When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey (novels to read txt) 📗

me, a teardrop-shaped silhouette against the tree line. The trees rustle a little as she passes them. They don’t bend toward her, but they notice her. I’m carrying a shovel. Handsome—the shaggier of the two farm dogs—lopes along beside me, his nose skimming the ground as he tries to take in every new smell in the grass. He whined when we snuck out, but once I told him that he could come with us, he shut up.

Yeah, I know. I’m a sucker.

Marcelina stops in front of the black oak she touched before. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s the same one—I don’t recognize individual trees the way she does, but there’s a big knot in the trunk that looks familiar. Marcelina confirms my guess when she puts her hand on the trunk and says, “I told you I’d come back.”

She’s holding the sheet of newspaper from her bedroom in one hand. It’s wrapped around the bone dust and twisted at either end, like a huge hard candy. She sets it down next to the tree, then looks back at me and holds her hand out.

“Let me,” I say, and she hesitates for only a moment before nodding.

“Okay,” she replies, “but you have to dig where I tell you to, or you’ll hit her roots.”

I pat Handsome on the butt and tell him to go have fun. He’s off before I finish telling him to come back within an hour, vanished into the trees to chase some sound or smell or dog-adventure that I’m sure he’ll spend the whole morning telling me about.

“You told him to come back, right?” Marcelina asks, peering into the trees.

“Yeah, but he’ll come back anyway,” I answer. “He doesn’t want to sleep outside anymore. His hips are bothering him.”

Marcelina frowns into the trees but doesn’t ask any other questions. She knows that Handsome is getting older, and that I’ll tell her if he has any serious problems. He’s doing okay for now. His hips hurt, and his vision isn’t so good, but he’s old and he’s pretty much all right.

“Here,” she says, pointing at the ground between her feet. “Dig straight down, three feet. Don’t go to either side, though. There’s a root there and a gopher tunnel on this side.”

“Got it,” I say, and she backs away a few feet so I can dig.

It feels good. The night air is warm, and the soil is soft, and there’s something satisfying about the sense that I’m doing work. That I’m fixing something.

When the hole is dug, Marcelina kneels in the soil and pushes the newspaper down into it. With both of her hands in the earth, she tears the paper open. She scoops a few handfuls of soil back into the hole, then kneads the bone dust into it. She hesitates. But not for long. Marcelina never hesitates for long. She pushes her fingers down into the loose mixture, and threads of blue shoot through the soil like an electric current. They disappear into the walls of the hole I dug almost as quickly as they appear.

“What are you doing?” I whisper, but either it’s too quiet for Marcelina to hear or she’s ignoring me. The question is answered within the next heartbeat as tiny tendrils creep out of the soil and brush against her fingertips. Marcelina breathes on them, and they shiver.

She glances up at me with a moon-bright Marcelina-smile and says, “Roots.”

The tendrils dive down into the bone-and-soil combination as Marcelina nudges the rest of the dirt back into the hole. I tamp it down gently with the back of the shovel—there’s a tiny mound left, but Marcelina puts a hand on my arm before I compress it all the way. “Leave some room,” she says. “She’ll need to breathe.”

We sit in the grass and wait for Handsome to come back from the woods. It’s probably one in the morning, and the dew is starting to gather. The seat of my pants gets damp, but I don’t stand up.

“So that’s what you needed it for?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, running her fingers through the grass.

“Why?”

“Minerals,” she says. “She’s been depleted because she’s been sending minerals to her friend. The bone dust should help a little.”

“Oh,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. Then: “Should we put the liver in there too?”

“No,” she says. “It would screw up the balance of the soil. We’ll deal with it later. Besides, I kind of think we should do the different parts separately, don’t you? So each one gets our attention? I wouldn’t want to get rid of anything without thinking about it.”

I swallow hard. I know exactly what she means. I don’t want any part of Josh to disappear without me knowing. I don’t want to look away from any part of this, no matter how hard it is for me to see what I’ve done. What we’re doing. “Sure,” I whisper, digging my fingers into my thighs. “Totally. I’ll talk to the other girls about it too, yeah?”

Marcelina nods, then goes quiet. She’s really good at comfortable silences—it never feels awkward to just be together, not talking about anything, looking up at the moon. After a while, Handsome comes loping out of the forest and sits next to me. I pick pine needles out of his fur and he pants happily, occasionally twisting around to aim a lick at my arm.

“What were you doing with Josh?” Marcelina asks after a few minutes. “I mean, I don’t care who you sleep with, it’s just … I didn’t even think you knew Josh.”

I glance over at her, but she’s not looking at me. She’s staring down at the clover next to her, gently brushing her palm across the tops of the leaves. I can’t tell what they’re saying to her, or what she’s saying to them. Or maybe it’s neither—maybe they’re just sitting there in a companionable silence, like she and I were until a second ago.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “I guess I just