Magic and the World

I told my girls there is magic in the world. I told them to watch softly for the Fae, to be mindful of the Oak, and to hide their minds when the Gulk are lurking. They didn't ever believe me, not really. I told them they would see the future, they would know before anyone else what would happen. They looked at me and shook their heads. I described to them the feeling they would get when danger came looking, and what to do. I taught them, or so I thought. So I hoped. I read to them, and made them read stories that were old, so old that they had become myth. I showed them the patterns in the grass, in the leaves, in the wind. All things connected, I said. They never did fully believe. Too busy, maybe. Too much city, I thought. And then there was that Gulk in Arizona that fed often. I saw it as a Red Man, most times. My second daughter saw it, too. It would be near one of the intersections, tilting the senses if you weren't very alert. Cars straying through the red light once a year in a small town like that, okay. Cars and trucks speeding through every week or two, people dying in numbers not to be believed in such a small place. A hundred a year, in a two block area. A hunded a year for two years in a row in a town of five thousand. She saw it standing on the corner as we drove through the intersection. She saw it, and it saw her looking at it. She hadn't remembered to hide her mind, to go neutral. My son was nearly killed when someone ran a red light and T-boned him in the intersection. My eldest daughter saved him at the scene, holding off the Gulk with her anger, though she never saw it or really believed it was there. My son recovered in a hospital a hundred miles from there. My wife got sick and doctors couldn't tell why. Allergies, they thought, but nothing tested positive. I moved us rather than fight it. The Red Man had been there for a very long time, maybe ten thousand years, and who am I to end that? It's an old place, anyway, and there are some things in old places that should be left to their own devices. When we got more than a hundred miles away, my wife wasn't sick anymore. Allergies, of course.

The world is full of magic, but we aren't allowed to acknowledge it. We do that, and there are people who make a living telling us we're crazy and need treatment. They'll give us drugs and teach us to disbelieve what we see. We'll be tainted for the rest of our waking lives in the eyes of everyone else if we get caught noticing the magic that rules the universe all around us. Stray sights or feelings are delusions or illusions or dreams, not reality. We are a people of rules and laws grounded by scientific facts which are rooted in physical laws which are in turn dictated by the natural order of the universe. Deny this, and pay. But in the back of your skull you know that if the Fae come out one night and catch you, they're just as likely to play with your guts as they are to kiss you. You know to be quiet around that old tree in the glade, especially if it's an Oak. You know there's a Gulk lurking because your heart gets all racey in the dark for no good scientific reason. Yes, you know. It's a double dangerous place, this world. A place of fear so thick we deny reality and cover it with our science, which we enforce like zealots at the altar. Albeit with good reason. Don't get noticed, don't pull the shroud. The things behind it are always hungry, and you're the food.