Some people’s parents sell cars for a living. Some sell cakes or makeup. My mother sells friends—imaginary ones—to kids. But not all the time. From September to May we live in Charlotte, my dad owns a baking supply shop and my mother helps out. In the spring and summer mom and me join the Harper family circus, which was founded by my great grandfather over 100 years ago. The caravan travels up through Virginia, down through Kentucky, Chattanooga and Atlanta, visiting dozens of counties in between.
The circus has few real animals left in the show—we don’t use elephants anymore (thank god) just some bears and an African leopard that are well taken care of during the winter. Mostly we make money from rides and carnival games, a freak show and of course, a magic show. That’s where mom comes in, and grandma, who is no longer with us, and who probably died because of me.
When I was young, grandma headlined the show with her levitation trick. People in the crowd held up silver rings as grandma used her mind to shuttle different objects through them. When I asked her how she did it all she’d say is that she had “helpers,” but she’d never tell me who the helpers were.
Mom and me worked the sideshow, which was specifically for kids. A volunteer would pick an envelope out of a hat and show the card inside to all the other children. Each card had a different cartoon character drawn on it. Once I’d seen it, I’d use my body to give mom signals about which card it was. If I stood with my right foot in front of my left one it mean the character was a dog, like Goofy or Pluto. If I stood behind a boy it was a boy character, etc. Mom picked up on my little clues and guessed which card it was. The code always worked because she’d made it up herself.
The second part of our show though, that’s the part I could never explain. Picking a boy out of the crowd (always a boy) she’d ask him if he’d ever wished for an imaginary friend. The boy’s eyes would light up as his chin nodded “yes.” Mom would ask the boy what his favorite animal was, then, with a snap of her fingers, she’d conjure up the roar or squawk or growl of the animal the boy had chosen. After that, the boy would start petting the air with his hand, convinced that he was running it over a lion’s mane or rustling the feathers of some big yellow phoenix that only he could see…
What freaked me out is that the boys acted like the animal was really standing there in front of them. It’s not like they were in on the act either; the boys were total strangers! For money we’d sell trinkets of different types of mythic animals to the other children. The trinkets hung on an old wooden board we called the wishboard—it described what kinds of animals they were and what made them special. Everyone wanted to be just like the boy who’d walked out screaming about his invisible giraffe or whatever, so they begged their parents to buy them one. And because we priced them correctly, their parents had no excuse not to.
All year long I’d look forward to summer and the Harper family circus, but the year I turned thirteen everything changed. Grandma had an aneurysm; her mind started to fray. When she left the hospital we moved her up into the attic of our house, making sure that it was always full of fresh flowers and brightness from the skylight. No matter what we did to cheer her up though, grandma only sneered at us. The bleeding in her brain had made her mean. Real mean.
That summer a thunderstorm ruined the old wishboard—which was older than me by a decade already. Mom asked me to help her paint a new one and because I was obsessed with Pokemon and Monster Hunter at the time, I replaced all the normal animals with made up creatures, giving each one a special power. Mom didn’t mind; she knew a pikachu would sell better than a griffon.
Grandma, on the other hand, flipped out.
Carrying the big board over my head, I went up to her bed in the attic. I thought that if I showed her how I’d decorated it, it might make her feel better. When I pushed open the door I saw the strangest thing: Grandma was lying back, stiff as a board with her eyes closed. Sitting on her nose was a big orange silk moth, the giant type that you should only ever see at night. Grandma’s lids were closed but I could see the eyeballs twitching underneath them. Not just that, her lips were moving. She was talking to the moth and… I swear the moth was talking back to her. Its voice wasn’t high-pitched or bright like you’d expect—it was an old voice, deep and wizened by an indescribable accent. I wish I could remember the words that it said, but I don’t think I understood them at the time. As soon as I stepped into the room the moth flew up and, I’m not sure where it went since the windows were closed but, in a split-second it was gone. Grandma’s whispering got faster and louder. Suddenly she was rocking in her bed, barking so ferociously that she woke herself up. Rising from her pillow, her head turned in my direction, turning me to stone with its green eyes.
She didn’t look happy.
I put the board down and hid myself behind it. I was so scared of her that I couldn’t speak. When I peeked around it I saw that grandma was reading the words and pictures, almost in a trance. Once she’d understood what I had done she spoke to me in a voice that was as cold and sharp as a frozen knife. I couldn’t believe that such a sound was really coming from her frail throat.
Fool, she said, you can’t invent a spirit. Have you no manners? After all we’ve given you!
I never went back to the attic again.
By winter she was on death’s doorstep. Mom said it would be best if I didn’t try to see her and I was okay with that. On days that I was home from school though I’d go up to the third floor and stand by the attic door. Up there I’d listen to the whispers coming from her room. It sounded like a dozen different people were conversing at once. There was an echo-y sound to the cacophony, like it was coming through a tube from some place deep below the earth. I never heard grandma’s voice again, not the nice, normal one that I’d heard throughout my childhood—or even that other, deeper voice that I now think was her real one.
I decided that once Grandma had passed I’d confront mom about what was really going on. It felt wrong to put more stress on her before then, but a weird feeling in my body—like marrow boiling in my bones—forced me to do it sooner. Afterwards I understood why. See, there was a movie in my head that I’d been carrying around for a long time, the kind that’s impossible to separate from a dream or a memory or your imagination. In it, Mom had been warming up a kettle in the kitchen and, being four or five years old, I’d grabbed the electrical cord and pulled the kettle off the table. Mom heard the scrape and turned around in time to see it spill the boiling water on my head, only it didn’t spill. Something invisible had caught it in the air and turned the kettle back onto its base.
That’s when it hit me: mom’s magic was real. Obviously, she had to have learned her tricks from grandma. Grandma had probably learned them from her mother. So why the hell was I being left out? Magic was supposed to be my inheritance, but instead of helping me learn it, they’d been using me to help them make money! I got so mad that I turned on mom and told her that I wouldn’t go back to the caravan with her—that I’d stay in the city from now on with dad over the summer. “Why?” She asked. So I told her. “Because you won’t teach me magic..” Then her face changed and for the first time ever I felt like she was speaking to me like an equal. “I can’t teach you,” she said. “Magic skips a generation. My magic is only a scrap that your grandmother allows me to borrow.”
And that was that. If I wanted to learn magic I would have to ask grandma. Only she could introduce me to the family secret. But that wasn’t possible because grandma wasn’t grandma anymore. Her eyes had clouded over with faint rage. Her skin had turned scaly and red like it belonged to some kind of demonic fire lizard. Even her nose had kind of crushed in on itself in a way that I still don’t understand. But… she was alive, and in the middle of the night I would hear her dragging her feet across the floor of the attic, her long black toe nails scraping the wooden boards as her every breath whistled in and out of her crusted nostrils.
The thing is I didn’t feel bad for her. It’s hard to explain but, to me, grandma had become a monster guarding the mouth of a cave full of secrets. For as long as she was alive there was hope that I might someday live my real life as a magic user. At the same time, she was the one hiding my treasures from me, and if she died, those treasures would disappear with her.
I stopped eating out of sheer frustration, nor could I sleep or do my schoolwork or even think about anything else. My life felt like a riddle that I couldn’t solve. The only clue, I felt, was the big orange silk moth that I’d seen on grandma’s nose. My mind kept coming back to it. In my dreams I’d listen to myself repeat a word over and over again like a desperate mantra, a long multi-syllabic word that I’d never heard before and which, as far as I could tell, had no actual meaning. Now I understand that I was calling to him. And he (whose secret name I will never reveal) had seen that grandma’s time was at an end and, in his own way, was looking for me too.
We made our agreement in silence.
On the morning she found grandma’s body lying lifelessly on the attic floor, mom cried that something strange had been done to her. Her head had been sucked dry of every last drop of moisture in its various tissues. No blood or oil or water remained all the way down to her skull, which itself had become brittle and desiccated. Front to back, her skin was pockmarked by thousands of tiny abscess, as if a swarm of very small, delicate vampires had attacked her during the night.
That same night I’d dreamt that a cloud of green and yellow angels surrounded my bed and bathed me in the holy lathers of an ancient contract between mankind and the earth. And also in songs, songs made of words that I don’t understand, though I can’t say for certain that I never will. Maybe with time something like understanding will come. What I can say for sure is that what little magic I now know comes from working within life’s riddle, because ever since that night I’ve been asking myself the same questions:
If a silk moth has a consciousness as good as mine or yours, does it mean that we and it are one and the same?
And what about those monsters I made up, was grandma right to chastise me for doing it? Or were they always meant to be there—right there on my Wishboard?