Real magic is the kind that, deep in our human hearts, we know makes the most sense. Magic should feel attainable, just one evolution away. To fly, to sprout wings like a robin, to be able to go upwards until we can’t breathe, does not make sense, and did not make sense to the little girl with the darkest hair. This was the last thing she thought of as she heard her parents die through the cracks in the floorboards beneath the sitting room of her grandfather’s ranch house.

The little girl with the darkest hair consumed fairy tales like a snake swallowing living things whole, suffocating each pixie lung, broiling each desperate, blushing princess in the stomach until they were nothing but bone and yellow locks. She swallowed the Little Mermaid, Icarus, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, Babayaga. She swallowed the prettiness of them, the horror of them, the bowed-up lessons. Be good, they told her. Be good.

But the girl with the darkest hair was too curious and too logical and knew, even at the age of six, that there had to be more to these pretty stories. She wondered, for example, how did they decide what was magic and what wasn’t? Who was to say that we do not already cast spells? Who was to say that singing isn’t magic, and flying is? Flying. She hated the thought of flying. It did not make sense.

And to this her father said, “not everyone sees magic the way you do.”

“Why not?” she asked.

Her father, an adorer of questions, with his almost-dark hair, and darting mint-green eyes, and freckled neck, would lean over her newest book of fairytales and analyze the illustrated pages as he would his own scientific research. He was, as he called himself, a virologist, and her mother a violinist, and the girl with the darkest hair would say time and time again that she must also be something with a “v.” Valet. Ventriloquist. Vocational specialist. Titles she knew nothing about. “Well,” he said, “Most people haven’t been told they can do magic themselves.”

“Do they need to be told?”

“Sometimes. But they probably wouldn’t see it as magic, anyways.”

“Why not?”

“Because to most people magic is remarkable. It’s not human.”

“Am I not human?”

“You are very human.” He smiled at her. “And you are also remarkable.” And then he kissed her head, right upon her dark, uncut hair, and she felt cocooned, warm, wanted. To have her kind of magic meant that she could feel how they loved her, as tangible as warm bath water, as the taste of tangerine. And because of this she did not care at all about how he studied her, recorded her habits, tested her blood, asked her the same questions over and over again: so what does joy look like? Like bubbles. And sadness? Stones. And embarrassment? I don’t know. When I danced with your mother on holiday?

This was her father, and he loved her, and this was the ungoverned rule of the universe: that her father loved her, fearlessly, and his work, secondly.

“And, the people in these stories, do they even do anything before the bad guy shows up?”

Her father laughed, and began to walk back up the basement stairs with another box of her late grandfather’s old books. “Not usually, no.”

“Well they are very boring,” she said.

“No,” he said, at the top of the basement steps. “They are just stuck.”

So the girl was flipping through the heavy, dusty pages of her grandparents’ book of fairy tales, thinking about boring magic and boring knights and boring horses in the glow of the poor basement light, when she heard the bad sounds.

The basement door slammed shut, and then the screams. She stayed there, clutching the spine of the book of fairy tales, until the silence. After the thuds, after something being dragged, and finally, silence. Silence into night.

To have the kind of magic she had meant that she knew the moment each of them left the world, because she could feel the moment she was no longer loved.

Her mother loved her just as much as her father, but the fear was there too. Not fear, caution. Anticipation. A readiness for the first bad thing. Perhaps this was because it was her mother who innocently tried to cut her hair all those years ago. She grabbed the little scissors from her vanity and sat the reluctant girl on the bed and snipped, and the hair bled. It bled onto the girl’s shoulder and her mother’s trembling hand, and it pooled like oil onto the mattress, and the girl screamed. Whatever it touched it spread like black mold, rooting itself into the bedsheets, the carpet, her mother’s fingernails. But the mother did not, could not, run. She picked up the girl, the poor crying thing, and let the blood trickle onto her blouse as she held her and swore to never cut her hair again. Love was always there, but then so was caution, and now nothing. Nothing at all.

When the authorities found the girl in the back yard three days later, the house was wrong. The wallpaper had grayed and flaked. The furniture had warped, rusted, and decayed. Veins of black mold bled through the walls and ceiling and floors. Where the virologist and the violinist’s bodies should have been, laying on the sitting room floor, the ground had opened up, swallowing the wooden floorboards and the sofas and the bookshelves and all the contents of the basement like a gaping, heaving throat.

It was the smell that allowed them to find her. They smelled the bodies, but not those of the doctor and his wife. The intruders. They found them, preserved, veins black and vile under pale skin, mouths stretched wide open, limbs repossessed by the black dirt as if it had reached up and pulled them into it, and the girl, smelling of earth and mud, sitting on her rope swing, staring out at the cornfields.

So here we have another creepy little dark-haired girl, stoic in the backseat of a government-issued vehicle stewing on her unguided potential for evil. That’s what you like to see, isn’t it? I like to think it happened that way, that this freshly abandoned child could enact swift and cruel vengeance on her adoring parents’ killers, leaving their bodies twisted. But really, she probably wasn’t stoic, was she? She probably cried. She probably cried for three days straight until some passerby heard her. I mean, she was six years old.

What’s worse? That her parents didn’t love her? That they never did? That the little girl was so desperate for a father she imagined the kinds of conversations they’d have about books and magic while the scientist went to work on her bone-marrow? That she imagined they weren’t in a laboratory at all. They were in a basement. Yes, her grandfather’s basement. And her grandfather was a rancher, and the three of them would visit every Sunday and help him unbox the library of children’s books he had stored away for her, because her grandmother was a librarian, and a school teacher, before she retired. And they loved her. And after dinner they would sit outside and watch the sunset beyond the endless field of corn. Sometimes it was corn, sometimes sunflowers, but they were colorless. Grey petals, grey stalks, black centers, just as they were printed in the black and white textbooks her father had her read.

And finally, that day in the laboratory, the scientist would drop a scalpel, and it would clash against the tile floor, and it interrupted the fantasy, just for a moment. And she realized that she was one of those boring, stuck creatures waiting for something to dislodge her and sling her into adventure, into joy, into her parents’ arms. And she could be anything but boring. She could be anything. She could--

She killed her father quickly, because he was first. She imagined a scalpel in his brain. She killed her mother slowly, because she had to know if she could kill slowly. She embraced the woman, and her hair writhed and coiled up her mother’s body, holding her there, winding around her neck, slithering into her screaming mouth and down her throat, until the woman seized. As for the other scientists, she imagined what it might feel like to be buried alive, and she filled their lungs with dirt-- black mud and tiny stones and spiders-- and they died coughing it up.

Alone, the girl used the last of her strength to climb out of the tomb she’d made and asked the dirt to swallow it up for her. She looked around at nothing but dirt and grass and sky, and she imagined corn- no, sunflowers. Hundreds of thousands of black sunflowers, sprouting up from the black soil. They all faced East, and she started walking, and thought only of how this new world had better be more beautiful than her old one.

Is this reality more tragic? Does it make more sense? No, you need to know where she went, who found her. Where did this terrifying little dark-haired girl end up? Where does she go from here? What kind of magic is this? It doesn’t make sense. I’ll tell you why it doesn’t make sense. She must have been loved, this curious, imaginative little girl. Someone loved her. Someone grew her and held her and read her fairytales. Someone doomed us by loving her.

But I guess before her we were all very boring, weren’t we?

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