Wishing Well

Time is a tape measure, marked and countable but foldable back upon itself. The metal lip latches feebly, retracts with a snap, and nips your thumb.

I hadn’t slept over at Joie’s in nearly three months. Not since she started playing varsity volleyball with her athlete friends. Not since Chris had broken off the last of our shared plans and taken with him the walking, the lockers, the daily small proof that I was known. Not since Joie stopped saving the seat beside her.

That night, though, for reasons I still can’t explain, I found myself in her basement bedroom. It smelled like gym shoes and laundry. I was already holding the spell book when Joie took it from my hands. The book held steady as I prayed to it for paralysis.

We stretched out on the floor, propped on elbows and overstretched wrists. The lowlights glowed a dull lemon. Joie sat up, reached back, and handed me the soft golden afghan. Then we lay back and looked across at the painting on the wall.

A stone well looked back at us from the canvas. Not the outside but the throat of it. Gray slate stacked in rough rings, narrowing down to a single point of turquoise at the bottom. Not light. Not exactly. The memory of light.

A wishing well.

The dark center magnetized me like a metallic promise, and I threw myself to the bottom of it.

She opened the book like a hymnal. The worn cover cracked in familiar spots. Modern Spells, Potions, and Incantations. Our page was dog-eared. As her finger scanned the text, Joie repositioned herself upright. Upstairs, her mom ordered pizza.

“I know what to do,” Joie said, setting the book on the floor and sliding it over to me.

A dream spell.

Her breath was even as she read. “In time, and with practice, if you rehearse the dream in reality, you will change your external reality from within the pure awareness of dream space.”

Her fingers tightened around the folded paperback. She shifted into criss-cross, straightening her posture in a way that lent seriousness or silliness. Her thumbprint sweated onto the page. Our eyes met.

A long moment was interrupted by the hot plate timer.

The spell required Moon Potion, which had required a trip to the local health food market on my way to Joie’s. Warm almond milk infused with cinnamon, turmeric, cardamom, and ginger. Nutmeg and pepper. Ashwaganda.

Was there a wrong way to do magic? There were no measurements, no teaspoons or explanations. Couldn’t get it right. Couldn’t get it wrong. I remembered our first invisibility spell.

Rod, rod, pod, pod, nod, nod, lod.

We stood booted and mittened at the end of my parents’ driveway in a foot of February snow, certain it had worked. Wild with the unseen power we desired, we hurled fistfuls of frozen treasure at a passing car. The driver rolled down the window.

“Are you okay? Do you need help?”

Broken and visible, we carried each other back up the driveway.

Then Joie handed me two marbles, red and blue. Cold and heavy and real.

“Look at them until they’re glowing,” she said, stirring raw honey into the milk.

I did.

She was looking at me. Thinking about me. Not about the spell, but me. There was a hypothesis in her eyes, but not pity.

She sat me upright, handed me a golden ochre mug filled with sunshine yolk froth. Her hands pressed my shoulders as I sipped then gulped the sweet, spicy potion. When we lay back down, we piled all the pillows around us and took our time getting comfortable. The sound of tires on her gravel driveway filled the space between us.

The well was watching. Lit lowly from inside by a singular turquoise source, the well received me.

“Hold the red marble at your throat and the blue one at your heart.”

I did.

Inside the well, the earthy wet of the cold stone bottom seeps through my skin to the bone with a shiver.

“Open a channel between them,” she said. I could see it. The red and blue lights melted into a violet stream. Her fingertips tapped raindrops on my crown and temples. “Connect that channel up and out.”

Intervention came from behind the veil as she whispered a spell.

“You’ll dream,” she said, her hands still on my head. I was already asleep.

As I slept, Joie continued. “Wake up inside the dream, Niki. Wake up and get to work.”

The well wall supports my spine. The length of my legs across the ground in angled diameters, I press against the barricade. A forced spin-induced gravity pulls my heart out from the back of me and secures it into the firm, cold stones of the well.

I'm awake. The dull lemon light holds me.

Above me, footsteps pad the ground like metronomes. My heart smooths as it’s pulled free from me and held there by charge. It becomes a polished, lustrous conductor.

It is already better without me.

Against my skin, the marbles glow. They dim and extinguish.