Black Magic Woman: Cherry Coma

[NOTE: You made us pick one of five prompts. I said that was too easy. I picked all five prompts and built a world around them just for this piece. I call it Black Magic Woman. Thanks for the light exercise. I also recorded myself writing the first draft if you want content. The recording has my notes I wrote up for the piece. Later, gator.]

“He burned it.” I said into my cellphone.

“What?” I heard my mom nearly huff the word out.

“Most of the acreage. It’s gone,” I said, my eyes moving about quickly, following the road.

“He must have really wanted to make sure you didn’t find it.”

“Ellis is thorough… This is unbelievable.” My breath barely made words as I looked around the destruction.

Small wisps of smoke were still moving up from it here and there. Emergency vehicles had left not long after the blaze ebbed, the news crews following shortly after.

“You must be wrecked, Love… People become who they become. Ellis was such a good man, I can’t imagine what would make him turn like this.”

I thought about those words for a moment, turning the car down that dark road that lead deeper, looking out of the window to my right at the mile upon mile of burned out, charred out forrest passing me by.

I had to navigate around bits of wood the emergency trucks didn’t bother dragging out of the way. Things too big for my truck to scale comfortably.

“Yeah… I guess. Look, mom. I don’t know what the next part looks like. I don’t know where this goes. I just know I have to get to the bottom of it. I mean christ, we have children.”

“I know… I still can’t believe it myself. The whole thing is surreal. You, your husband, all of it. Magic…”

“Believe it, mom. It’s real. Somehow I got wrapped up in it. And now it’s gone to a place I don’t know how to-..”

My phone vibrated against my ear as I drove with one hand.

I pulled it down and stared at the name, ice falling into my stomach from the bottom of my chest.

“I didn’t catch that you broke up,” My mother said as I lifted the phone again.

“Hang on, someone’s calling in, I’ll call you back, Mom. I love you.”

“I love you too dear, please for the love of God stay safe.”

I heard the sincerity in her voice.

“Where I’m going God might not care…” I said, trying to switch over fast enough. But I missed the call.

“Damn,” I swiped about, throwing my eyes up to the long dark road ahead as the sun set, navigating around another downed bit of wood.

Up ahead was nothing but the tree line where the road suddenly stopped.

The part that remained.

All I could hope was that his fiery blast didn’t kill any chance of finding it.

The opposite of whatever he’d found.

The name on the phone was clear: Ellis Donato with a ring beside it.

A ring emoji.

Staring at it now almost felt hollow. It felt cheap.

I still hadn’t taken the ring off of my finger. Even now looking at it as my truck came to a stop, I felt comforted by it’s presence.

The gothic black band with bats wings hugging an onyx gemstone, surrounded by a cluster of moonstones. Black diamond.

I still couldn’t bring myself to slide it off of my finger.

To admit that it was over.

I realized I was sitting in the middle of the road in my truck. Unmoving. Staring at my ring finger.

My wheels turn as I pulled my truck into the far shoulder closest to the burned out woods.

It was thick.

You could hardly see through the burned trunks shooting into the sky. Most of them retained their shape, swaying their crackling dance in the wind, soon to dry and fall to bits.

It almost hurt to look at it. Ellis and I had gone on so many walks in these woods.

Just outside of Indianapolis, about an hour or two depending on how often you liked to take stops. A big chunk of wood that sat by its lonesome. Likely some state owned parcel no one was interested in at all.

Not a single person knew that they were living next to one of the most dangerous artifacts to ever be constructed.

A magic so dark and so vain in its creation that it mocked reality.

Chrono magic. Not the ability to control time, specifically.

But to do things with it. Things that allowed one to amass unbelievable power or fortunes or both.

The kind of power Ellis always hinted at wanting. I thought it was just a boy’s fantasy. Boys are like that sometimes.

I’d known Ellis all my life. He was a beautiful boy and a gorgeous man. The kind of person you felt comfortable around. A friend.

Truly.

He had kind eyes back then but now they were… not less kind, just… less in love with the wonder of the world.

His bubble had been broken by something. I never knew what until now.

He chose me because I was beautiful. I chose him for the same reason. It was high school. Who cared, right?

Both of us stumbling our way through our magical studies not knowing what the future would be. But he was always in love with it.

The notion.

Power.

He knew he could only get it through time, and so we went searching. And here we found it.

The elixir of Saint Germain.

He said he always wanted me to stay forever beautiful. His brunette lady of dark magic. Guess someone should have told him I was more tomboy than lady but I think he liked that too.

Dark magic is only profane if you use it for profane things, after all. He would say it all the time.

And in truth, many of us… in this world. The magical side of the world… We use dark magic daily.

It isn’t a social disgrace.

Unless…

As I walked from my car to the forests edge I could feel it.

“History…” I said. And why?

As I swiped my phone screen and looked down at it, I stared at his missed call.

Before I knew it I was calling him back.

“Hey you,” His classic answer.

Simple. Not loving. Not elegant.

Just… there it was.

I loved it.

“Hey you,” I said back, my tone far less… usual.

“I always thought you’d be the one who stayed with me. By my side no matter what.”

“Ellis,” I said as I crunched through the brush, walking into the burned out char.

“Wait, Maybe. Before you… just- may I?”

“As long as you realize where this ends.”

“I know where it ends,” He said, and there was silence. “I know where you are.”

“You should. I have to.”

“I know. And I know you’ll find it despite my best efforts to stop you.”

“So why did you bother?”

“Please. Maybe… Give me some credit.”

I sighed and looked around, smelling the lingering scent of ozone and cooked wood. The distant scent of burning animal fat. It hung in the air like a burned meal.

It made me think of Ellis…

I crunched my way onto the path ahead but stopped, thought about that.

“Oh believe me. I give you all the credit you deserve. For a magician who has decided to exchange reason for madness your batting a thousand.”

“Oh don’t get theatric, Maybe. Sports term was cute. You hate sports though, don’t do that.” he chuckled that warm, attractive chuckle.

“You’re flirting with me now?” I laughed.

“Long as I get to hear that lovely accent. You know it was always my favorite.”

“Accent?”

“Yeah… play coy.”

I always teased him about not knowing what he meant. I talked like a Jersey kid that got a proper education.

“That’s my job isn’t it?”

“I thought your job was to make sounds I like sometimes?”

“Ohh, you want a fight,” I chuckled.

Bastard.

“No, I just wanted to hear you laugh.”

“Mission accomplished.”

“You curse less.”

“You cursed us. Not exactly feeling like further debasing myself in the eyes of our peers.”

We both shared a humorless chuckle.

That one.

The chuckle. That one that lingers in the air after a break up when you talk for the first time.

Especially when the break up was bad. When the air is full of that strange silence.

The one full of all the things you couldn’t say. That you should say but won’t. That you wanted to say but realized didn’t matter anymore.

God it hurt.

I was talking to the love of my life who had decided power meant more than us.

“I want to ask you so many questions,” he said.

“Intimate conversation? Why? You lost that privilege,” I said, looking down at the path again.

I’d never find it going places we’d already been.

I had to get lost.

So I started trudging into the brush, pushing towards the center of the blast.

Towards what he was aiming for.

“Oh, come on… sure we can at least talk, you and me. We shared so much. We were so much,” the genuine regret in his voice caught me off guard.

“Were, Ellis,” I reminded him.

“Maybe.”

“That’s my name.”

“That’s why I said it.”

“i know. I’m just confirming it because it could have been taken either way. I don’t want you thinking after what you did that we can ever be an us again.”

“Stop that,” he shot back tightly.

“Look, cut the shit, Ellis. You’ve been addicted to this wild idea since we were kids. You wanted to live forever and you got it. Look at me… I’m beautiful forever. You talked a young, idiotic girl into cursing herself with eternal life. Congratulations.”

“I freed you from death,” he said, trying to hide frustration.

Something he couldn’t hide from his wife.

I knew this beast.

Or I thought I did.

“You didn’t free me. You cursed me with the inability to have it.”

“Have what? An end!?”

“Yes!” I roared in the night.

“Oh, right. The Black Magician Catholic girl speaks again. There she goes. Better than everyone,” he hissed back.

“Stop it. That’s not fair and you know it… I didn’t want this world. You gave it to me.”

“And I made you powerful,” he said.

“Y’know, Ellis… now that the spell of love is broken, I realize you sound just like the devil.”

He even chortled like him then.

“You flatter me.”

“You sicken me."

“Cute.”

“That’s what you like,” I teased, hating myself for loving that deep, rolling voice of his.

We’d been married forever. Long enough to have to move around the country four times.

Long enough to have to be other people.

But each and every time we reinvented ourselves it was with pleasure. It was an adventure. He showed me parts of the magical world that a girl like me would never known on her own.

He gave me what every girl wanted.

Too bad he had to turn my cherry coma into sour grape.

We bantered back and forth for another half hour, him chiming in jokes now and again. I couldn’t believe I was talking to the magical anti-christ.

To the man who actually did it. In the eyes of the magical world he had become death. The most powerful dark magician in a century.

And we were joking about bacon.

“You always liked it a little burnt,” I smiled, trying to ignore the growing smell of burning animal flesh.

Apropos.

“Hey, nothin’ wrong with a little burnt rump roast.”

“You always liked a hot butt,” I said and we both melted into laughter as I hurdled a fallen log.

“Guilty as charged. See? I married you for two reasons. One of them was your sense of humor.”

He was always the smoothest operator I knew. Here I was standing in a forest fire that smokey here didn’t prevent and I still wanted to jump his broom.

Hard.

Loyal wife syndrome. Sue me.

“So why? Why wasn’t the elixir enough?”

“Time,” he said simply.

“Time? I don’t get it. We have infinite time now. I’ve been thirty-eight for a long time, Ellis.”

“I know, right? I was lucky.Tight body, great brain, and an ass like a cheerleader forever.”

“Cheerleader,” I laughed despite myself, feeling that familiar flush he could set fire to in me heat my ears. “Doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to have to …”

I finished and we both went quiet.

“Do what, Maybe? Say it…” He whispered that masculine rumble.

“Stop.”

“Say it,” he said more firmly.

“I won’t. You’ll just have to see the day when it comes,” I said, stomping through the brush.

He’s not your husband anymore, Maybe. He loves the darkness now.

Up ahead a cluster of trees made me skirt wide round.

On the other side of it I saw it. What I smelled earlier growing nearer.

The smell had grown more and more prevalent until I was right on it.

The stink of a burned out corpse of an animal. Lying on its side in the mud by the scorched remains of a small pond. Blood had started to seep through it’s sizzled outer surface.

Dear God, the poor thing died in agony hours ago. Magical flame that burned quickly, settled fast.

Partly why they put the blaze out so quickly. Magical fire tended to be short lived.

I curled my lip up at it, skirting wide around the foul smell and the gore.

One of them had split wide in two over a large rock, smoke lifting off of it into the sky.

I tilted my head at it but Ellis interrupted my thought.

“You think you’ll be so fortunate?” He asked.

I was staring at it though.

The weird swirl of soot on the stone.

I approached it and rubbed at it with a finger.

I felt the groove as ash collected on my fingerless glove, smearing it further down, following the swirl to a pattern in the stone.

“Fortunate in what way?” I asked, as I scrubbed at the soot, smearing it further to see the swirl more completely.

“Being afforded all the courage you believe you have. When the time comes.”

“To face you?” I asked, seeing it then.

The way the swirl moved inward, then seemed to break into a shape that made no sense to stare at.

The illusion. The thing that normal eyes wouldn’t see.

A magic rift.

“Mm-hm…” he made that sound I loved, confirming my question.

“Are you underestimating me?”

“Would you be mad if I did?”

“No… I’d be mad if you didn’t. If you did what we both know you did.”

“Three Life Magic. Yeah… We’ve been alive long enough to live a couple ourselves, but… none of them like that.”

I let the magic within me call to the wooden rings on my middle fingers. On the wooden bracelets around my wrist, feeling its weave spark to life.

I let the purple flame dance on the fingertips of my right hand.

Touching that odd rift of swirling stone, it opened for me, letting my magic sizzle into it and work its way throughout the spiral like burning parchment lit by purple fire.

When it resolved before me, it was a doorway.

Old. Arcane…

Beautiful.

“I guess I’m about to find out, aren’t I?” I asked him as I placed my hand on the gothic knob.

“I guess you are. It’s a lot to live three lifetimes with the power inside of that door. It will make you make a choice when it shows you what it has to show you.”

“A choice…” I nodded, “I know.”

“And what will you think of yourself if you come out of it agreeing with me? Would you burn the magical world by my side if I was right? Would you help me slaughter profane magic with profane magic if it meant magic’s end?”

That question caught in my stomach like I swallowed miasma.

It gutted me. Roiled around inside.

Ellis had killed people.

Ellis had done forbidden magic.

Ellis had ignored the sanctify of what we held. Of our family. Our adult children.

Ellis sacrificed legacy for this thing he now chased.

And now I was faced with the same thing…

And it would make me choose.

“I’ll admit it, Ellis… that’s a fucking good question.”

“Out of the light woods. Into the dark forest.”

“Out of the woods,” I nodded, feeling that gothic knob in my hand.

I knew whatever was on the other side of that door…

It was going to change me.