Magic IS
By Linda Jordan
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About this ebook
Four fantasy short stories. Magic shows up as art and as a plague. Magic reappears after centuries and from Faerie. It surprises and terrifies. Includes the stories: Bitter Magic, Searching for Faeries, The Shadow and A Plague of Magic.
Linda Jordan
Linda Jordan writes fascinating characters, visionary worlds, and imaginative fiction. She creates both long and short fiction, serious and silly. She believes in the power of healing and transformation, and many of her stories follow those themes.In a previous lifetime, Linda coordinated the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop as well as the Reading Series. She spent four years as Chair of the Board of Directors during Clarion West’s formative period. She’s also worked as a travel agent, a baker, and a pond plant/fish sales person, you know, the sort of things one does as a writer.Currently, she’s the Programming Director for the Writers Cooperative of the Pacific Northwest.Linda now lives in the rainy wilds of Washington state with her husband, daughter, four cats, a cluster of Koi and an infinite number of slugs and snails.
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Book preview
Magic IS - Linda Jordan
Magic IS
by Linda Jordan
Copyright 2013 by Linda Jordan
Published by Metamorphosis Press
Cover photo by Kriscole
Licensed by Dreamstime
Smashwords Edition
Contents:
~Bitter Magic
~Searching for Faeries
~The Shadow
~A Plague of Magic
~About Linda Jordan
Bitter Magic
Sirena stood on the wharf, staring out at Port Gardner Bay. Crowds swarmed around behind her. The Sunday Farmer’s Market was in full swing. Smells of meat grilling and caramelized popcorn mingled with the ever present scent of kelp and fishy sea water.
Her yellow and lime green sundress swirled around her legs. She wiggled her toes inside the brown sports sandals. The sun felt so good on her skin. Summer was finally here again. A warm breeze moved her shoulder length hair just enough so it was flapping in her face. She tucked it behind her ears, knowing it wouldn’t stay. She had to stop herself quickly, before she used magic to calm the breeze or hold her hair down. There were repercussions to using it these days and she still had the habit.
Repercussions for every thing she did now. The magic was paying her back for every little thing she’d done as a child. For every small comfort she’d gained, the magic was now extracting payment.
The timer on her cell phone pinged. Her break was over. She needed to get back to her booth. Jenna, one of the bread vendors, had been covering for her. Sirena couldn’t take advantage of her kindness.
She wove through the throngs of people, back to the white tent that housed her mosaics.
Jenna smiled and said, I sold two pieces while you were gone. The black and silver mirror and the big koi. To the same people. They took the mirror and will be coming back for the bigger piece. I wrapped it and stashed it behind your table.
Thank you so much,
said Sirena.
She’d loved the koi piece. Designed it from a photo of a pond she’d seen. But glad it had sold. She could use the money.
The crowds thinned a bit as the afternoon wore on. The man came to pick up the koi mosaic. She sold a couple more smaller pieces.
She watched the new honey vendor across the way sell bottle after bottle. Felt the enchantment he’d laid on his bees, causing them to thrive and find the flowers most filled with pollen to create the best tasting honey. The honey overflowed with vibrancy. Envy filled her.
It was all she could do to keep the magic from entering her work. She fought it with each piece of glass she glued. Each small cut on her fingers. The magic was killing her, bit by bit. Using her up. How long before it finished and found a new victim?
She refused to be a part of that. She would take no lover, spawn no children for it to use, like it had used her after it killed her mother. She remained alone. And lonely. Hoping it would die with her.
At the end of the afternoon, she pulled her van up on the wharf and loaded all the remaining mosaics back in. Most of the vendors’ booths had more than one person working at them. She was always one of the last to finish taking everything down. The bee man had another guy helping him, a pale thin man who looked fragile somehow, and in the end the two of them helped her carry everything to the van and stash the mosaics in their racks.
Quite the set up you’ve got here,
said the bee man, looking into the back of her van with its metal shelves lined with cloth and crammed full of mosaic pieces.
Gotta keep them from breaking,
she said, wishing he’d go away. Thanks for your help.
No worries,
he said. My name’s Isaac, what’s yours?
Sirena,
she said.
Hey, Jason and I are going over to the Scuttlebutt to grab a beer. Do you want to meet us there?
he asked, pointing to where the brewery sat, a couple streets away.
No, I gotta get home.
She couldn’t get involved.
He shrugged, Maybe next time. Anyway, see ya next Sunday.
Yeah,
she said.
He and Jason walked to their pickup, already packed, and drove off.
She sat in her van, the only one left on the wharf and banged her head against the steering wheel.
He was just the kind she liked. Quiet and strong. Dark, curly hair and a gleam in his brown eyes. Tan and muscular from hard work, not from being a gym rat. He’d even smelled good, a little sweat beneath the herbaceous scent.
She knew then that the magic had brought him. That it would stop at nothing to leap. It was just a short step to jumping into bed with him. And no matter what means of birth control she used, it would fail. And she’d be pregnant.
Nice try,
she muttered. I’d use the morning after pill. Or get an abortion. You know that don’t you?
The magic murmured at her, soothing her. And she knew that somehow it would stop her from doing such things.
It had her trapped.
It always had.
The next morning after tea and toast, she went into the spare bedroom and looked at her current ‘big’ mosaic. It was a red bee balm flower the size of her head. The spiky petals punctuating the shiny black background. To the flower’s right hovered a huge bumblebee, looking for pollen. Of course, that’s why it was a honey guy who appeared, instead of a musician or one of the food vendors or another artist. It was because she was working on this piece.
If it hadn’t been almost finished, if she didn’t need the money, she would have thrown it to the floor and broken it. But she did need the money. So she kept working on gluing tiny pieces of glass to the sealed wood. For hours. Blasting the radio. It was really hard work to keep the magic from helping her. It kept trying to insert its influence into the mosaic. She kept pushing it out.
It took two days to finish the bee piece. Then she let it dry for two more days. On Friday she mixed the black grout and painstakingly layered it into every open space. Then let it dry till Saturday afternoon. Then she sealed the entire mosaic and left it to dry, fans running to speed the flow of the warm summer air.
She sat outside in the front of the house, her scarred fingers cut and bleeding from the sharp glass. She rented the house from an old lady. It was out in the sticks, so it was cheap enough for her to afford by herself. Her nearest neighbor was miles away. But it wasn’t too far out to have internet, which was where most of her sales came from. She had shops set up everywhere she could, including one on her own website. The Everett Farmer’s Market was worth going to though. It was the closest one and it gave her a chance to get fresh food. And pretend she was human without really having to get close to anyone. And she had to go in town to UPS to ship the mosaics she sold anyway.
She drank whiskey from the bottle as she sat in the sun, watching the hummingbirds chase each other through the garden, the chickadees drink from a shallow plate she set on a stump and the bees pollinate the weeds. She didn’t grow things. So not a gardener. She just made art. That was what she was here for, that and to house the magic, she thought, ruefully.
No, that wasn’t true. The magic was using her and she didn’t know how to kill it. She didn’t want it to latch onto some innocent baby. The few people who she saw using magic, like the bee man, clearly had different magic. Why was hers filled with evil and pain? If she wasn’t already in pain, the magic put her in situations