Contagic

I was infected when I was fourteen.

Magic is contagious. Not everyone that is exposed will become infected, just the ones with the right predisposition. The right genetic markers or certain kinds of life experiences – usually some form of trauma or abuse. Those kinds of experiences left physical remnants, damaged DNA, malfunctioning cellular machinery, and abnormal brain waves. Then, if that person is further unfortunate enough to be exposed to magic, they will become contaminated. This often manifested as a malignant magic prone to certain aberrant tendencies.

This is all to say that it is in everyone’s best interest to not allow magic spread, as it invariably goes awry. It was simple; magic needed a conduit and conduits tended towards depravity.

But I didn’t know any of this back then. How could I have? To me, magic was just something out of fairy tale. It was something that the heroes used to vanquish evil wizards, their white magic so pure that the tricky villains stood little chance with their depraved black magic.

I remember like it was yesterday.

I swung sullenly on the last unbroken swing at our decrepit neighborhood playground, when my friend James approached me.

“Hey Abby, it’s about to rain,” James said, sitting down on the rusty misery-go-round. It protested with a creaky groan.

I looked up at the sky, full of obvious wet promise, then back to him. I glared with my one good eye, the other was swollen shut, courtesy of my drunken father, Richard.

“No shit,” I sneered.

He tactfully avoided looking at my eye, lips pursed in disapproval. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said. He picked at a large flake of rust on the railing beside him.

“God, James, not another cockroach, okay? I’ve got enough of them at home,” I sighed. “And I’m fine. He came home earlier than I expected today and caught me off-guard. He’ll pass out early, so I’ll be able to go home in a couple of hours.”

James nodded stiffly and forced a grin. He held up two fingers pressed together. “Not another cockroach, scouts honor.”

“It’s three fingers for the scouts, dork,” I said, and he laughed. The tension lifted.

“Whatever,” he stood abruptly. “Follow me.”

I rolled my eyes and winced. I wished I’d grabbed my father’s smokes on the way out of the house. I followed James up the rickety ladder of the metal playhouse. There used to be a junky metal slide attached, but some kid sliced his thigh all the way to the femoral, so the city was forced to remove it. James and I had told some of the littler neighborhood kids that his whole leg had come clean off.

“For a minute there, it was a slip and slide,” James had embellished dramatically. “You know, ‘cause of all the blood.” I felt the corners of my mouth twitch upwards at the memory.

It started to drizzle. The ping, ping, ping of the droplets hitting the metal roof above was both familiar and soothing.

“Okay so,” James said, once we’d settled down. “You’re not going to believe me, but I can do magic now.”

My face fell in disappointment. “Damnit, James. I’d have preferred the cockroach.”

“Now hold your horses.” He looked around furtively. “Listen, last week Dennis came by acting all weird. Said he had to tell someone something. He had tried to tell his mom, but she didn’t believe him, so he showed me instead. Magic! He killed all my house plants in one go, it was nuts.”

“I can do that too. Pretty easily,” I said, unconvinced.

“No, I’m telling you, he just waved those fat little sausage hands of his and they all withered into little crisps. He was actually trying to get a bag of chips to float over to him, but anyway, it was still impressive.”

I listened to the rain as it picked up speed. I was glad for the playhouse even though the sides were unprotected. I wiped my arm where little droplets were still spraying in from occasional gusts of wind. It was still better than being at home.

 “Let’s say I believe you. Which I don’t,” I clarified. “Why didn’t you bring him by so I can see this so-called magic for myself? Or maybe you can just ask him to drop by my house so he can turn Richard into a piece of jerky.” I started calling him Richard right around the time my mom died; she fell down some stairs when I was eight. That was when we moved to this God-forsaken neighborhood, and everything went from bad to worse.

“Don’t need Dennis. Check this out,” James said, cupping his hands together. He stared at them so intently that I thought he might be having some sort of fit. Then, the craziest thing happened. Thick droplets of rain started to come into the shelter. Not sprayed by the wind, but as though they were beckoned. The droplets floated over, defying physics, congealing and separating almost playfully. They migrated into James outstretched palms. I gaped in disbelief. His hands were now completely full of rainwater, and he hadn’t even moved.

“How... did…”

“Magic. I told you,” James said, looking very pleased with himself.

After my brain stopped short-circuiting, a thought occurred to me.

“Wait, so why can you do magic now just because Dennis showed you?”

“I don’t know exactly. I guess he accidentally transferred some of it to me?”

“Like it’s contagious?”

He tapped a finger to his lips, and then shrugged, like it didn’t matter. “I guess so.”

My eyebrows shot up. “So, I might be able to do it, too?”

He grinned, “I hope so. That’s why I showed you. I figured you could use it more than just about anyone I know.”

I stayed silent, thinking. For the first time in a long time, I felt a small flame of hope. What might I be able to do with this power? Could I heal my wounds quickly? Could I pickpocket people from afar? The possibilities were endless.

“Where is Dennis, by the way?” I asked eventually.

“Not sure, haven’t been able to get ahold of him since he showed me. I wanted to talk to him about it, but he hasn’t even shown up to school.”

I found that odd, but I was quickly distracted by other thoughts.

Did I feel any different? I think I did… but maybe it was just that I wanted, so badly, to feel anything other than the misery I had felt for so long. The sadness over my mother’s death. The fear of my father’s rages. The disgust at our filthy house. The helplessness I felt day in and day out.

“Could you do it right away?” I asked. “Magic.”

“I’m not sure, nothing happened for a few days. I didn’t realize that I could be…”

Infected.

We sat in silence while the storm reached a crescendo and then fizzled out quickly. The rain dripped from the roof into puddles below that would freeze overnight. The temperature had plummeted as nightfall approached and it was rumored to be the coldest night of the year.

“I should probably get home,” James said. I knew that I would be up all night trying to channel this new force through my fingertips.

“Give me a call if you get anything to happen,” James said, reading my mind.

“I will. Let me know if you hear from Dennis, alright?” Something about him disappearing made me uneasy. His family wasn’t the type to go on vacation. So, what was he up to?

---

I made my way home and cautiously opened the front door. It was dark inside, which was a good sign. I closed the door quietly behind me and slipped off my shoes, the cold linoleum biting at my toes. I discovered my father where I expected to; on the couch in the living room, face down, a blanket thrown haphazardly over half his body. His snores were muffled by the couch cushions. A half empty bottle of Jim Beam rested on the floor beside him, the cap tightly secured. He had the remarkable ability of not spilling any alcohol regardless of how intoxicated he became. He would know if I tried to dump it out; that was one mistake I’d never make again.

I spitefully ripped the blanket from him and threw it to the floor and then made my way to the bathroom. I wanted to take a shower, but quickly discovered there was no hot water. I realized then that the house was dark not because it was Richard’s drunken bedtime, but because the electricity was out. He hadn’t paid the bill on time. Again. I sighed in irritation.

Resigned to a cold night, I retrieved the thick quilt from my father’s bed and squirrelled it away into my own room. After lighting a few candles with his cigarette lighter, I jumped into my bed and threw the blanket over my head. I rubbed my hands together absentmindedly and thought about what James had shown me.

The magic sprang to life more quickly than I could have imagined. My hands began smoking and a warmth spread throughout the blanket as though it had just come from the dryer. I untucked my head from under the covers as the smoke burned my eyes.

Holy shit!

Excitement and alarm warred inside me. I rubbed my hands together faster until a small flame appeared in the center of my palms. Similarly to how James had coaxed the rain droplets to him, I now held a small flame. I watched it flicker back and forth, mesmerized. It didn’t hurt at all. I pressed my palms together and the flame was snuffed out, a thin tendril of smoke snaking into the air. I glanced at the ceiling but remembered that Richard had taken all the smoke detectors down one by one as their batteries died and had, predictably, not replaced them.

I opened my palms again and willed the flames to reappear. And they did. Just like that.

Magic.

Adrenaline coursed through my body. I briefly wondered if my current state of coldness had anything to do with how the magic manifested. Had James called the water to him simply because it was already raining? Or because he had an affinity to water? I was pretty sure he had fish at home. But if that were the case, wouldn’t I be more likely to create ice? I wasn’t sure.

I had a different idea.

How different was fire to electricity? It was sort of similar, I thought. I quenched the flame again and hopped out of bed, coldness forgotten. I walked to the light switch and placed my palms over it. I focused on willing the electricity to come on. I didn’t know anything about electricity. I didn’t know if each light was separate or if the whole house was hooked up to the same circuit. I focused as hard as I could for a few minutes, but nothing happened. James had explained that he had tried many things, but only a few had worked for him.

I cleared my mind and thought about the magic flowing from my core to my palms, through the plastic light switch cover and into the electrical wiring I knew would be running through the walls. I pictured a current going up the wall and into the ceiling where it would reach the single bulb in the center of my room. I imagined it flickering at first and then staying on.

Instead of this, thick gray smoke began pouring from the spaces between the switch and the cover. It burned my eyes and I snapped them shut, rubbing them furiously. When I opened them again, I saw that the plastic covering was already melting: a small fire had started inside the wall and was quickly growing larger. I yelped and jumped backwards, tripping over a bath towel I’d thrown on the floor yesterday. I grabbed it and scrambled to my feet and started swinging at the flames to put it out. Instead, the towel caught fire as well. I threw it down, panicked.

Inexplicably, another small fire then sprouted on the opposite side of the room where a small nightlight was plugged into the wall. The bulb had burnt out months ago and it had sat there unused. It spontaneously combusted as though it had been doused in gasoline and the fire spread quickly to the moth-eaten curtains hanging inches away.

It progressed very quickly after that. Fleeing the flames, I covered my mouth with my sweatshirt and ran from the room before I could be trapped inside. Smoke poured out silently behind me, the flames crackling. I reached to pull the bedroom door closed, but my hand sprung back, burned by the hot metal handle.

I fled to the living room where I skidded to a stop when I saw Richard still snoozing away. He would kill me when he found out what I’d done, accident or not.

But what if he never found out?

The thought formed with a sickening swiftness.

I could just leave him here.

I swallowed. There wasn’t much time to consider my options. If he were in my place, would he save me? Depends. If so, it wouldn’t be for any saintly reasons, that was for sure.

What kind of person would it make me if I left him? He wouldn’t thank me for it.

So, it had come to this. Do I save my father to assuage my own guilt? Or do I leave the devil I know for an unknown future?

A future with magic.

The dark gray smoke flowed out of the bedroom more thickly now and Richard slept on, oblivious. I made my decision. I went to the front door and slipped on my shoes and grabbed my thick coat. I paused at the open door for a moment, considering. I ran back to the living room and grabbed my father’s smokes from the table. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

---

I considered going to James’ house a block away, but the timing would be suspicious. Instead, I went back to the playground. I blasted the misery-go-round with magic until the water fizzled away and then I sat down, pleasantly warmed despite the freezing temperatures. I wondered at the ease at which the magic came to me. It had seemed to be quite difficult for James to bring up, and Dennis had killed all those plants despite wanting to do something completely different. I wondered what that said about me.

Time passed strangely. I wasn’t sure how much later it was that the police found me sitting there alone in the dark. When they told me about the fire, about my father, I tried to muster up some semblance of sadness, but nothing would come. My face was an impassive mask. The police officer who led me to his car kept glancing at my swollen eye in an irritating way. His attention made me irrationally angry, and I was somewhat alarmed to realize how quickly I considered lighting the police car on fire. I resisted out of self-preservation, which was, after-all, what I excelled at.

Later, at the police station, they asked me some questions. I told them that I had been with James for a while but couldn’t remember what time he left. Best to be as vague as possible. I gave him James’ number and the officer left. He must have confirmed my claim, because when the officer came back, he changed tacks.

“You know, a boy your age went died recently, heard you might know him. A boy named Dennis,” the officer said.

My eyes widened in alarm, “Dennis is dead?”

“Afraid so. The whole family was found dead inside the home, including the family dog. Strange that you were with the same boy who was with Dennis around the time things went bad for him. Know anything about that?”

I was perplexed. “Why are you asking me about this? Do you think I had something to do with it?”

Another officer with a large mustache entered the room then, but the first officer continued as though he hadn’t noticed. “Just answer the question.”

“I’m fourteen,” I said, as though I hadn’t just committed patricide.

Officer Mustache put a warning hand on the first officer’s shoulder. “I think that’s enough, Jim.”

Officer Jim slapped the hand away, his eyes never leaving mine. “Did you or did you not start the fire at your home this evening?”

“You’re out of line,” Officer Mustache said. The way he was looking at my hands made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I looked at my hands, wondering if I had missed some smoke soot. But no, they were clean.

I glared at the man, considering whether I could make him spontaneously combust.

Mustache hauled Jim up from the chair and started pulling him towards the door. Before he could get dragged out of the room, Jim leaned forward and spoke quietly, so that only I could hear. “I know what you are. You’re better than this.”

But I wasn’t. And then they were gone.

----

Later, I was released into the custody of Child Protective Services. I would be assigned to a foster family as soon as they were able to locate someone who would take me in on short notice. As I left the police station, I passed Officer Jim and couldn’t resist giving him a wink. He was infected too, I knew it. But there was nothing he could do to prove what I’d done without revealing something dangerous about himself. He watched me leave.

I needed to be careful, lest I end up like Dennis. I was free now, and no one would be able to keep me down ever again.