The Mage's Box

THE MAGE'S BOX

by Eve Morton

Content warnings: Animal cruelty, physical abuse

When I fold my clothing, an old coat spits out a key. Once brass, the three-pronged key is now charred black. 

I remember the door this key belonged to: behind it lived the witch neighbouring my childhood home. She stole rabbits from our garden and turned them inside out before I could learn my spell to save them from harm. When I was a teenager, she went into the city for three days and asked me to water her plants. 

"I will pay you," she said. "How much for a good deed these days?"

I did it for nothing. 

I watered her plants—but I also kept the key, duplicated it, and hexed her doorway with salt so no living thing ever suffered if it passed the threshold.

The key belongs to me now. I add it to the box the mage-counsellor gave me. When you remember pain, put it safely away. Do not let it interrupt your current magic. You can deal with that vicious place later, when the box is full. 

The box is half-empty. 

I go about my day. 

When I step outside, I find three pennies on the ground. One is lucky, because it is face-up, but the other two are not. I hold them in my palm and remember the time my father did not let me buy candy at the market. I cursed him using the language I'd heard every full moon from our cellar, but he pulled my hair out by the root and whispered counter-curses right back. 

That night, I took his money and held it in my hand, pretending I was rich like him. The next day, I bought the candy myself. But he caught me because he counted everything. He took revenge on my hair until I was missing the exact same amount from my scalp. The scar on my head, no matter how much I ate and conjured and wept and prayed, never fully healed. 

These pennies are mine now. I add them to the safe-box when I get home, then read my tomes long into the night. 

A week passes, then another. A letter arrives from my mother. Her letter smells of lavender and mothballs. She claims to have things for me that have arrived at her house. It is different from the home I grew up in, though all the items appear the same, and my father is not there. I've kept the package especially for you, she writes. I believe it is a crown, encrusted with purple diamonds. You've always been my little princess. 

There is no such crown. I smell the decay and deception between her smudged lines. These memories are not mine, so there is nothing for the box here. Only a sad woman who cannot let go of what she once ignored until it left her. 

I burn the letter and watch the ashes take to the sky. 

When I fold my clothing again, it’s at Mirabel's place. She is my girlfriend and we laugh at jokes we've created especially for one another from between our sheets. Then, she reaches into her pocket, which spits out a ring. I stare at its centerpiece of a hand holding a heart. "You have me now," she says. "And I'd like to hold you."

I look through my clothing, my pants, my skirt, my coat. Nothing comes out of the pockets, not even shredded paper or dust. Where have the bad memories gone? I wonder if I'll need to tell the mage-counsellor I've run out of items to put in the box. 

I am scared of what to do next. 

I say nothing about the ring to Mirabel. I keep it in my palm and run home. When I arrive, I go to my safe-box. 

It is empty.

I tear apart my home. I look under everything, even the garden rocks. But there is nothing there. The safe-box is empty. 

So I add the ring to the bottom. 

I wait. 

I write to the mage-counsellor but she does not answer. I walk by her front door and all I see is my reflection in the glass window. The mage-counsellor has left me, when I need safety the most.

Mirabel knocks on my door three days later. "I miss you," she says. 

"You don't hate me?"

"I miss you," she repeats. She takes my hand and I see another ring on her finger, upside down. "It means we're together when it's like that. The world sees me holding your heart."

I want to wear the ring. I hope it has not fallen out of the box of bad thoughts through the floorboards and into the same vicious pain-place where the key and the pennies and the broken glass from my brother's arm and the rusty nails from the chairs at my old school now live. I hope that I have not lost the only good thing that has come to me, the one I have not been able to recognize. 

"I can't look." I thrust the box to my girlfriend. "You do it."

"Of course." She smiles. She gets on one knee. "I should have thought of this before. It's perfect. Will you—?"

She opens the black lid and the world does not fall apart. The ring is there. The heart is there. 

I say yes. 

She slides it on my finger. 

I wait for the bad memories to return. For pain, instead of magic, to run through my veins. 

But we kiss. That's it. 

The box is empty now as I slide it away. I might need it again in the future, but I'll know where to find it. And I'll know where to find Mirabel, too.