Candlelight

It was the smell of lazy afternoons in the summer sun, Mama coaxing more harvest from her crops than any of the neighbors. It was the smell of cozy evenings, the frost of winter retreating from the fire as Papa built it higher. Fall mornings, walking to school with Willow as the sun shone a little brighter over her. 

It was the smell of magic, burnt and beautiful.

The smell faded in the air as the last of the words died from his mouth. He lowered his hands. The movements and shouting hadn’t been necessary, Mama had only murmured the words, Papa didn’t have to say anything at all. But Cypress had been chanting for ages, though the clock only said it had been an hour, and he couldn’t get anything but the smell. 

There was none of the buzzing the Papa said he heard. None of the tingling hands Mama felt. Cypress felt exhausted, the way Willow had felt the first time she used magic. But she had called up a hurricane during a drought. 

Cypress stared at the unlit candle. Maybe he just had to wait for the magic. Three times, he thought he saw a spark. Darkness fell quickly in the dusty room as the sun ducked below the distant mountains, but the candle didn’t light.

He screamed and ripped the spell out of the book, wadding it up and throwing it across the room. The book fell from his lap as he stood. The thud rang through the empty house. 

He doubled over and screamed again, muffled by his palms. It didn’t matter. There was no one around to hear him. The neighbors had all been taken away years ago, running for the city. Cypress worked in the city. He had a small house. His family could have lived there. It would have been cramped but they would make it work. 

He offered. They refused.

Why had they stayed here? Dammit, what was so important about these walls, this roof? 

But he knew. He could hear it, too, even if his magic wasn’t quite Mama’s. He could hear the laughter as he and Willow chased each other around. He could hear the songs as Mama cooked. The cheering as Papa came in from work, sweeping them each off their feet and hugging them tight. 

You didn’t need magic to remember. 

He wasn’t always sure he wanted to remember. How much easier would it be to just forget those moments? To live unknowing of what he lost? To go back to the city and be with Felicity and not think about mothers or fathers or twin sisters?

It would be so easy. 

But the taste of the long ago magic still hung in the air like the bees over Mama’s garden. The magic was drawn to this house, just like he was. 

Cypress opened the rusted gate in front of the fireplace. He stirred up the rotted wood and ancient ash, thinking about how Papa used to light the fire from across the house when they complained about the cold. Sometimes, they did it in summer, just to watch the fire burst to life. They would run squealing and giggling to Mama’s side, burying their faces in her skirt and shouting about the fire monster. Mama, apron full of precious produce, would tell them to run outside and bring the baskets back in. The monster was afraid of fruits and vegetables. The more they had inside, the farther away the monster would be. So Cypress and Willow would run outside and pull at the heavy baskets that Mama had woven last winter, filled with every color of the rainbow. They knew no monster was afraid of vegetables, only little children were. But they still carried the baskets in. 

Mama’s magic was quiet, one that almost seemed normal. She baked her magic into her foods, singing soft spells over it as she mixed and cut. She had a spell for everything. Apples. Tomatoes. Carrots. Potatoes. Water. Oats. Milk. Cypress used to hide in the pantry and listen to her songs. When he was little, he would sing along, double blessing the food. When he got older, he changed the words around. Boils for the rotten old lady next door. Fever for the kid who called him a witch. A few good curses sprinkled throughout. When Mama found him, she banished him from the kitchen for a week. 

Cypress stood with a sharp inhale. He marched toward the door, crusted over with rotten foods and mud, hanging off its hinges to let the spring breeze stir the dead air inside. He spat a curse as he turned back, walking toward the kitchen. Again and again and again. Back and forth. His hands fluttered by his side. Papa made magic with his hands. A simple wave or complicated gesture. It took long moments for Cypress to realize his hands were shaping the spell Calm. but nothing happened. 

Willow hadn’t grown into her magic yet. She had it, she knew the spells earlier than anyone else their age, but she hadn’t found her specialty. Mama thought it would be something outdoorsy. Willow did have an affinity for nature. Papa thought she would be a SmoothTalker or Persuader. She had a way with words. Cypress thought it would be something he had thought lame at the time. Beauty. Good singing. Maybe just curly hair. He liked to think it would be small. Because maybe if her magic was small, maybe his was just disguised.

But now he would give anything for her to find out. She should have known years ago, the year they became adults. The year he left. But she hadn’t. 

She was the only one he had still talked to after leaving. She worked as a doctor’s assistant, traveling all over to help people. She came into the city frequently. They would get a meal, talk about life. How was Mama? How was Papa? How was the farm? How was Mary the dog and Oscar the cat? It was never more than formality. 

She hoped to be a real doctor, one day, Cypress remembered that. Part of him hoped she would fail. He hadn’t gotten his dream, why should she get hers? Maybe she could be a nurse or a secretary. She had a good enough memory. She would be paid much more as a secretary than a doctor that practiced magic.

But she never listened. Not even when it might have saved her.

Would it have made a difference? Cypress paused in his pacing and entertained the thought for a moment. Would her and Mama and Papa moving in with him in the city have saved them? Or would it just have killed him along with them?

It hadn’t really been sudden. Long years of angry men yelling about the dangers of magic users and their powers. Cypress never told anyone about his family, about what they could do. On the infrequent times that he met Willow, he forced her long, dark hair into a hat or wig and her eyes behind glasses. 

His cousin, he told people who asked, visiting from the countryside.

He told himself it was the only way he could keep his job, his home, his lifestyle. He watched other magic users thrown out of stores. He’d seen them spit on. They were nothing to the people here. If he wanted to live, they had to be nothing to him too. What would a little yelling do to his family? Papa would laugh, Mama would sigh and shake her head, Willow would yell back, raising her voice high above the others.

It never occurred to him that yelling would become more, not until he stood in the empty house, rewatching memories that seemed to belong to another boy. 

He looked over at the crumpled paper torn from the spell book. It had been one of the first Willow had learned. One of Cypress’s oldest memories, Willow waking him in the middle of the night, holding the unlit candle close to his face. He remembered watching her mouth shape the words in her young lisp. He remembered the glow in her eyes that had nothing to do with the sudden light in the room as the wick burst into flame. The spark of life, Papa would have called it. 

Cypress should have had his magic by thirteen, that’s when all the others got it. He had memorized every spell in Mama’s books. Flame. Growth. Ice. Storm. Control. He had tried everything. Fires refused to light. Water refused to freeze. Ants kept on marching to their hill. 

Papa told him that magic didn’t make him any more or less part of the family. Their ancestors were so much more than what they could do with their hands or words. 

Maybe you will get magic, he had said that night. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter to me.

Cypress tried to not let it matter to him. But every day of watching Willow dance in her own sunlight, warming himself by Papa’s fire, eating Mama’s food, was another day that he dragged his family down. 

The wind rolled over the crumpled paper, teasing it. Cypress slowly bent and picked it up. He sat, cross legged, the way he used to when he listened to one of Papa’s stories, smoothing out the paper over his knee. The language scrawled over it was familiar, but nearly forgotten. He hadn’t read it in many years and tears weighed heavy on his lashes. 

Darkest night, it started. He wasn’t sure if he read that or remembered it. 

A soft flash of golden orange brushed across the wrinkled page. Cypress’s gaze shot up, but the candle was still unlit. Slowly he looked back down. 

For Papa, he thought quietly. For Mama. For Willow. For Mary the dog and Oscar the cat. For every magic user, here and past. 

For myself.

He took a deep breath and began the chant.