“Blank Magic”

One day the old man called us up to his porch. Well come on come on he said when we excitedly looked at each other to see who had the guts to go first. We walked through a rust-wrought gate secured only by orange weedeater cord then past piles of decaying bricks and rotting air conditioners and molding lawn furniture and so much more, all of it in some kind of overgrown, proprietary geometry. The porch looked/felt as if it had shipwrecked against a house of former royalty; there he shakily handed us each a tooth wrapped in an orchid petal alongside small, severe gesticulations of ceremony. Bury these in your backyards, he said. Bury them when the moon is at its thinnest and have a fig in your pocket when you do it he said. Marcus asked What will happen? The old man smiled with black Sith teeth and said You'll grow what you want, you'll grow what you want, then coughed. Shooed us away. And we knew about Stay away from that house and about That old man’s crazy but we didn’t fit either, did we? They called us the same names, didn't they? Maybe this was the sage guide we wanted. So we lined our pockets with Fig Newtons and buried them like we were told. Hoped we could actually grow something that we wanted: something to make us different, and special, but not in the way that made Coach Rossiter single us out as how-not-tos in gym class, that made our parents tell us we were too sensitive for R-rated films, that made other kids laugh at us for not knowing what a dildo was. We thought becoming feared was a legit status. But the old man died soon after, and wasn't found until long after. The piles in his yard were deleted, the piles in his house excavated, and his house gutted, as if we needed to be shown there was no magic hidden within: just an old man going through dementia, admired by kids who were just going through kid shit. Nothing grew from our seeds. Janie dug hers up, wiped her brow, and we pointed our flashlights at her palm: it had become just a tooth.