Mister Magic

You never forget the lesson that they would rather destroy you than let you inconvenience them.

Children accept absurdity because everything is absurd, everything made up of complex rules and systems that they don’t understand. Arbitrary rules that are arbitrarily enforced. You know what that’s like, if you let yourself remember. Maybe, in addition to regular rules, you were given a god who watched everything from an easy, safe distance. A god you poured love into, who gave you rules and condemnation in exchange. A magic man demanding perfect obedience and the performance of a life instead of the living of one.

This version of him isn't perfect. None of them are. New isn't the same as perfect. Growing up isn't inherently loss, it's just change.

Magic never forgets the taste of your friendship.

People think children’s lives are simple, easy, but it’s the opposite. Everything that happens around them affects them, and they don’t have the power to affect any of it back.

If Sarah Michelle Gellar starts a cult, I’m there, no questions asked -pretty sure the Sarah Michelle Gellar cult is the gay lifestyle the Teletubby people were afraid of

All words are imaginary. Sounds that we attached to meaning, images and emotions conjured out of the air. So really, all words are magic. Something from nothing. Forcing others to feel things, to think things, to understand things simply by uttering the right combination of noises. You were always good at words, weren’t you? Good at making the others do what you wanted.

I’m fine,” she says, because it’s what she always says. If she says it firmly enough, she believes it, too. Like fine is a blanket she can pull from the ether and wrap around herself.

Adults are children with both more and less autonomy.

I don’t understand how I can be there every moment of every single day and somehow not exist at the same time.

Val obliges, spinning Jenny into her arms and kissing her the way she deserves to be kissed. Sometimes a kiss is a promise, and sometimes it’s just fun. When Val lets her go, Jenny looks dizzy. “Is that how it was always supposed to feel? Great. Now I’m even angrier at all the things I missed because of this stupid desert cult. I’m ready to break things.

The desert does have a way of wriggling into your soul. It’s the only landscape that tells you the truth about yourself: You’re small, and you’re alone, and you don’t matter. And that’s okay.

Marcus has worked for so long not to show his feelings, sometimes they get confused on their way to the surface.

Clean hearts and clean minds, cleanliness at all times! Nothing dirty, nothing bad, always happy, never sad!

Fine. At least I’ll go out doing what I love: being an absolute fuckwit making the worst possible choice.” “No,” Val says, her voice solemn. “Being an absolute fuckwit making the worst possible choice in the best possible company.

It smells cold. The kind of cold you can taste. The kind of cold that baptizes you with a promise of a perfect peace, if you’d only lie down and give yourself to it.

Val hooks her pinkie finger through his. A child’s promise, the only kind they could ever make to each other. The most powerful kind, though, made with their whole hearts.

I think you've told me thank you more in the last day than anyone else has in years. It's like--when there's a stack of dishes, if my husband actually does them , I tell him thank you. But when I do them, no one thanks me, because it's not something nice I did for someone else. It's just what I was supposed to do all along.

realizing how much of reality is simply belief.

Mister Magic doesn’t talk, but somehow everyone watching understands the message: What matters to you matters to Mister Magic. The good feelings and the bad, because in that space, there’s no distinction. No qualifiers. They’re all just feelings, and they’re yours, and Mister Magic loves everything that makes up the wonder that is you.

If you can’t beat a small, petty god… Become one. “It’s magic time,” Val says, and throws the cape over her own shoulders.

In today’s session, I’d like to revisit the period of your childhood that was controlled by a minor deity in a pocket universe.

You didn’t fail anything. Your parents—our parents, this system, this cult—failed us.

Val reaches into herself and retrieves the cape. It isn’t a real cape. It’s never been a cape, just a piece of the magic of this place. This wondrous, miraculous place.

She nods, throat aching. Those monsters outside decided some children were an acceptable cost in their paternalistic fetishization of innocence, their singular definition of “good.” Fuck good. These children were real. They needed love and protection and nurturing, and everyone in their lives failed them.

Val wants to strangle someone. To punch them. To punch the whole world. But she takes a deep breath and tries to stay calm for Kitty’s sake.

Whatever this place is—a pocket universe, a sentient nightmare, fuck if Val knows—it hasn’t stopped existing because they left. The hum was always here, Jenny said. They just figured out how to shape it. Val sent Mister Magic away and then she never summoned him again. And when her dad pulled her free, she took the cape with her. The cape she made out of a piece of this place, to control it. It hasn’t been controllable since.

This version of him isn’t perfect. None of them are. New isn’t the same as perfect. Growing up isn’t inherently loss, it’s just change. Maybe she can’t taste sparkles anymore, but she has a lifetime of moments that feel like that. The first buds of spring after another long winter. Hanging suspended above a lake, about to release the rope swing. Good sex. Watching a student the first time they triumph at a new task. A perfectly ripe, sun-warmed blackberry bursting on her tongue.

Little Val thinks she’s creating the world for her sister and friends, but really, she’s being used. That’s the big lie this entire place is built on. The lie that experience, that actual life, ruins children. But Val’s grown up enough to see that the burden placed on them in here wasn’t for their own good. It was to serve the sick purposes and ideals of the grown-ups safely outside. The same ones still outside, armed and waiting. She’d almost forgotten. This place is a trap, a honeyed lie. Val doesn’t blame any of the kids for believing it. They had to survive, after all. But Val refuses to lose herself again. She’s seen how they got here now.