin, big? boobs? Butt? Hair color? Nose?" Mark realized he had not thought this through at all and another bolt of butterflies shot through his stomach. He couldn't really think of anything- this was too real. "I don't know. Just make me the girl version of me, I guess," he said. Then, "Oh, and make me thin. Real thin. I mean, that's good, right? Then I won't have to worry about my body." His parents exchanged a look - sure, you'll never worry about your body, uh huh - but didn't say anything. "And not too cute. I don't want boys all over me," he said. "Okay," Katie said, "you might want to sit down, but you don't have to. It's just- this is going to feel pretty weird." He sat down and with a feeling that was actually kind of familiar, though he couldn't say why, Mark's body started to change. It didn't hurt, but his stomach, which seemed to be the main communicator in his body right now, felt the whole time like it was on a roller coaster that had just crested a peak. Too quickly to catalogue individual changes, his butt spread out, his rib cage shrank, his waist came up and thinned some, his arms thinned a lot, it felt like his face puckered a little and dark hair sort of fell down to his shoulders. Then something happened in his stomach- it wasn't the same as the sensations thus far- it was more like a bubble grew and then disappeared and he wondered later if he'd actually felt himself grow a uterus. Man, was that a fucked up thought. Also fucked up was that he didn't even notice - maybe he'd been blocking it out or something, the inevitability and the oddness of his genitals changing over from male to female. After about twenty seconds, he was all changed over. He reached a hand down and somewhat vulgarly felt the crotch of his sweatpants, sort of dragging his hand front to back between his legs. Then he felt one of his breasts, which felt enormous; then he realized that his mom and his aunt were watching him, unsurprised, with maybe smiles at the edges of their mouths and he stopped? well, feeling himself up. His heart was racing, which contributed to the feeling of alien-ness, but otherwise, there was no pixie dust anywhere, no bibbity-bobbity-boo, no kind of wands, nothing. He was just a girl now. "We don't choose our role. It's already there. It may not always make sense and also, in each of us there's a creator and a supporter; most of us just never figure out which is where, what each means and how that relates to physiology. If at all." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian In dreams, one's interactions with the three dimensions gets weird; you can swing your arm and not feel muscular resistance, or you can try to move your leg and feel like you're walking through mud. Right away, Mark felt dreamlike this way because he was not used to his new musculature. His arms were smaller than they had been, which made them lighter to lift, but also less strong which made them feel, well, weird. And his legs? And his butt felt like it was there, more present than it had ever been before. Being a girl felt weird, but Katie had informed him that this disorientation was key. "Don't get used to it," she'd said. "This disorientation is how it should feel, to be in the world; once you feel normal, forget how your body feels, then you are jaded, you've forgotten and awareness of self and surroundings is the only way to? you know." She made an I-put-a-spell- on-you hand gesture and smiled. Now was the part to which Mark had not been looking forward: femininity. Mastery of the world was intertwined with his newfound ability to give life that, was of course, intertwined with his new physiology which, of course, was affected by his personality. With an imperceptible click, in oversized ill-fitting clothes on the oatmeal-colored rug he'd grown up on, Mark felt the interconnectedness of everything in the world. Even if he didn't understand it. "Um, I need clothes," Mark said. His old clothes hadn't been magicked into new ones when he had. "Hold on," Katie said and then Mark found himself in a dress. It was black, long and nylon, with a square neck; somehow he knew he was wearing black underwear. He felt underwire. He got up. Like the moment you realize your plane is going down, it occurred to Mark that he hadn't thought this through, didn't know what he was going to do now and that he was smaller and cuter and all vulnerable. He raised his arms and felt like it said "vulnerable" on his forehead. What the fuck was this? He sat down. He would have sat Indian style, but his dress constricted his legs and he wound up sitting with his legs like the symbol for greater than. Then he was crying. His parents kind of descended on him, hugged him and helped him to bed. And he found himself asleep. The next morning he woke up and wrote this down: 'Everything seems normal and okay by the light of the morning and that's the problem. Everything's not right, or normal. Give me the night.' He'd never woken up and written anything down before, but it felt right. He wondered if he'd dreamed it or if it had just occurred to him, then he realized that he wasn't a him and he changed his mental pronouns. Her. Leaning over toward the table her little breasts hung freely and while they were too small to really dangle around or anything, they were prominent enough to notice. Her thin left bicep brushed her breast and she lay back down with the thick cotton comforter at her chin. She. Her. It felt weird, but she made herself get used to it. Well, she didn't make herself; she let herself. She noticed that there was a difference and then she noticed that she really fucking hated the name Marcie. 'Brief Lives', 'The Doll's House', 'World's End'. Marcie walked over - in black t-shirt and underwear - to a bookshelf in her room and took out a 'Sandman' compilation. They were still the same. She took it back to her bed, sat on the mattress against the wall, pulled the grey comforter into her lap, put the book on top of it and started at the beginning. She lost herself in it all the while noticing that she could sort of put her elbows together in front of her and squeeze her little boobs together. That was kind of neat. They were warm against each other in this room. She smiled a little and read. Her stomach was still shaky though, because this all still felt less comfortable than she wanted it to. Around noon Katie knocked on her door. "Come in," Marcie said. "Hey, how are you?" Katie asked from the space between the door and the jamb. "Ok," Marcie said, hearing her own voice. It was actually pretty deep, for a girl. Katie opened the door a little wider, crazy curly red hair flattened because it was Saturday. "Do you want some tea?" She did. She said yes. Katie had figured as much and had brought it to begin with; she passed it off to Marcie. "So," Katie said, "how do you feel? Sick? Uncomfortable?" "Actually," Marcie said, assessing, "pretty good. Not bad at all." This was true. No aches, no upset stomach, barely any morning breath. That was interesting. "Really? Your body took that really well. I was over the toilet my whole first day as a woman," Katie said. "Nope," Marcie said, sipping, looking up from the teacup. "Well listen, we're moving. Tomorrow. So um, we can pretty much handle that, but I figured I'd tell you. Warn you." "Okay," Marcie said. Then she smiled. She was still thinking her way around her body and the more she did, the more she realized that she felt fantastic. Two months later, here is what Marcie had learned: to sit with her legs together. That's it. No magic, no sort of subservience to anyone, no new style. Just to keep her legs together. This frustrated her to no end: she was supposed to be able, at least, to levitate sandwiches. "It's not a matter of understanding. It's a matter of not trying to understand any more: to lose all self-consciousness: just to exist. Then, to co-exist and to understand the necessity of one to an object and the necessity of that object to oneself permits the use of this necessity as a sort of fulcrum. Again, this is easier to do than to explain." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian They hadn't put her into school. Not immediately. Marcie wasn't particularly feminine: not that she walked around like a bull in a dress, but it was obvious that she hadn't been given all the social programming that goes in to American girls. She didn't have the proper reactions to things; she still had a strong positive physical presence in a room and not enough of an intangible one. Paperwork was easy to change, anyway. She'd be back in school soon enough; her parents weren't going to let her drop out. She'd been in very little contact with Audra. After her parents had magicked their possessions to the new house, which was smaller and made of dark wood and felt like a very comfortable cave, Marcie'd called Audra and told her that things were weird and that she'd be in touch when things got into order. Audra had cried. Marcie didn't know what to do, so she had said, "I'm sorry," and, "okay," and hung up. Her parents had not brought Mark's photo album. At first, she was furious, because she had put so much effort into it, documenting everything she had done when she was male and had friends and there had been an argument. Marcie had run up to her subtly more feminine new bedroom and cried. She'd always had loss issues. "Marcie?" Katie was at her door. "Go away," she said. "I can't believe you." "Marcie, you have to sacrifice a lot to learn to be? yourself. You have to. We didn't just lose your photos or something; we intentionally didn't bring them. I want you to think about that. What we're trying to accomplish with you and how we might be trying to do it. What you could learn from this." Marcie glared. "I don't want to come down on you, honey, but we need to do this." 'Don't you fucking call me honey,' Marcie thought and at that moment the whole thing was just too much: this body that was still all new and raw, this mindset, this horizon full of hurdles in everything, the total lack of stability. It all exploded out, bottled up because she didn't want to be upset at her new lot, but she was. She should have grasped this and she would, eventually: these things were gifts, that feelings are what make you alive. But now she didn't. She was just miserable and pissy and made her aunt leave. Life went on. Twenty-eight days after Mark became Marcie, she got her period. Her first egg didn't leave her body like an earthquake, like a particularly visceral Jackson Pollock painting: it appeared as a little circle on the white inside panel of her panties. It came in her sleep. Her parents had tried to talk to her about it, the inevitability of ovulation, but Marcie hadn't wanted to hear it. And like anything, nobody had forced the conversation: they let her figure things out on her own. They let her learn on her own. There were pads in the bathroom. They were not hard to figure out how to use. At breakfast that morning Marcie showed up scowling in a hoodie and thought. The last few days, her stomach had been giving her trouble, but she hadn't known that it meant anything. She just figured it was food she'd eaten. "You got your period," Katie said. "I don't want to talk about it." "You know you're going to have to, at some point." "Listen," Marcie said, "I don't fucking want to talk about it." Magic didn't feel worth? all of this. Yes it did. "Listen," Katie said, "You're going about this like a boy. You're missing the point. Men love 'Fight Club'. Do you want to know why? Here is the secret. The scene in 'Fight Club' when the one guy pours acid on the other guy's hand and demands that he not black out, that he's missing the best moment of his life. That's a typical Hollywood overstatement of a simple truth: this is life. Stay present. Your period, the moodiness, the surprise of it? you have to stay here, feel it, know it's happening. It's your body saying something to your mind, it's you being present in the world and it's life coming from you. This is important, Marcie. This is key. If there were a single most important thing here, in the world, this would be it. Men have to have things punch them in the face, have to be screamed at, made to be in the present.Your period, this is the thing that anchors us to reality, that won't let us forget to be present. Men don't have that, do you see?" "I thought Fight Club was pretty good," Marcie said, getting up. Leaving for upstairs. Fuck all this. Can't give it up though. Such a bad mood. Fuck this. Upstairs, she fell onto the bed and pulled a pillow over her head. Didn't think about it. A month later, she was wondering about the missing photo album. She'd dealt with the inconvenience of menstruation twice now, was sort of over it and was now okay enough to be thinking with curiosity instead of spite about why her parents had gotten rid of her photos. She'd been thinking about how she missed her friends and wishing more than ever that she could be looking through those photographs, when it hit her: she could see her friends again. And in this weird pretzel-shaped synapse pathway in her brain, suddenly it made sense: she could see them in the future, look forward to that in anticipation, or she could wallow in what had happened. Live in the past. In the present, she was thinking about Audra, but not ready to see her, so she took out a sheet of paper and a pen and started a letter. Downstairs, Katie and Maggie could feel that something had shifted in their daughter's room, that a little corner had been turned. Dear Audra, I'm sorry I haven't been in touch. Things came up with my parents and I miss you desperately. If you can, meet me at the mall in front of the bookstore next Sunday at ten AM. I'll recognize you. You probably won't recognize me. Marcie signed it "you know who." "This moment is all you've got. No matter how complicated it seems and no matter how informed by the past it may be, there is nothing other than this moment. It's only when you learn to live in this moment, realize that you can't change anything other than what you can change now - as the old platitude goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. All you can do is take that one step. Whether that journey will mutate into something else entirely, you can't know and you can't worry about it. If you find yourself on an entirely new path, well, that's a good thing! It's exciting to figure out where you can go from there. It's pessimistic and pointless to obsess over the roads that are closed to you now, especially when so many are open." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian Things progressed. Marcie told her parents that she was going to see Audra and her parents said that it was okay. They didn't want their daughter to be a recluse. After a few months, it was time to be socializing again. Marcie still thought Audra would want to be lovers. Her parents knew better though. Still, they knew that teenagers need to learn some things alone. Sunday morning, Marcie woke up early, showered, put on a dress and went to the mall at 9 AM, when they opened. She was leaving herself as much time as possible because this was maybe the most important meeting she'd had in her life so far and if it got messed up, she'd never forgive herself. Plus, she had to drive slowly because her heart was beating so hard it almost hurt and she nearly had tunnel vision from nervousness. She pulled into the lot and saw Audra waiting at the mall entrance they always used; Audra had shown up more than an hour and five minutes early, as opposed to Marcie's hour and five. She cared. Marcie drove up and honked and waved at Audra and Audra gasped and walked over. Marcie reached over and unlocked the passenger door. Audra didn't get in, though. She knocked on the window. Marcie rolled it down some. "Um, hi," she said. "It's me," Marcie said. "For real?" Her eyes crinkled at the corners like baby skin. "Yeah. Come on, get in," Marcie said and she was suddenly very aware of her voice, how female it sounded, even with its low tone. Of her visible legs and of the fact that she was wearing a dress. Audra got in. Fuck the mall. Marcie pulled the car around to a far corner of the parking lot where nobody would bug them and parked. She looked at Audra for the first time in months. She was still gorgeous. Her hair had grown out a little bit, but otherwise, she was exactly the same. She was wearing Mark's old favorite outfit of hers, too; these bellbottom jeans and a little black sweater that showed her belly pretty much whenever she did anything. Marcie was overcome for a second. She didn't know what to say, couldn't speak, so she leaned forward and hugged Audra, throat full of something. Audra hugged back. "Hi," she said. Smiling. Marcie realized just how much she'd missed her. She half broke the hug, holding her at arm's length, looking, then sat back. They talked. Steve was good, everybody had heard that Mark had suddenly moved away. She brought a going-away card a bunch of people had signed. She took it out of her blue bag and gave it to Marcie. Marcie put it in the back seat. Sun shone through the windshield and filled the car with glare. Marcie leaned in again to kiss Audra and Audra pulled away. "I can't," she said. She whimpered. Marcie's eyes widened. She drew back. "This was a bad idea," Audra said, opening the door to get out. "This is too weird," she said. She paused for a second, like she was waiting for Marcie to tell her to stay, and then closed it. Audra walked through the parking lot. Marcie didn't know whether she should chase her. No, that's wrong: Marcie knew that she shouldn't chase her. Audra was never gay. Mark had known that and Marcie knew it too. This was the pain the came with enlightenment. In the stairwell at school, when she'd said she'd still love him if he became a girl, that had been teenage wishful thinking. Willful thinking that she could never have followed up. Audra faded to a blue and black inch and a half and turned the corner of the mall. She was gone. This had been a bad idea. That sunlight streaming into the passenger window, all yellow and bright- that would be Marcie's memory of Audra. "Things get fucked up, but your life is never completely ruined. Ever." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian At home that day by eleven o'clock, Marcie was on her bed. She hadn't changed, but she had put on a sweatshirt with a hood over her dress. Her nose and cheeks were flushed pink. She didn't want to look good anymore, she didn't want to look anything. She didn't want anything and she didn't understand anything. And she still couldn't do magic. She spent the day in her room. She didn't read, she didn't rock on the bed dramatically and she didn't punch walls or scream. She didn't do anything. She stared at the bare walls, she missed the pictures that had been all over her old walls and she wished she had somebody there for her. Her parents were all she had. How would she make any friends? How would she get on with her life? She had no idea. She felt like she was at the bottom of a well. There was so much she wanted. So much she couldn't have. And then, in her mind, her thought about her inability to do magic crashed into her thought about how much she wanted and something new came out of them. She realized that she wanted to do magic so badly that her desire had stood in the way. She realized that her discomfort with her new sex, with her old life, her inability to come to terms with it, all this friction? THAT was what was ruining everything. You could have sadness and you could have regret, but you couldn't tie this desperation to it. You couldn't tie this longing- this sense of entitlement. That was the problem - entitlement. She didn't deserve anything. Nobody deserves anything. The sacrifice of her old sex? That didn't mean she had earned anything. It didn't mean anything at all. This idea that she was working toward something, the fact of how much she was giving up, it was all pointless and she needed to write this down. Marcie had written out three pages when she realized: she hadn't gotten up to write in her journal. It had come over to her hands without her doing anything. She continued writing. That night, Marcie looked at her camera. She was tempted to take a picture of herself -to commemorate the day - but she didn't feel like it. She dug into her closet and found a set of acrylics that she hadn't touched since she was a kid. "Everything seems normal and okay by the light of the morning and that's the problem. Everything's not right, or normal. Give me the night." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian From there it went. Marcie was sad. She missed Audra. She missed everyone and, as spring turned into summer, she realized that she was going to have to make an effort to meet people because nobody was going to storm up into her bedroom and say "Hi! I want to be your friend!" She was tired of being sad. One morning in the beginning of June, Marcie came down the stairs with an idea in her head. She was going to get a job. She'd meet people at the job; she'd start her life again, get comfortable as herself with people and then start school in September. One more year until graduation and with a little finagling on the part of her parents, her grades would get her into any school she wanted. At the breakfast table, her parents were eating fruit, as always. Marcie pulled up a grapefruit, sliced it open and sat down. The sun shone in like it does in summer camp movies. "Listen," she said. "What's up?" asked her mom. "I'm thinking about getting a summer job. I've been in this house for the last few months and I need to get out and maybe meet some people my age. You know?" "Yeah," her parents answered together. "So I think I'd like to be a lifeguard." "That's a good job," her mother answered as she took another piece of mango. "You know that means wearing a swimsuit all summer, right?" Katie said. "Yeah. But it's what I'm feeling. Just? there's just one thing," Marcie said. "What's that?" "I really fucking hate the name Marcie." "Language, dear," Katie said, stealing a hunk of fruit from Maggie's plate. "You can name yourself whatever you want, hon," her mom said. "In fact, we'd kind of expected you to pick something else." "I want my name to be Erica." Nobody said anything about the fact that they were all eating their breakfasts without their hands, floating spoons lifting chunks of fruit into their mouths. "Lucid dreaming is a technique by which people learn to control every aspect of their dreams as they're dreaming them. What people don't realize is this: Lucid living is just as available and you literally have as much control over waking reality as you can over sleeping reality." -from "the book of magic," by Erica Rodian