In church, Lee conjured herself another mother. Not the small, faded woman who sat next to her in the wooden pew, but a woman with long, loose hair, one who smelled of jasmine and wore a blue silk dress. Lee could picture the woman so clearly that she could see the faint laugh lines at the edges of her eyes, the freckles on the underside of her jaw.
A pain shot through Lee’s upper arm, and she gasped.
“Stop that right now,” Lee’s real mother hissed, her fingernails digging into Lee’s tender flesh.
A woman in the pew ahead of them turned around and stared. With a yank, Lee’s mother dragged Lee out of the pew and walked her down the side aisle, out of the church doors. In the bright sunlight, Lee’s mother let go of her arm, but Lee could still feel the half-moons of pain her fingernails had left on her skin.
“Are you out of your mind?” her mother hissed. “In church, of all places!” She knew Lee’s tendencies, the way she could conjure people and places out of nothingness. And she was intent on rooting this out, with the determination of a gardener who’d recognized an invasive weed. “It’s blasphemy,” she said. And for a moment Lee thought she looked really scared, like God might actually be listening in on their conversation.
It’s not blasphemy, Lee thought. Though her mother would see it that way: a thing that set her apart from the other fifth graders, from the rest of the town. But to Lee it was special. A gift.
“You have to stop,” Lee’s mother said. She bent down so her face was level with her daughter’s. Lee’s mother had once been pretty, but after raising seven girls, of which Lee was the youngest, she looked like a shirt that had been through the wash too many times.
“I didn’t mean to,” Lee mumbled, her face hot.
But of course that was a lie. Lee meant to. She always meant to. She loved the conjuring, the way it made her feel. It began with a prickling on her skin and then a sense that the top of her head was about to come off.
“Lee! Look at me,” Lee’s mother snapped, seeming to sense that her daughter was slipping away. She grabbed Lee’s shoulders and shook her.
Lee blinked as stars traced the edges of her vision. She found herself wanting to catch hold of them. What if she could see stars all the time?
“You have to control yourself,” Lee’s mother said. “Don’t let your mind wander. That’s when they come.”
Lee frowned. How did her mother know when and how the conjurings came? Unless she herself …
But Lee knew there were certain questions she could never ask, not unless she wanted to receive a swift slap across the face.
“Do you hear me?” her mother said.
“Yes,” Lee said, squirming out of her grip. “I hear you.”
But in her head, it was the other mother she was listening to. The other mother whispered in her ear that she must never give up the conjurings, no matter what.
***
At sundown, Lee wandered down to a bend in the creek where no one else went, and there she called forth a forest, a grove of oaks with branches that tangled overhead. She invited soft moss and cultivated flowering vines that climbed the trees and threatened to strangle them.
In the distance, she heard the screech of tires on the road, the whoop of boys tooling around in their pickup trucks because there was nothing else to do in this town. The forest wavered, and through it, she could see the tired weeds at the creek’s edge and a rusted tin can half-buried in the mud.
Lee refocused on the forest, sharpening its details. The smell of spring water wafted from deep within the wood. Birds called to each other softly in the twilight.
This is where she wanted to live. Not in a town with faded storefronts and houses sinking slowly into the ground. In the afternoons, she was sometimes sent over to her sisters’ houses. Her older sisters, already married with kids, were developing that harried, vacant look that reminded Lee of her mother. When Lee spent time with her sisters, she couldn’t imagine their futures for herself, marrying one of those boys who snapped rubber bands at the back of her head in Mrs. Guidry’s seventh-grade classroom.
What, you want to be alone for the rest of your life?
Lee’s mother’s voice had a way of worming itself into Lee’s head even when she wasn’t there. Which was perhaps its own brand of magic.
Lee pressed a hand against her sternum. Sometimes she ignored the things her mother said; other times, they filtered into her bloodstream like slow poison.
Lee did not want to be alone for the rest of her life. She’d been alone already for a long time. She had no friends at the small school on Chestnut Street. It was impossible to have both conjurings and friends; if they collided, someone was sure to notice. Like Ellen Chee, who had seen Lee conjure a tiger in the backyard of the Chee’s small house. Even though Lee had vanished the tiger as soon as she’d seen Ellen’s terror, it hadn’t stopped the chaos that came afterward. Ellen had to go to counseling for months because her parents were worried about her sanity—their daughter really thought she’d seen a tiger in their backyard. Ellen never spoke to Lee after that.
Lee let the forest get bigger. Owls appeared in the trees, their golden eyes like tiny moons. A wolf darted between the tree trunks, soft and silent. The conjuring took no effort; if she gave herself fully to it, she felt, the forest could take over the town in the time it took for her to draw a breath.
You have to make a choice, Lee’s mother said in her head. You have to put a stop to the conjuring. Or it will put a stop to you.
Lee closed her eyes. When she opened them, the forest was gone. There was just a muddy little creek, littered with trash swept down by the latest rain.
***
After graduation, Lee packed her few belongings into a couple of cardboard boxes.
Her mother stood in the doorway of her bedroom, arms crossed. “And you think somehow the city will be different?”
Lee didn’t answer. She had learned not to fight her mother’s words. They were too powerful.
“You’ll still be you out there. No self-control. No way to protect yourself.”
Lee wondered if she was right. But what other option did she have? She didn’t have the grades for college. She didn’t have a boyfriend she could move in with. The only thing she had was a savings account with a little money she’d managed to squirrel away from working at the reception desk at the lumber mill. And her boss knew someone in the city who was looking for a receptionist, someone willing to work for cheap.
When she turned around, her mother was looking at her with that gaze that said: I know you better than you know yourself.
“I’ll be alright,” Lee said. But her voice wavered. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure at all about what she was about to do.
But when the bus pulled away from the station, Lee tucked safely into a window seat, head leaned against the glass, she felt something flutter in her chest as the town slid out of sight. A flicker of hope. The beginning of love.
***
The city was full of movement, chatter, lights. Restaurants and taxicabs and people dressed in the latest fashions. Of course, all of that was out of reach for Lee. On her meager budget, she could only rent a damp apartment in an unremarkable neighborhood and take a crowded bus to work. Still, she loved that bus ride, looking out the window at a life she could almost touch.
At Cleary and Sons, her front-desk duties were simple. Answer the phone, file papers, direct people to Bob Cleary’s office. Mr. Cleary managed construction projects, and she fielded a constant stream of phone calls because something was always going wrong somewhere. Projects going over budget, builds delayed.
Lee didn’t mind the rush of phone calls. They kept her mind occupied. For a certain number of hours, she found herself tangled up in real life. The trouble came when the phones stopped ringing and the office emptied for lunch. Then Lee’s mind began to wander, and she felt the familiar prickling on her skin. She grasped the skin on the underside of her arm and pinched, hard, until her eyes teared up. Not here. Of all places.
Across the room, she saw the only other woman in the office, Marina, staring at her. Lee ducked her head, trying to look busy by scribbling on the message pad on her desk. Marina had carefully hairsprayed hair, perfectly applied makeup. And she knew how to banter with the men in just the right way—to make them laugh, and then to put them in their place when they flirted too much. Lee could tell that Marina had been born for real life. She had no need to imagine another existence for herself because it was so easy to navigate this one, to skim expertly across its surface.
The only time Lee had seen any kind of crack in Marina was when a spider crawled across her computer screen. She’d yelped in terror and refused to sit back down at her desk until one of the men in the office had killed it for her.
Lee added more meaningless doodles to the message pad, wondering how the Marinas of the world came to be.
“Hello,” a man said.
With a jolt, Lee looked up. A man stood in front of her desk. Lean, tanned. Not a businessman. He wore jeans. There was a smell about him of freshly cut lumber.
“Oh, hi,” she said. Then, remembering herself: “Welcome to Cleary and Sons. How may I help you?”
His gray-green eyes laughed at her. “You new here, Lee?”
How did he know her name? For a moment, it seemed like he could see right inside her. Then she remembered the plastic name tag pinned on her blouse.
“Yes,” she said softly, wishing she didn’t look so obviously young.
He smiled, revealing teeth that were very straight, very white. “Well, it’s a pleasure, Lee,” he said. And he held her gaze for a long moment.
“Dan!” Mr. Cleary said, emerging from his office.
And then the man—Dan—was gone as he and Mr. Cleary retreated behind closed doors.
Lee put her hands on her cheeks, feeling the heat that lingered there. There was no magic to the man. He was an ordinary contractor—more handsome, maybe, than the others, but that was all.
Then why did she feel that somehow, in saying her name, he had cast a kind of spell?
***
Dan visited Mr. Cleary several times a week, something about a project that was not going according to plan. She was never clear on exactly what he discussed with her boss, but Mr. Cleary was always in a better mood afterward, laughing and slapping Dan on the shoulder as they walked out of his office.
Dan wasn’t tall or imposing, but he had a way of drawing attention with his slow drawl and easy smile. As he came out of Mr. Cleary’s office today, Lee saw Marina carefully touch up her lipstick and assess her face in her pocket mirror.
Dan came over to Lee’s desk and peered over at the message pad between her hands. Quickly, Lee spread her palm flat over the paper. But Dan tugged the message pad out gently and turned it toward him, looking at her drawing. It was a girl turning into a bear, her fingers sprouting long claws.
Dan glanced at her. No one had ever looked at her like that before. Like they wanted to know what was underneath her skin.
The clock on the wall behind her made a thunk as the hour hand hit five.
“Little Lee,” Dan said. “Where do you go after work?”
Lee blushed. “Home. Just … home.”
He smiled. “Well, isn’t it about time someone showed you around our fair city?”
“Dan.” Marina had emerged from her cubicle and was walking with her confident stride toward the front desk. “Quit bothering that poor child.”
He pushed away from the desk. “Just trying to do a good deed here. It seems no one has taken this girl around to see the sights.”
Marina rolled her eyes. “She’s a receptionist. Not a tourist.”
He chuckled. “Well, maybe, maybe. Doesn’t mean she can’t let loose and have fun every once in a while.”
Lee felt caught between them, feeling somehow that she’d ruined a plan of Marina’s. That Marina had expected Dan to talk to her, not Lee.
Dan looked at Lee, his green gaze electrifying her. “I know a good little spot just around the corner. How about it? You hungry?”
She was, Lee realized. Suddenly, she knew she was starving.
***
Dan took her to a little café on a side street she’d never noticed before. The place was just a hole in the wall, but the interior was charming—red wallpaper with dull gold designs tracing its surface, worn menus, candles flickering in glass holders. Dan ordered old-fashioneds for them both, and Lee—who’d never had a real drink before, just light beer—sipped it like it was a potion that could transform her. The bourbon filled her with a feeling that was not unlike the conjurings.
Dan was easy to talk to. He chatted casually about the places he’d traveled—New York, Guatemala, Puerto Rico. Then he made her talk a little bit about herself. He seemed to find everything Lee said amusing, although she wasn’t trying to be funny.
When, near the end of dinner, he reached out and clasped a callused hand around her fingers, she knew: this was the moment her life was going to lift off its rails and fly in a whole new direction.
She was so happy. So happy that everything that happened afterward had the feel of inevitability. The walk home. The roughness of his palm when he pressed it against her cheek. The feel of his lips against hers. The tilting of the world as he laid her down on the couch.
***
Each time Dan called her again, she felt a thrilling shiver. With his visits to look forward to, she felt, for the first time, that she didn’t really need the conjurings. Most nights in the city, she’d sat on the couch, conjuring a fireplace with a cozy fire, lighthearted chatter from the kitchen, as if newly acquired friends were rattling around in there, pouring wine and laughing.
But she didn’t need to do that now. Dan visited her and brought real bottles of wine. When she walked with him to the café, which was becoming their regular spot, he rested his broad hand on the small of her back and she felt something bubble up in her chest and threaten to balloon right out of her ribcage.
Dan made her feel like she belonged. There were times she was so full of love for him that she almost, almost told him about the conjurings. But always, something stuck in her throat. As if her mother had put a stone there that couldn’t be removed.
Sometimes when they lay in bed together, her head against his shoulder, she felt a surge of something powerful run through her. Something so tender and raw that the outline of her body began to blur and merge with his. It was only with great effort that she kept herself solid: a real, normal girl.
***
One day at the office, after Dan had dropped her off at work, Marina passed by her desk and said in a low voice, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Lee startled, knocking over a jar of paper clips at her elbow. But before she could say anything in return, Marina returned to her desk.
Lee puzzled over the comment for maybe a half hour before she decided that Marina must be jealous. It must’ve shocked her to see Dan choose Lee instead of her. And now she wanted to sour Lee’s good fortune.
Well, that was just too bad, Lee thought, feeling uncharacteristically bold. When she walked to the Xerox machine, she caught sight of her reflection in the glass windows at the front of the office and thought: That’s me. And for the first time, the thought didn’t make her flinch. The ground, for once, felt steady under her feet.
***
Lee was so happy that she didn’t think beyond the doorway of each new day. Then, one Thursday, she sat down at her desk to find a note from Dan tucked underneath her message pad. The note was short. His company was moving on to a job in Arkansas. He’d enjoyed their time together. She was a sweet girl.
The note was so brief that she turned it over to see if anything was written on the other side. He hadn’t left a phone number where he could be reached. He hadn’t said he’d call her when he got to Arkansas.
Dan. Her Dan. It was impossible he’d written this.
Lee fled to the bathroom, where she locked herself in a stall, hands shaking. She closed her eyes, clenching the note in her fist. When she opened her eyes, none of this would be happening.
A burning smell wafted through the bathroom stall. Lee opened her eyes to find smoke spiraling from her tightened fist. When she uncurled her fingers, her palm was grimy with ashes.
Lee returned to her desk, her eyes red, and caught Marina smirking at her. Somehow, Marina knew. How? Dan would’ve told Mr. Cleary, of course, about moving on to Arkansas. Probably everyone in the office knew.
Marina walked over to Lee’s desk and tapped her knuckles on the stack of files beside the telephone. “Look, don’t take it personally, hon.”
Lee remembered the kids at school, how they used to taunt her. She remembered the fury she’d felt toward them, how she sometimes thought she’d like them all to burst into flames.
“I mean, men like that, that’s the way they are, you know?”
Lee felt a clawing on the inside of her chest. Because she didn’t know. Her skin prickled, the conjurings churning beneath her skin.
Marina screamed and jumped back from Lee’s desk, her face white. A giant spider crawled across the floor, headed straight for Marina’s sky-blue high heels. Marina let out a high-pitched wail. “What is that?”
Calmly, Lee stood up and walked out of the office, stepping into the hot sun, which reflected off the sidewalk like it was a mirror.
She knew what she should do. She should pinch herself. She should make the spider disappear. But she’d lost the will to care.
Lee walked away from the office, blind to the people brushing past her on the street. She still didn’t believe it. Dan, gone. A person couldn’t just vanish like that, like a quarter dropped down a sewer grate.
In a daze, she found herself walking down the little side street where the café was. Maybe she would find him sitting there. And he would explain everything. But she couldn’t find the café amongst the familiar storefronts. It had been right here, between the art gallery and the bookstore. But now, today, the only thing at that address was a dive bar with a neon sign above the doorway.
Lee stared. Where was the café? The chalkboard menu, the jazz music drifting out onto the street. Numb, she walked down the block and back again, certain she had somehow made a mistake. But finally, she had to face the truth. This was exactly where the café had been. This place where, through the murky window, she could see sad, thin figures hunched over the bar.
Slowly, she pushed open the door and stepped inside, into the smell of spilled liquor and cigarette smoke. None of the patrons looked around at her, but the bartender, a middle-aged man with a stringy beard, gave her a lazy nod.
“What can I get you?” he said, as she approached the bar.
Words stuck in Lee’s throat. “I’m looking for Dan,” she finally managed to say. Dan had known all the waiters here, back when it was a café.
“Dan?”
She flushed. “Dark hair.” She held her hand above her head. “About this tall.”
The bartender looked closely at her, then seemed to make the connection, not from her description, but from what he saw in her face. “Ah, Danny. What’s the matter, darlin’? He owe you money?”
The barroom floor felt like it was tilting under her feet. “No, nothing like that.” Her mouth was dry. “I think we’re talking about different people.”
The bartender turned to the wall behind him, which was covered with Polaroid snapshots. A mosaic of blurry faces. “This Dan?” he asked, pointing to a photo.
From the photo, Dan grinned, his arm slung around a young woman. It was him; it was unmistakably him. Except … this Dan had a chipped tooth. Where was the dazzling smile she remembered?
Lee backed toward the door.
“Hey, you okay?” the bartender said.
Lee stumbled out of the bar, feeling like she’d been hit over the head with something heavy. The cafe, the one in her memory, she’d conjured it. Dan too—not the fact of his existence, but the way he’d seemed to her. His perfection.
She blinked rapidly, her eyes stinging. That had never been the way the conjurings had worked before. Before, she’d always known when she was doing it. She hadn’t known she could trick herself, become lost in a wilderness of her own creation.
Her mother had been right. The conjurings led to terrible things.
Lee thought about Dan, all the sweet things he’d whispered to her in the still of the mornings, the way her body had fit seamlessly against his. Her lips trembled. Which parts of Dan had been real and which had not? There was no way to tell.
She knew what she needed to do. She needed to stop the conjuring, once and for all, and never let it slip out ever again. But Lee was like the drinker who yearned for the same thing that caused so much distress. The only thing that could soothe her pain now was another conjuring—this one bigger and more powerful than anything she’d done before, something that could make her forget that this world ever existed.
Lee’s skin began to tingle, even as she thought: what good would it do? She could conjure herself a whole new universe, but what was the use if, once it dissolved, she came back to a world even sadder and smaller than she remembered?
She remembered lying next to Dan in bed, the way his fingers wove around hers as he slept, and tears trembled against her eyelashes. The buzzing sensation spread over her skin, bringing with it a flood of heat that forced her spine to straighten, her head to tilt back. Her body felt like it was stretching, her hair lifting away from her scalp.
The conjuring was too powerful this time; it was going to consume her. A tear slid from her left eye, then evaporated on her skin. Brightness blazed through her fingertips. Her blood fizzed. It might kill her this time. But she faced it with the strangest feeling of calm.
Inside her was all the rage and loneliness and despair she had held in for years. All of her mother’s words: You bring yourself home, you don’t know what the world is like, how do you think you’ll survive, you silly girl. With a clap, Lee caught the words between the palms of her hands and squeezed them out of existence. She hadn’t known she could do that. She was untethered now, floating, free in a way that was frightening.
Then, with a whoosh, the brightness left her; the unbearable heat dissipated. Somehow Lee was still standing on the sidewalk. She hadn’t been reduced to a pile of ash. She turned in place, expecting to see the world changed, destroyed. But no, this was the same street as before. Where had the conjurings gone? Could they really have made their way out of her and touched nothing?
Uncertainly, she took a few steps forward. And that was when she felt it. Her limbs longer than she remembered. Muscles that felt taut, supple. She pushed her hair back from her face and felt, not the wispy blonde strands she knew so well, but a heavy mass of curls.
Turning, she stared into a shop window and saw the reflection gazing back at her. What magic was this? There was no Lee anymore—not a Lee her mother would recognize, anyway. A woman gazed back at her, tall and powerful, with golden eyes, like an owl’s.
Lee touched her face. She had never before turned the conjurings on herself. She hadn’t known that she could. She touched her new arms, her new neck that was long and proud. The conjurings weren’t caught inside her anymore. They had done the work they were meant to do. And so there was nothing left to hide from. Nothing left to hide.
Jaime deBlanc-Knowles holds an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin. Her short fiction has been published in Catapult, Post Road, and Meridian, and she has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Lighthouse Works Fellowship. Her novel After Image is forthcoming from Thomas & Mercer.
Featured Artwork:
Gatekeeper
Sarah-Jane Crowson’s art and poetry are inspired by ideas of accidental trespass, surrealism and romanticism. Her work can be seen in various places, including The Adroit Journal, Rattle, Petrichor, Sugar House Review and Iron Horse Literary Review. You can find her on Twitter/X @Sarahjfc or at her website.